Two Mothers

Three U.S. judges at Frankfurt had to make a decision that would have taxed Solomon.

The case began on New Year's Day 1941, when a baby boy was born to Ivan and Pavla Pirecnik in the village of Sostanj in Yugoslavia. The Pirecniks named the boy after his father. Two years later, the Germans shot down Ivan Pirecnik for working with the partisans; they sent his wife to Auschwitz concentration camp, and little Ivan to a German orphanage maintained by Hitler's SS.

Later that year, an SS man named Gustav Sirsch and his wife entered the story. Childless, they went to the SS orphanage, asked to adopt a boy. They were offered a dark-haired, blue-eyed youngster of two whom they liked at once. The people at the orphanage said he was the son of German parents. It was, in fact, Ivan.

A Place to Live In. During the war, SSman Sirsch was captured by the Russians, and his wife cared for little Ivan. At war's end, expelled from her home in the Sudetenland, Frau Sirsch took the boy to West Germany, where she made a precarious living as a seamstress. In 1949 Sirsch was released from his Russian P.W. camp, took up his old trade of house painting and built a new home. Herr and Frau Sirsch and little Ivan seemed happy.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Pavla Pirecnik, released from Auschwitz, had returned to Yugoslavia and begun her search for her son. The International Refugee Organization found Ivan. Mrs. Pirecnik petitioned for his return and the I.R.O. brought the case to the U.S. court at Marburg.

To the witness stand came Ivan himself, then eleven years old. Awed by the serious grownups, he told the court that he liked school, dogs, cats and soccer, but he did not like girls. He did not want to be a fireman or a locomotive engineer when he grew up, but a house painter like his father. Who was his father? "Gustav Sirsch." Who was his mother? "Josefine Sirsch."

A Place to Be Brought Up In. Six weeks ago the Allied High Commission's court of appeals in Frankfurt rendered a divided judgment. Chief Justice William Clark and Justice Marc J. Robinson decreed: "The boy should stay with his foster parents and the mother must sacrifice her natural feelings to that decision" because of the "material factors of the respective homes . . . Although Yugoslavia, as judicially noticed, seems not as bad socially and democratically as most Communist dictatorships, we think it compares economically unfavorably with free enterprise Western Germany as a place to be brought up in."

The tribunal's third judge, Carl W. Fulghum, held in his minority opinion that i) Yugoslavia's lack of free enterprise was beside the point; 2) no case had been made out to show that Ivan's real mother was unfit to give him a proper home; 3) "the former member-of the Nazi Party and SS trooper [should not] be considered more suitable for her child [than she] who suffered so much at the hands of the Nazi army and SS troops . . ."

Last week Mrs. Pirecnik was in Germany to appeal the verdict. When she saw her son for the first time in ten years she broke down, sobbing: "Das ist mein Ivan." In the quiet chambers of Chief Justice Clark, Ivan was questioned:

"What do you want to do?"

"Stay here," the boy sobbed.

"Why do you want to stay here?"

"Because I'm well off here."

"What do you think of your real mother?"

"Nothing."

Nevertheless, Justice Marc Robinson changed his opinion in the case. The verdict was now two for Mrs. Pirecnik, one for Mrs. Sirsch. This week Ivan went back to Yugoslavia with his real mother.

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