The Making of a Documentary - PART I

It’s 1993.
I read a review on an Oscar-nominated foreign film called “The Nasty Girl,” based on a true story about a head-strong young woman from Passau, Germany.

Passau?
But I was born in Passau!
We left when I was 14 months. We were refugees (not German) and needed a less hostile country to start a new life yet growing up in Montreal I manage only twice to find a map reference to this Bavarian town on the Danube.

All I knew of Passau.
Every year on my birthday, my mother told me how she saved my life because, not trusting the doctors in the DP camp, she made certain I was born in the hospital in nearby Passau.

It was just another story.
My mother had too many. This one I interpreted as yet one more ploy to convince me that I should be grateful to her for giving me life. Considering our never-ending conflict, I was not inclined to take this seriously.

Das schreckliche Mädchen
So, in 1993, I see The Nasty Girl, a story about a young woman whose community turns against her when she investigates the town's Nazi past. Afterwards, I think that one day I should contact the real-life nasty girl, Anna Rosmus.

Eleven years later.
At Montreal’s Blue Met Literary Festival, I’m chatting with Verena Stefan, a Swiss-German writer, and mention that I’m planning a trip to Passau to do research for a novel.

She says, Ah! You should get in touch with Anna Rosmus.

I say, I would love to…and before I can finish the sentence, Verena taps a woman on the shoulder and says, Karin, this is Gina. She would like to be in touch with Anna Rosmus. Would you send her the email address?

Is that all it takes?
Ask and you receive. I contact Anna and begin my letter like this:
“I am a writer and poet living in Montreal, and although my parents were refugees living in Pocking-Waldstadt, like you, I was born in Passau. My mother said she didn’t trust the doctors in the DP camp.”

Anna writes back:
“Oh, she must have heard about all the baby deaths in ’46 and ’47. There were 57 babies murdered.”

I was born January, 1948.
Wait. That means my mother was not a paranoid Holocaust survivor. And she did save my life. That’s where this story begins. The story called “My Mother, the Nazi Midwife and Me.”

www.nazimidwife.com