The Awakening : Liesel Brooks’ Parents Had a Wartime Secret That Would Shatter Her Life : First Person : Liesel Brooks.

I learned about my parents, Heinrich and Else Steffens, one day in the spring of 1951. I was playing alone outside our house when a stranger came towards me, and I noticed that he looked very different from any man I had ever seen. He wore a strange little cap, which sat on the back of his head. He had a kind and gentle face, a blue suit and a briefcase.

Who is sick? I wondered. Someone has called a doctor, I thought. I was not frightened, when the man asked, “Kleine, wo wohnst Du? “ (Little girl, where do you live?) I pointed to our house. He nodded in recognition.

“I am looking for a man,” he told me. “You see, my life was saved. Saved by a man during the Kristallnacht. Do you remember the Night of Glass?” I did not reply.

He continued: “I lived here, in the house next to yours. My parents owned a clothing store, right there, where the supermarket is now.” I listened attentively. “In November 1938 . . . it must have been before your time . . . Hitler ordered all Jewish property destroyed.”

“What is Jewish property?” I thought. “It must be a special kind of property.”

He went on. “Nazi thugs broke into our shop. We lived upstairs. My parents were killed. They were going to throw me off the balcony on the second floor and kill me, too.

“I would have died, there is no doubt. Suddenly, a German neighbor stepped forward. In the confusion, he grabbed me away. He hid me till the terror was past. He saved my life, I am sure . . . at risk to his own. Later on, I could make my way to Israel. Israel is where I live now.”

I had no idea what or where Israel was. This was the first time I had heard of the Kristallnacht or anything so terrible having gone on in my neighborhood. The man continued.

“I have returned to find the man who saved me and thank him for my life,” the stranger said.

‘This Man Was My Papa’

I thought for a moment, then I told him enthusiastically: “This man was my Papa.” After all, hadn’t my father always brought poor people home from the streets? Hadn’t he always helped people in trouble? “He is dead now, but please come with me and see my ‘Mutti.’ You can stay with us.”

I took him by the hand and brought him inside our house, convinced that this was what my father would have wanted me to do. My mother was in the living room with Frau Lauder, a robust woman who was renting an apartment from us and who made it her business to know absolutely everything that was going on in the neighborhood. I excitedly told them that this nice man had come to see Papa.

My mother recognized him immediately and froze in her tracks. The stranger froze, too, and did not venture any farther into the room. While he had never met me, he must have known my mother and Frau Lauder only too well.

What I did not know then, but overheard later, was that Frau Lauder had already seen the man, a former neighbor named Willi Mayer, wandering around the area asking questions. She had come over to tell my mother. The two of them had been discussing how to avoid a confrontation with him.

Before I could utter another word, my mother, who by then had turned a bright red, ordered Frau Lauder to take me away and lock me in my room. I was bewildered and shocked by my mother’s reaction to this man. Despite my banging and kicking on my bedroom door, I was not let out again until the man had gone.

I do not know what happened between them, but I have been extremely burdened by it ever since. Afterwards, when I was let out, my mother was very angry: “You have done something terrible. There is no way, you can ever make up for it! Don’t you ever bring people like that into the house again!” I had never seen my mother react so furiously.

I stood there aghast. Why was she making me to feel like an outsider, a traitor? What had I done that was so terrible? What could have possibly been wrong with this nice man?

In a split second I began to connect what the man had told me with my mother’s reaction. Something serious was wrong here. Why wasn’t my mother dispelling my doubts? Then in all innocence I asked: “Mutti, what did we do in the war? Did we not save this man?”

My mother was at her wit’s end. Unknowingly, I had touched on something very painful. She shouted defensively: “Your father was a good man. He believed right. Why should he have saved a Jew? For God’s sake, leave me alone.”

I did not know at that time that my father had willingly supported the Nazis in our community, and, as a teacher, had spread the Nazi creed in the local schools. For my name-giving ceremony, an ancient Teutonic rite reinstated by Hitler, he had placed in the background a large photograph of the Fuehrer secured from the local town hall. He had forced his family and students to listen reverently to broadcasts of the Nazi leader’s speeches.

Later, an uncle told me that my father also had served in the occupation government of Poland, though he was not, apparently, a ranking official there. Other relatives would turn defensive when I asked about his role in the war.

When I was a child first seeking answers about my father, however, I could only stand in front of my mother defiantly, cornering her, not letting go. Never before had I challenged my mother. But at this moment I hated her.

Part in a Tragedy

She now grabbed me and shook me violently. Suddenly, I knew that my parents had played a part in this young man’s tragedy. It dawned on me that my parents, specifically my father, had been Nazis, and the full implication of it. I knew that Nazis were evil and had killed innocent people, but I had thought them to be men in uniform, not my kind and loving family.

I did not want to be part of this family and these people anymore. I was filled with shame, but couldn’t cry. Accusingly, I faced my mother and shouted, “You are murderers! Don’t ever touch me again!” I ran to my room and slammed the door shut.

Since my father had died just a few months earlier, I directed toward my mother all my horror and rage over my parents’ past. I never kissed her again after this day or called her mother. We never again discussed the fateful day in the spring of 1951. In fact, we never again talked about anything important. I was totally unforgiving and unrelenting for the next 37 years, and, when I became an adult, I began a still unsuccessful search to find Willi Mayer.

The overwhelming pain emanating from my parents’ wartime conduct became an addiction, and I also took on the shame and the guilt of the German nation. I worked obsessively to erase the stigma of my German heritage.

As my rage subsided, I realized that I knew my mother’s secret, and she knew that I knew. My knowledge could give my mother a great deal of pain, and that was exactly what I wanted to give her.

Mother thought in the beginning that I would come around, get back to normal. It was not conceivable that she had lost her child at such a young age, when she was not even an adolescent. Tomorrow, Liesel would wake up and be the little sunshine again. Mother’s husband had died and her grown son was married and barely came home to see his mother.

“Liesel is all I have,” she thought. “She was our hope and dream for the future.”

My mother consulted her friend, a teacher, on her daughter’s strange behavior. “Teen-agers get that way. She’ll grow out of it,” the teacher said.

But things did not get better. One evening it got dark and I was not home from school. My mother went through the neighborhood asking, “Have you seen my daughter? Something terrible must have happened to her.” Everyone shook their heads. “We have not seen her.”

The next morning, as my mother was leaving the house to report her daughter’s disappearance to the police, I turned up.

“Where in God’s name have you been?” she yelled. “Don’t you have any concern for your mother? What is that mud on your shoes? You are a young girl. Do you have any idea what danger you are in when you keep going to the forest? That’s where you have been. I can see it. Your clothes are all dirty. Go and take a bath.”

“Leave me alone. I want to sleep,” I replied. I closed the bedroom door leaving my mother standing, exhausted, in front of it.

What was going on with her daughter? She was totally shut out. Something very serious had happened to her child. Was it still connected with Willi Mayer, the Jew who had come that day? Why had he come back to upset her family? Was he an Israeli spy? We have suffered enough. What could they possibly do to us now? No more Jews lived in the neighborhood. Jews had always been the cause of trouble.

No Reply at the Door

By the afternoon, my mother knocked on my door again. No reply. She thought I must be hungry by now. I had not eaten in two days. She knocked again. “Child wake up. You have got to eat.” No reply.

By evening, she could not bear it any longer. She took a screwdriver and removed my bedroom door lock. I was in bed, fully dressed. My mother went over to the bed, by now fearing a disaster. Then she let out a scream. A bottle of rat poison on the child’s bedside table. More than half empty. She ran out of the room.

“Get a doctor, quick!” she shouted to the tenants, who had appeared in the hallway attracted by their landlady’s scream. An ambulance was called and I was rushed to the hospital.

Days went by and no one knew if I would have enough strength to pull through. Finally, I woke, deadly pale. My mother had not left my side. “Liebling, how are you? Why did you do it? You are so young. Your whole life is before you.”

Not a word from me as my mother waited anxiously. Just an icy look and then I turned my body to face the wall, leaving my mother to look at my back.

“I am being judged by a 10-year-old. This is not normal,” she thought.

Mother resolved that Germany had been defeated but she was not going to let herself be beaten. The problems with her daughter would have to be solved. There was something about her child, something she could not put into words, a strange spirituality. Church, going to church, would bring me back to her.

Later, now 14 years old, I was confirmed into the Evangelical church, tested in front of the congregation on my knowledge of catechism. With a clear but shy voice, I recited verse after verse as mother watched with pride. Things would get better. Mother and daughter had something in common now . . . the church.

But very little changed. I was very bright in school, but the teachers found me strange and secretive. Teachers and mother got together to discuss a difficult child who could not express her feelings to anyone.

Although inscrutable in school, I read constantly and did a lot of writing. My mother had given me a brightly colored diary for Christmas, and she watched as I spent many afternoons sitting at the big desk in the living room filling the pages. I wrote with a serious expression and closed the book as soon as mother came near.

“I would give anything to find out what’s between those pages,” she thought.

A week later my mother bought another diary with the same format as the one I was writing in. She tried the key and it fit.

Just as she was locking the diary up to put it back into position I came bursting in and saw what she had done. With blazing eyes I screamed: “Get me out of this house! I want to leave!”

A day later, she made arrangements to send her rebellious daughter to a boarding school in Dusseldorf.

I never returned home.

I left Germany for England when I was 17 and moved 20 years later to the United States. I saw my mother maybe six times in 30 years. They were like flying visits, with my car’s engine running outside. As part of my rebellion, I had married a black man and I would march in with my children, which unsettled her terribly. My mother could not bring herself to touch my children and I would leave quickly. I would tell her that I had found Nirvana in England and would never return to Germany.

During this time, I always thought of myself as a rootless, stateless wanderer, holding on to layer upon layer of hurt and guilt. It came to me gradually and painfully that if you do not like where you come from, you do not like yourself. I knew I had to break that vicious circle of blame and insecurity, and I tried to start by attending a support group about a year ago in Los Angeles.

One night, a woman named Rachel got up to share. She was outstandingly beautiful but racked with pain. Instantly, I knew that she was on the same self-destructive path I was on. She spoke with great emotion of how her parents had been survivors of the Holocaust. She had been forced to live her life with the horror of it and had not allowed herself to be happy. Her parents taught her: “It’s your responsibility to never forgive or forget.”

At this moment, something extraordinary happened to me. I began sobbing. For years, I had fabricated stories of how my parents had been heroes who stood against the Nazi regime. No one, not even my two ex-husbands or closest friends, were aware of my secret. Now, without a moment’s hesitation in front of all these strangers, I revealed that my parents had been loyal supporters of Adolf Hitler.

To my utter surprise, people literally formed lines to be with me, share my pain and help me heal. The abundance of love showered on me was overwhelming, especially from the Jewish participants.

Rachel and another woman who had been affected by the terrors of the Holocaust became linked with me in a very special way, and we began to heal each other. We were going to become friends.

I knew this was the moment when it would be safe to look back at the past and let the life I had hidden for so long come out.

Today, I’m doing a lot of volunteer service. I’m taking care of an old lady in the Jewish Home for the Aging.

The first time I met her she said, “Are you Jewish?”

I said, “No. I’m German.”

She said, “That’s all right. It doesn’t matter. I like you.”

It made me feel very good. This old lady wasn’t holding anything against me. So I shouldn’t hold anything against myself. I’ve been really healed by Jewish love.

Else Steffens died at 88 in West Germany, her daughter still so estranged from her that she did not see her on her deathbed. Liesel Brooks, 4 7 , now lives in Van Nuys and manages a cosmetics line for a Glendale department store.

Excerpted from “Stateless, the Identity Crisis of a Nazi Child,” Copyright, 1988, by Liesel Brooks. Times staff writer Gary Libman assisted in the preparation of this article.