In Europe

night and pulled her out of bed. ‘I was puking with fear.’ She had to hold down two jobs, because the men of the family were no longer bringing in money. Her sister and her baby were caught in the crossfire, her brother was sentenced to life imprisonment. She got married, her husband was sent to prison, a life of arrests, searches and caring for prisoners. ‘The strange thing was: at the same time, we just lived on as normally as possible, like everyone else. That was pure survival instinct.’
    I had been introduced to Teresa by a mutual acquaintance; now she sits a bit uneasily in the hotel lobby, it's still hard for her to talk about it. Her first husband was tortured: British soldiers blindfolded him and put him in a helicopter, flew around and then threw him out, two metres above the ground. A joke. It led to a ruling against Great Britain by the European Court of Human Rights. Teresa herself was detained for a week, in total darkness, interrogated at the strangest hours, without any charges pressed. ‘When I came out, I was completely disoriented.’ That was only two years ago.
    In 1976, a spontaneous peace movement arose among the women of Belfast; the two initiators, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, actually won the Nobel Prize. ‘I knew both of them well. I sympathised with their idea completely, but of course all those wonderful meetings didn't work. After all, it wasn't about a personal conflict between Catholics and Protestants. It was about a Northern Irish government that treated us like trash, simply because we were Catholic.’ According to her, that is what finally put an end to the women's peace movement as well.
    Now the thaw has truly begun. The police stations are still electronic fortresses, but the armoured cars are off the streets and the men of theIRA are gradually coming out of prison and out of hiding. Teresa knows quite a few of them, they are all thirty-five or forty years old by now. ‘Some of them were always on the run, had all kinds of girlfriends, marriages fell apart. Most of them have spent a good part of their lives in prison. They were already falling behind when the civil war started, and now it's even worse. What's more, today we have a completely different Northern Ireland from when they went into prison. That whole generation has to find its way back to a normal life.’
    Teresa was divorced, and recently remarried. ‘When I go out these days, I'm still afraid. But then, so many women have led a life like mine.’
    Lost lives. Jean McConville's children never stopped looking for her. This spring, the IRA finally admitted that she had been murdered. In June 1999, a search began of the beach at Templetown to recover her remains. The McConville children, adults by then, gathered in the dunes and watched as policemen dug a huge L-shaped hole behind flapping plastic curtains, then systematically dug up the rest of the beach. ‘Finding her body would bring us back together again as a family,’ Helen McConville, the eldest daughter, says. ‘This is destroying us.’ A reporter from the
Independent
wrote: ‘One of Jean McConville's daughters walked across the car park, her eyes fixed on the ground, full of sleeplessness and worry, an attitude of pain and despair. She walked to a car in which other members of the family were sitting. The digging was over for the day, and there was little reason to stay any longer, but the family remained, maintaining their endless wake for reasons deeper than any logic …’
    Jean McConville's remains were finally found in summer 2003. For the IRA, her death had been merely a working accident: she had been interrogated with a plastic bag over her head, and had suffocated.



Chapter FIFTY-EIGHT
Berlin
    ‘ FAMILY,’ MY GERMAN FRIENDS TELL ME, ‘FOR US IT WAS ALWAYS family ties that determined the choices we made in life.’
    There are eight of us at the table, it's a chance get-together, and I cannot remember how we hit on the subject. ‘I was born and raised in Wuppertal,’ the woman across the table from me says. ‘But only because my mother was bombed out of her house in Berlin while she was still pregnant, and the only thing she could think of was that she had family there somewhere. That's how I became a real
Wessi
.’
    ‘With my mother, it was completely the other way around,’ says the woman next to her, who comes from the former DDR. ‘She was pregnant too, my father was in the army, and he had family in Rostock.