Goldengirl

‘She was driven the following weekend to a hotel in Bavaria,’ said Serafin, ‘where she was introduced to her “assistant,” a captain in the SS. Being a well-brought-up daughter of the Reich, she made no objection to what took place. As it happened, she found him reassuringly considerate and charming. They spent two nights together. During the day they skied and took meals together like any honeymoon couple. She learned that he was a former international sportsman, an expert in each of the five events comprising the modern pentathlon. She never met him again, but she heard that he was killed in the bombing of Dresden. In August 1940, she returned to Bavaria, to one of the Lebensborn’s thirteen maternity homes, at Hochland, and there gave birth to a daughter. She elected to bring the child up herself. Money was provided by the Reichsführung of the SS for the child’s upkeep until shortly before the end of the war. The little girl’s name was Trudi.

‘It was hard for Gretchen bringing up the child without a father’s help in postwar Berlin, as you may imagine. She worked in a street market, helping on a fruit stall, and her health suffered each winter. Sometimes, when she was feeling at her lowest, she would take out the gold medal from its case and draw some kind of inner strength from it. Fortunately, Trudi was a robust child, and seemed, if anything, to thrive better without the sponsorship of the SS. Being so prone to bronchial troubles herself, Gretchen formed the idea of saving enough money to make a new life in California, where the milder climate would be kinder to her health. In 1953, she contracted pleurisy and permanently damaged one of her lungs. That made up her mind; she sold her apartment and left Germany for good. They came here and rented a place in Santa Barbara. For several years her health improved, but in the winter of 1959 the pleurisy returned. This time she was not strong enough to pull through. She was forty-one when she died.

‘So Trudi was left without family in Santa Barbara. By now, she was eighteen and a capable young woman, able to fend for herself. She got a job as a stewardess with TWA and took an apartment of her own near Los Angeles International Airport. She did not lack cash, clothes or boyfriends. During her childhood, her mother had often talked to her of the two cherished events of her life — the gold medal at the Olympics and the weekend in Bavaria with her SS captain. When Trudi saw that the Olympic Games were to be held in Rome in 1960, she decided to make the trip, to watch the gymnastics, almost in tribute to the mother whose gold medal had so unfailingly raised her spirits when she took it out to look at it in the dark years of the forties and fifties. As a TWA employee, Trudi got a free flight to Rome.

‘The gymnastic team event in 1960 was dominated by the Russians. There was no storybook victory for Germany, I’m afraid. But something else happened which in some ways had a certain logic to it, but in others was quite remarkable.

‘The gymnastics took place in the evenings in the historic Terme di Caracalla, a former Roman bath. One evening Trudi found herself sitting next to a group of young Americans watching the beam exercises. They were cheering a little Czech girl named Eva Bosakova, who was performing so brilliantly that she looked to be snatching the gold medal from the Russians, and so preventing a clean sweep in the women’s events. When the result was announced, and Bosakova was declared the winner, the young man sitting next to Trudi jumped up in excitement and tipped half a bag of popcorn into her lap. As so often happens in such incidents, it started a friendship between them. He told her that he and his companions were members of the U.S. track team, and he presented her with a ticket for the next day’s events in the stadium.

‘I have never discovered whether the young American became a medal winner in the event, because Trudi concealed his identity from the one person with whom she discussed these things. I do know that when his competition was over and the team manager no longer checked his movements around the Olympic Village from hour to hour, he met Trudi and they went out together, discovering the beauties of Rome. I am speculating now, but I imagine that to Trudi, who had so often heard her mother speak with pride about that short weekend in Bavaria with the handsome sportsman chosen by the Reich as her Liebhaber, the friendship with an Olympic athlete must have seemed intensely romantic. And it may be that when she gave herself to him in her hotel bedroom, she was exhilarated by the knowledge that she, too, was privileged to enjoy the embrace of a superman.