‘Perhaps it’s a mercy their mother had already passed away by then,’ Jan said. She shook her head. ‘Terrible times. I don’t know how any mother could cope with such news.’
‘Or father, come to that,’ Tayte added. ‘By the end of 1942, poor old Heinz Schr?der seems to have lost all his immediate family.’
‘There’s a couple more records to go,’ Jan said, prompting Tayte to look at the next one.
‘This is another marriage certificate,’ he said, scanning the details. ‘In July 1945 Heinz Schr?der married Helene Schmidt.’
‘It’s nice to know he remarried.’
Tayte smiled. ‘See, that’s a positive, right there.’
There was nothing particularly noteworthy about the marriage. The bride’s address told Tayte she was a local woman, perhaps someone Heinz had known for some time, given that his first wife had died more than ten years earlier. The witnesses were a neighbour called Martha Olberg and another member of the Schmidt family. Tayte turned to the last record, and as soon as he saw it a shiver ran through him. His breath caught in his chest as he scanned the details.
‘Karl Schr?der?’ he said, unable to believe his eyes.
‘Does that name mean something to you?’
Tayte nodded. ‘It’s what I’m looking for. At least, I think it is.’ His eyes were all over the document, taking everything in, and at the same time trying to understand what this discovery meant. He was looking at a copy of Karl Schr?der’s birth certificate. The father was listed as Heinz Schr?der, the mother as Helene Schr?der née Schmidt. The place of birth was shown as Gilching. ‘This was issued in September, 1945,’ he added.
‘So it gets even more positive for Heinz,’ Jan said. ‘He had another son. This time with his new wife, Helene.’
Tayte scrunched his brow. ‘I don’t think so. See here. The date of birth is shown as February, 1945, yet this certificate wasn’t issued until September that year, seven months later. The date of birth is also five months before Heinz and Helene were married.’
Jan looked more closely. ‘That’s curious then, isn’t it?’ She pointed to something written on the record. ‘And this field asks whether the child was born legitimate or illegitimate, and it says “legitim”, which is something of a contradiction, too.’
‘I think that what we’re looking at here is an amended birth certificate. I don’t believe Heinz and Helene are Karl’s biological parents at all.’
‘You think he was adopted?’
Tayte reminded himself that if this was the Karl he was looking for, the same Karl who had later married his mother, then he had gone to see Tobias Kaufmann’s father, Elijah, back in the 1970s with a view to tracing his parentage. If Karl had believed that Heinz Schr?der was his biological father, Tayte could see no reason why Karl would have done that. There would have been no need to look any further.
‘I’m sure you’re aware that it’s common practice to change the facts on amended birth certificates so it appears as if the adoptive parents are the child’s biological parents. The place of birth can be changed to suit the adoptive parents’ address, even the date of birth can be altered. I think on this occasion the date of birth must be correct, or it would likely have been amended to something closer to the date when the child was named.’
‘That makes sense,’ Jan said. ‘They don’t call them “amended” certificates without good reason, do they?’
‘No, they don’t,’ Tayte said, thinking that his own birth certificate showed he was born in Washington, DC, where his adoptive parents brought him up, but he had later come to see that for the falsification it was.
‘So, do you think Karl is Ava’s child?’
‘I think there’s a very strong possibility,’ Tayte said. ‘We don’t know what became of Ava yet, but it’s fairly certain she was no longer with Johann after the war. I don’t know why just now,’ he added, thinking again about the terrible thing Langner had said Strobel had done. ‘If Ava had a child, though, it’s possible that by the end of the war, she might not have been able to look after it. And here we have a child adopted by Ava’s maternal uncle. The timing of the adoption certainly fits, and Heinz’s birth record tells us he was born in 1887, so he would have been fifty-eight years old in 1945, when he and Helene adopted Karl. That could be considered a little old to want another child, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Jan said. ‘Although I imagine there were plenty of displaced children in Germany around that time, because of the war. I shouldn’t think his age was so much of a barrier to adoption as it might be today.’
‘No, and especially if the child was from your own family and there was no one else around who could look after it. We already know Ava’s mother, Adelina, died in May the year Karl was adopted.’