Revealing Ground Zero of the Swiss Adoption Scandal
Switzerland is under scrutiny for fraudulently rehoming thousands of babies. The failures go back further than previously understood
When Paul Harwood, a founding member of the Central Intelligence Agency, relocated to Paris from Vietnam, he was keen to expand his family. It was 1961, the Berlin Wall was about to go up and Europe was embroiled in a Cold War crisis, keeping Harwood and his fellow agents on their toes. But besides his undercover work at the U.S. Embassy, Harwood was on a more personal mission: He and his wife, Mary Ellen, were trying to adopt a baby girl.
They ended up using an agency run by a Swiss welfare worker named Alice Honegger. Harwood welcomed her assistant to his apartment on the top floor of an older house in central Paris. A staircase led up to a room ready for a child, reachable via a gallery and complete with its own bathroom.
“Mr. and Mrs. Harwood are extremely likable people, kind, very calm, and I don’t see them as typical Americans at all,” reads the report she wrote for Honegger in St. Gallen, a canton in the country’s northeast near the blue-green waters of Lake Constance. “They are both of medium height, with brown eyes and brown hair.” The Harwoods wanted a girl to complement the little boy they had previously adopted in the United States.
On Aug. 2, 1962, the couple received a letter from Honegger’s agency with the news they had spent years agonizingly waiting for: a “very handsome” little girl of Italian nationality who was a perfect match for them, with the same color of hair and eyes. She added that the child’s expatriation papers were still missing but assured the new parents she would urge the birth mother and the Italian authorities to send what was necessary.
The baby arrived in France in November of that year and, by 1963, had been named Ann Elisabeth Harwood, according to her adoption papers. A few days after her arrival, Honegger wrote to the Harwoods asking them to stay in touch through the child’s development and to thank them for a future donation which would allow the agency to continue its work protecting “abandoned mothers and children.”
Throughout her nearly 50-year career, Honegger was keen to portray her work in an altruistic light, with the feelings of outcast women her main priority. But in actuality, she capitalized on the desperation of pregnant women with few options, coaxing, cajoling and sometimes simply stealing their babies to place them with affluent Americans. Among her clients were spies, diplomats and alleged criminals.
Switzerland’s past and present adoption system is under scrutiny following government-commissioned investigations that showed how thousands of children from at least 10 countries were fraudulently adopted between the 1970s and 1990s. The 2023 report shows that Swiss authorities were aware of the practices of child trafficking, falsification of documents and false indications of origin regarding children from Bangladesh, Brazil, India and elsewhere.
Our two-year investigation shows how Honegger cut her teeth exporting the children of migrant women and perfected her modus operandi for intercountry adoptions, setting the standards for this illicit and morally questionable industry. We reveal how her dubious practices date back much earlier than previously understood, to the late 1940s, leaving a legacy of distrust among the adoptees — including Harwood’s daughter, who, at 62, only recently discovered her true origin story.
By piecing together archival material in Switzerland, Canada and the U.S., interviews with adoption center workers, researchers and adoptees, and Honegger’s official correspondence obtained by archival requests, New Lines and Investigate Europe have found evidence that Honegger placed at least 2,000 babies with families until the 1970s and expanded her network to other parts of the world.
“Alice Honegger was very interested in having power over human beings,” journalist and researcher Sabine Bitter — who was commissioned by several Swiss cantons to investigate international adoptions and the activity of agents like Honegger — told New Lines. “She notoriously ignored the law and set her own rules.”
Honegger was first connected to illegal adoptions in 2017, some 20 years after she died. That year, the St. Gallen canton issued a report saying that up to 70% of the 750 adoptions of Sri Lankan children sent to Switzerland from the late 1970s to the 1990s were illegal. The report sent shockwaves across the Swiss adoption industry.
Today, adopted people from the 1950s and ‘60s are looking for answers. They want to know the truth about their adoption. They want to discover their birth parents and understand who is responsible for their lives.
In March 2022, while standing in line in a downtown store in Bassano del Grappa, my hometown in northeastern Italy, I met the Harwoods’ adopted daughter. She heard my Canadian partner’s accent and introduced herself as Lisa Helmick, a fellow North American but with an Italian mother from Bassano del Grappa. We got to talking and later had a drink together, when she told me how she was adopted by an American family and had recently found her birth family.
Her name is Ann Elisabeth, “but everyone calls me Lisa,” she said, explaining how her father was in the CIA. I had just become a mother myself and Helmick’s story seemed the opposite of mine: While I had come back to Bassano del Grappa from Sarajevo to deliver my baby, Helmick’s mother Aurora had departed Bassano del Grappa to give birth abroad to her only child.
Helmick had just moved to Bassano del Grappa with her husband to reconnect with her birth family, settling into a centrally located apartment with exposed wooden beams. “I’m trying to catch up with the time I’ve lost in the past 60 years,” she told me.
She always knew she was adopted but had been told by her parents that her mother was too poor to care for her. In 1999, when Helmick was training in Virginia to become a teacher, her father Paul died. “Everybody at his funeral thought he was working for the State Department,” Helmick’s husband Jeff tells me. Harwood didn’t reveal much about his job and past. Details of his daughter Lisa’s story were among his secrets.
But he left her some documents in a safe-deposit box in the bank. They detailed, in English and French, information about her adoption on onionskin paper with a large red wax stamp of the law firm that formalized the adoption in 1963. “When I opened up the envelope, it was amazing because a sentence stated my mother’s name, the town she was from and that I was named after her. So it was a shock. It was a surprise.”
For the first time, Helmick read the name of her birth mother, but she didn’t believe it was real. “I thought it was like Jane Doe protecting privacy. Well, because the names were the same,” she says. Confusing Helmick further was the fact that the mother and the daughter had the exact same name, Aurora Gramatica. The only detail that stayed in her mind was the Italian woman’s hometown, Bassano del Grappa. It was the initial element for searching for her birth family. But that’s not what happened.
“It was not the right moment,” Helmick explained. The 9/11 attacks happened shortly afterward and Jeff, as a colonel in the U.S. Army, had to go to the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan. “I folded the documents up and I had three kids to raise.” Seventeen years passed before she began her search. “Had I done this a little earlier, I would have been able to talk to my mother,” she said, her words tinged with regret.
In 2017, Helmick decided to fly to Italy and see her mother’s hometown for the first time. She almost didn’t make it: In the weeks leading up to the trip, Helmick suffered a brain aneurysm and ended up in the intensive care unit, bedridden. Months later, her brother and mother-in-law, to whom she was extremely close, both died. At the end of the year, the entire family — Helmick, Jeff and their three children — made it to Bassano del Grappa. They spent some time in the town as tourists. Helmick recalls how she would look around, trying to find someone similar to her mother. But no luck.
At the beginning of 2018, when back in Virginia, the Helmicks received a message on their phone. It was from a friend in Italy who offered to help with the search for her mother. Jeff read it first, as Helmick was out teaching. “I got good news and I got bad news: The good news is I found your family here. The bad news is your mom passed away in 2002.” Attached to the message was a photo of her mother’s gravestone, with an oval black-and-white picture of her at its top. The woman is smiling, her curly black hair falling just above her shoulders. “It was the first time I saw my mother’s face.”
Helmick managed to get in contact with her family. Her uncle, who spoke English, called her up. “He said, ‘I want to speak with my niece.’” It was the first time she had spoken with a blood relative.
The reunion happened during Easter 2018. All of Aurora’s siblings welcomed Helmick at the cemetery in Bassano del Grappa, where they had their first meeting. “They called me Aurora, like my mother, and caressed my face to see if I was real.”
Helmick spent the following years moving to Italy and trying to catch up with them and the time she had lost. It was in Italy where she felt she first understood who she was. “I could see my lineage. I could see what I actually look like, because you look at your mom and your family, you know, where you get your height, your looks, everything.” She met her mother’s twin sister Giovanna, who was astounded by her existence. She threw her hands in the sky, pointing upward: “Why didn’t my sister tell me?” Giovanna’s son, Stefano, is only two weeks older than Helmick, meaning the sisters were pregnant at the same time without even knowing. A few weeks after Aurora gave birth in Switzerland, she returned to Italy and helped her twin with childcare, while her own daughter was in the hospital in Basel.
Helmick says she is trying to embrace her new Italian roots but misses American food: She buys sauces from the nearby U.S. military base in Vicenza and longs for caramel macchiatos, considered a small culinary crime in Italy.
As in many European countries 60 years ago, the condition of women in Switzerland was largely domestic and restrained. In general, they had to adhere to the so-called three “Ks” in German — “kinder, kuche, kirche” (“children, kitchen and church”). Having children without the support of a husband was culturally not accepted. “Children were often taken away against their will and women were also interned for reeducation purposes,” Francesca Falk, a historian specializing in migration at the University of Bern, tells me.
But if Swiss women had few rights, migrants who came from the poorest countries of Europe to work and found themselves giving birth in the country had none. Pregnancy confronted them with a non-choice: “to leave the country and lose their jobs, or to stay and give the child up for adoption,” says Bitter.
Aurora Gramatica was handmaking porcelain dolls in Bassano del Grappa, a trade particular to the region. In the 1960s, the town was recovering from the scars of World War II, having been at the front line. She had seven siblings and came from a wealthy family. But when her father passed away, all the children had to find work. Aurora kept making artistic porcelain dolls until November 1961. She then received three months of unemployment pay and prepared her documents for leaving the country, according to archives in Basel.
On Feb. 5, 1962, Aurora crossed Swiss customs through the Italian town of Chiasso and headed north to Basel. She entered with an annual visa as a “maid,” which required her to “stay overnight in the master’s house.” She first worked in the railway canteen, then in cafes and restaurants in the center of Basel.
At the hospital, they found she was pregnant. The report from the nurses stated that “the foreigner entered the country pregnant!” and must leave “within a reasonable time.” The social workers insisted on asking for the identity of the father. Eventually, Aurora revealed that he was an Italian, originally from Florence, who did his military service near Bassano del Grappa. She then revealed his name, Remo Raveggi. “But there is no mention of marriage.”
Hospital assistants called Honegger’s agency, who asked her to sign an adoption paper the day after the baby’s birth.
Soon after, Aurora considered other options. According to documents in the Basel archives, she suggested putting the child in an orphanage closer to home, in Italy. She called her daughter Aurora Gramatica, just like her. The hospital recorded that, within days of giving birth on June 23, 1962, she stopped breastfeeding and returned to Bassano del Grappa, a trip that today would take at least 10 hours by train, and talked to her mother. Aurora tried to convince her that keeping the baby was the right move, according to Swiss customs declarations. Her mother told her to do “what she thinks is right for the child.” Aurora returned to Switzerland but later went back to Italy without the baby.
“I think she left a trail of breadcrumbs for me to find her,” Helmick says.
But one month after delivering her baby, on July 31, a car with Honegger’s assistant picked up baby Aurora from the women’s clinic in Basel, then called the Frauenspital. The woman described the baby as a “Sympathetic girl, beautiful features, large dark eyes, looks quite bright and clever in the world.” Honegger told the Harwoods about her.
Two months later, the baby entered a foster home in the small picturesque town of Schaffhausen, about an hour north of Basel on the train. A network of private families provided this service and babies were taken there while waiting to be adopted. Honegger asked the biological mothers and future adoptive parents to pay the fees for the fostering service, alternating between them. Children from non-Swiss mothers who were then considered illegitimate were not eligible for public assistance.
With her birth name of Aurora Gramatica, Helmick entered the house of Erica H., who was married to a train manager and living on a hill right in front of the train station. The woman used to take pictures with all the children she fostered and added them to a poster in her house. Her husband recorded the date they entered the house and when they left it. It was a list of dozens of babies. The daughter of this family, who was a young teenager when Helmick arrived, saved one page of this list and shared a copy with New Lines. It details the typed names of 38 children, all provided by Honegger. Helmick is listed as number 12: “Aurora Grammatica, Paris-USA.”
From there, she was brought to the new family in France. There do not appear to be any identification documents with which Helmick left the country.
There are no letters from Aurora. Honegger wrote to her to ask for documents to export her daughter and to pay for the foster family. Later, Honegger wrote to assure her about the new adoptive parents. There are no documents showing Aurora’s consent for the adoption.
Our investigation reveals that Honegger repeated this scheme with many women. Like a spider creating webs for its victims, she took advantage of their vulnerability and desperation while exploiting the lack of help from their families and the weak control of authorities.
At the same time, she had the full support of adoptive parents, who saw in her a saving grace. She gave them what they could not have otherwise: a child.
Among at least a dozen adoptions that we examined, some of these women didn’t want to put their babies up for adoption. They were forced by the fact they had no other choice. And despite the many warnings from the American branch of the International Social Service, or ISS — an international body based in Geneva and recognized by most governments, including in the U.S. — along with several investigations, Honegger was never taken to court.
Honegger completed her studies as a social worker in Zurich and, in 1948, joined another social worker in her private adoption agency. She soon took over the activity and became the main reference person. She used her house in the town of Rapperswil to welcome pregnant women, asking them to work for her and then taking their children for adoption if they were unmarried.
But in May 1952, the Swiss Charitable Women’s Association (SGF), the umbrella organization for the Swiss women’s movement, reviewed her management and came to the conclusion that her working methods were “devastating.” She was eventually “dismissed without notice.” So she decided to move to the U.S.
North America was good for Honegger. It was where she was able to establish a lot of contacts she would use later. When she came back to Switzerland, Honegger had carved out a specific slice of the adoption market: She was placing children from Switzerland with North American clients.
But in 1959, the American branch of the ISS interrupted its relationship with Honegger and rejected her request for cooperation to send children to the U.S. because she did not comply with its standards. According to documentation found in the University of Minnesota archives, Honegger refused to cooperate or share information with the U.S. adoption authorities and asked for money from the adoptive parents, including for the foster families — both breaches of U.S. adoption laws.
The ISS branch denounced Honegger for not responding to it with updates about the adopted children and how they fared with their new families. Instead, she gave preferential treatment to some parents, which violated U.S. laws on adoption.
But more than that, Honegger asked for money from the adoptive parents even before the adoption took place. They were also asked to pay for the foster family service before even knowing the baby, a practice that the U.S. branch of the ISS condemned.
In 1964, she was “suspended” and then “dismissed” for her questionable practice by the board of her own agency, according to a report published in 2020 by the The Zurich University of Applied Sciences. The following year, the same agency was caught up in a lawsuit by the Dutch authorities because Honegger had placed children in the Netherlands “without the necessary official consent” from the mothers. This meant that children would have to be returned to their country of origin. Honegger denied all the allegations and, in the same year, managed to set up a new agency. She even applied for public funding to support her business but the requests were rejected, as her organization was deemed unqualified.
She always defended her actions as justifiable. In a typed letter from the 1980s to one of the adoptees she placed in a family, Honegger wrote, “I’m looking now back to over 30 years of work in this field and I never regret a day.”
Christiane Weideli, a 63-year-old realtor receptionist, was given as a baby to two alleged criminals who took her from Europe to Peru and then the U.S. and Canada, where they abused her mentally and physically. Now, she’s applying to the solidarity fund set up by the Swiss state in 2017 that helps people abused by enforced social measures.
Like Helmick, she has now managed to find the identity of her birth mother but it was also too late to ask for answers. In two letters sent to adoptive parents, including Weideli’s, and viewed by New Lines, Honegger said she had a license as a welfare assistant and a license from U.N. programs in the U.S. and Canada.
Both Weideli and Helmick spent part of their childhood in South America. Weideli was taken from her birth mother and given to a Swiss and Belgian couple running a medical equipment and gemstone business in Peru. A handwritten note from her mother states that the baby was not adopted legally. Her adoptive mother, Victoria Meeus, first began her work in Antwerp, Belgium, the diamond capital of the world. She soon started trading in Peru, where she met Pierre Weideli, a Swiss man working for the now-defunct Banco de Lima. A letter from a family friend obtained by Christiane years later says that, when Pierre met Victoria, “he had no penny.” He was 22 years younger than her. When he realized she was an artist and she had the money, he started managing her accounting and then took over the business.
They were very well known and seen by the European community in Lima. But they were often moving, probably on the run for one thing or another. Christiane’s childhood memories are full of unusual incidents, from watching her parents shift a body in their backyard to the time she came home from school in Montreal and was told to jump in a van to Vancouver on the other side of the country.
The couple raised Christiane and her brother, also adopted and three years older than her, with cruel punishments. While in Peru, one day Victoria called the police asking to arrest the boy because he was taking food from the refrigerator. The policeman replied, “The kids have to eat. What kind of mother are you?”
In the early 1970s, Peru was under a military government. The Weideli family left Peru and moved to Florida when Christiane was 9 years old.
“That’s where the sexual abuse started” by her father Pierre, with the complicity of her mother Victoria, recalls Christiane. She never told anybody about it. “You know, they were upstanding citizens in the community and they spoke well and were, you know, for all intents and purposes, educated. So you didn’t tell people because you didn’t think anybody would believe you, you know?” We are sitting in her home in a working-class, suburban neighborhood in Vancouver. There are photos of friends and vases handmade by her adoptive mother. Everything is tidy and neat, including the catalogued folders pertaining to her adoption, which she gets out to show us.
In 1974, Christiane’s family moved to Montreal. “This is where Vicky and Jean-Pierre sharpened their skills with mental and verbal abuse. I was kept awake until early hours of the morning, made to recite my homework over and over, to then be told I was stupid and would never amount to anything. This was a time when punishments would involve withholding food, locking me out of our home for hours, becoming their housekeeper, doing all the cooking and housework.”
There, her brother, at 15, put an end to the abuse and ran away from home. Christiane remained alone with the couple. One day, upon returning from school, she found the apartment empty. She was forced into the car, without saying goodbye to anyone.
They arrived in Vancouver and, after one year, Christiane made a decision. “I could no longer endure any more abuse from these people and so I ran away from home.” She went into the care of the Ministry of Social Services at the age of 15 and went to live in a group home, where she received counseling and therapy. “As a child and into adulthood, I seemed to have the gift of incredible resilience, hope, joy and a positive outlook. I do not know where it comes from, perhaps it is genetics.”
Right when Christiane was in Peru, Helmick’s family moved to Mexico and Ecuador, where Paul Harwood was busy with his work. “I just remember that sometimes he would disappear for days and then come back,” Helmick tells me. At that time, the CIA was involved in subverting democratic governments in South America and replacing them with right-wing military dictatorships. Helmick arrived in Ecuador when a new coup put Gen. Guillermo Rodriguez Lara in power.
Despite the turmoil, Helmick had a wonderful life. “I was 10 years old. I was on a private boat in the Galapagos with my family. I had a privileged life,” she tells me during a walk in downtown Bassano del Grappa, describing how she was chauffeured to school each day and served cocktails and hors d’oeuvres to diplomats and visiting dignitaries.
After coming back from South America to the U.S. with her family in the mid-1970s, Helmick grew up in McLean, Virginia, in an affluent environment. She met Jeff Helmick at college. They got married in Alaska, where he was working for the U.S. Army. Right after they wed, he was posted to Seoul, South Korea, for the Olympic Games. He later became a colonel and they had three children.
Helmick’s father, Harwood, welcomed Jeff as a son and talked to him about everything, except about his job — until he started disclosing some information about himself. “Hey, Jeff, at noon today, you and Lisa have to leave. I have people from the agency coming by,” Jeff recalled him saying one day.
Christiane had a different experience. She didn’t know she was adopted until she was 29.
While in Vancouver, she managed to reconnect with her adopted brother, after 17 years apart. Through a friend who worked in a telephone company, she searched for his name, Claude Weideli. The friend found someone with the same surname but the forename listed as Clint, in the province of Alberta. “He is my brother.” Christiane was sure, knowing that her brother had always been a fan of Clint Eastwood.
The hunch was correct. The brother, who ran away from home, had changed his name so his parents could not track him down and built a new life for himself. “Well, it’s about time you called,” he told Christiane. When they saw each other, Clint revealed to her what he had just found out from a close family friend: She and her brother were both adopted.
“It was such a relief,” remembered Christiane. She was happy knowing the people who raised and abused her were not her birth parents. But her world changed completely. She started discovering that all her life had been a lie.
She first wanted to meet her biological mother. With what little information she had, Christiane went to the Swiss Consulate in Vancouver to trace contacts who might have information about the adoptive parents. The stored documents didn’t help much but an official gave her a clue. Right on the doorstep of the consulate, he stopped her and told her he remembered someone with the surname Weideli. It was Walter, brother of her father Pierre. She remembered him as the author of the book “A Banker Without Vision.”
Christiane managed to get in touch with Walter, who then lived in the south of France. From him, she obtained a letter with a revelation. Her adoptive mother, Victoria, wrote to Walter in a letter about inheritance that her two children had no right to anything, as they “were not legally adopted.”
The adoption had taken place in Switzerland through the agency of Alice Honegger, she continued.
Christiane had a name to start from. Her world was shaken. “I felt as if my entire life was a lie,” she says.
When she flew to Switzerland for the first time to ask for information in 2003, the Swiss adoption office discouraged her, saying the bureaucracy and costs involved were insurmountable. She would later discover a tragic truth. Her mother was still alive when she was looking for her. It would have been her last chance to meet her.
Years later, Christiane found out her birth name, Daniela, and her mother’s name: Edith Frieda Docekal. She had become pregnant with her second daughter but her husband did not intend to keep her. Forced by her economic situation and her husband’s lack of support, she sought help first from her sister and then from a foster family, with whom she left her daughter, hoping to scrape together the money to take her back as soon as possible.
That was when Honegger’s agency entered the scene. She was informed about the mother’s complicated situation. And she needed a new baby for a well-to-do couple.
A handwritten letter exchange began. Docekal tried possible solutions to keep the baby. In one letter, she wrote that she didn’t want to consent to the adoption on paper because it would haunt her for the rest of her life: “If I let Daniela to be adopted, this will be written in the paper, I would be reminded of it my whole life without coming to rest.”
Unlike the archival files from Christiane’s adoption, there are few traces of what Aurora felt. She left no letters.
While the documents revealed little about her mother, Helmick found out more after she met her biological family in Italy.
Her image is preserved in the memories of her relatives, who remember her as an artist. “Makeup for her was something artistic, just she lived on images and artistic creations, even her face became an artistic creation, her dresses were an exercise in style,” said Claudia Vallerini, Helmick’s cousin. Aurora loved fashion and music. She later moved to Verona, one of the Italian capitals of opera. But her light and brightness dimmed after her trip to Switzerland. And she died with the secret about her daughter.
We managed to track other adopted persons who had been displaced by the agency of Alice Honegger in the 1960s and ended up in Tacoma, Washington, Denver, Colorado, and New York City, as well as Burlington in Canada. Monique (baby number six on the list of the same foster family where Helmick stayed) was born in 1959 in Switzerland and adopted by Canadian and British parents living in Bahrain. Monique eventually managed to meet her birth mother, a French migrant worker to Switzerland, and her birth father and siblings. But her mother never wanted to talk to her about her adoption, becoming visibly distressed and even scared by the mention of the name Honegger. Armin, born to a Hungarian refugee who sought safety in Switzerland, was adopted by an American family in Saudi Arabia. Not long ago, he connected with his birth family in Switzerland.
Today, as part of the Swiss government’s solidarity fund given to those who suffered from a “compulsory social measure” prior to 1981, adoptees who were poorly treated can receive around $28,000. The money is also given to the babies’ biological mothers and others affected by enforced placement affecting their physical, psychological or sexual integrity. “The Federal Council recognizes and regrets the fact that the Swiss authorities, despite substantial evidence, failed to take appropriate measures against illegal international adoptions (also in the case of the authorities in the canton of St. Gallen like Alice Honegger),” Ingrid Ryser, a spokesperson for the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police, told New Lines in emailed comments.
Christiane, Helmick and the other adopted people interviewed for this story reflected on how the uncertainty about what happened with their birth mothers affected their identities.
“I found out that the family who adopted me treated me horribly. And then that was a lie,” Christiane says. When she tried to change her name and date of birth to match her actual data, she found herself trapped in a bureaucratic conundrum.
Her mother had forged her ID, making her born in December in Peru, instead of in February in Switzerland. This caused an issue with the Swiss authorities because they now needed her to prove that she was born on her real birthdate. This would cost money for lawyers and, if verified, she would have to change all her Canadian IDs, including her passport and driver’s license.
“I found out my real identity. But I can’t be that identity. I can’t be Swiss. I can’t have the right birthday. I partially belong to all the people that have been in my life for many, many years,” Christiane says.
Their search is often stopped by several elements: by their gratitude toward the adoptive parents, for example. They wait until those who adopted them are dead before looking for their real parents.
Or, they are stopped by other fears.
“What I thought for the longest time is that my mother was raped,” Helmick says. “That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to do that research. And now am I bringing that horror back?”
She keeps thinking about who decided her destiny from her birth until she was in the house of the new adoptive parents. “This is the feeling now, it’s just kind of like throwing the dice down. Who’s going to take me home?”
The feeling of having your life in the hands of someone else has also accompanied Christiane’s life. She even missed the last opportunity to meet with her mother and lives with this regret. “I was starting to look before she died and, if the government would have helped me out, I would have met her.”
It is an important decision to start the search for biological parents. “I’m hoping other people go on. This journey is like, ‘Be careful,’” Helmick says. “Are you ready for the journey? And if you’re not ready, just wait a little bit. Maybe it’s the right timing.”
Otto Hostettler (Beobachter), Nico Schmidt (Investigate Europe), Pascal Hansens (Investigate Europe), Attila Kalman (Investigate Europe) and Leslie Knott (TigernestFilms) contributed reporting.
Reporting for this story was supported by Journalismfund Europe and Guido Fluri Stiftung.