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The Power of Secrets
In ILLEGITIMATE, you share with readers your personal journey to find truth, identity, and peace as you search for your biological father and your family’s ties to the Lebensborn program in Nazi Germany. What inspired you to share your story with others?
This is a question I had to ask myself for three years before I decided to put pen to paper. After all, some of my aunts and my uncle were still alive and well, and this is certainly not a happy subject to chit-chat about. I was transparent with them in my interest to write a book and received minimal pushback from only one of my cousins. My aunt certainly helped when she emphatically stated, “I want the truth to be known!” That is the power of secrets: they always want to be revealed.
You write powerfully about feeling unwanted and unclaimed as a child. How did you approach writing those early emotional experiences?
I realized a long time ago that good things can come out of bad experiences, and I believe my sense of independence and perseverance was developed out of a desperate desire for inner joy. It has to be innate, not provided by others.
Did you feel a sense of responsibility in telling this part of history through your family’s experience?
Most certainly! I suppose that’s why it took almost ten years of researching, writing, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting… I needed for the story to roll easily off my tongue as I read it to myself. Any pauses or stops in a paragraph required scrutiny, hence all the revisions. It paid off; my family has been very supportive and complimentary, even those who were cast in a not-so-pleasant light.
Do you feel a sense of closure, or is this an ongoing process?
I feel a type of closure. I understand and can empathize with my mother and her choices, as well as my father, who had his options taken away from him, my aunt, and her strength to accept herself for what she was, the additional quirks of other family members, and all things that went undiscussed. The most amazing closure came from my late-in-life relationship with my father. I am very much like him, and that was amazing, because I had never found any similarities with my mother. It was a DNA confirmation! I can certainly understand why adoptees feel the need to find their biological parent(s). My one huge regret is that my mother passed away in 2013, and I never had a chance to tell her I now understood her choices—how healing that would have been for both of us!
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Determined to chase her dreams, Susi joins a dance troupe, leaving her infant daughter, Maddie, in the care of her mother, Katharina—a resilient woman who has already raised six children, three with different fathers. Six years later, Susi returns, now engaged to an American Army officer. Maddie is taken from her grandmother and adopted to be raised in America.
As Maddie grows, she wrestles with her fractured identity and, decades later, finds her way back to her German roots. Just before her 60th birthday, a shocking confession from her Aunt Sieglinde shatters everything she thought she knew: her beloved grandmother once participated in a Nazi eugenics program that encouraged “racially correct” unions to produce children for Hitler’s vision.
That revelation ignites Maddie’s quest to uncover the truth about her own father—a journey that intertwines generations, secrets, and the unyielding need to belong.
ILLEGITIMATE is the true story of two women who had to uncover the identities of their fathers in order to truly understand themselves.
ILLEGITIMATE: A Daughter’s Search for Truth in the Shadow of Lebensborn
Illegitimate is a memoir about Maddie Lock’s search for her biological father and her family’s buried ties to the Lebensborn program in Nazi Germany. What starts as one shocking family confession turns into a long, personal hunt for truth, identity, and some kind of peace. Lock moves between childhood memory, family research, wartime history, and late-life discovery as she pieces together how silence, shame, and war shaped several generations of her family. This is a book about wanting to know where you come from, and what that knowledge can cost.
I found the writing vivid and deeply felt. Lock has a gift for small details that stick in the mind. A garden, a window, a stairwell, a face, a silence at the table. Those moments give the memoir real heart. The book takes its time in certain passages. Readers will appreciate that because it lets the emotional weight really sink in and keeps readers engaged. What hit me hardest was the way she writes about being a child who feels unwanted and unclaimed. That ache feels real. It’s not dressed up or forced. It just sits there and hurts, and that honesty gave the book a lot of power for me.
What I admired most was the book’s moral seriousness. Lock does not chase family truth for drama. She chases it because not knowing has shaped her whole life. I liked that the memoir does not flatten people into heroes or villains. Her mother, grandmother, father, and aunt all come through as messy, wounded, limited human beings. That made the book stronger and sadder. I also think the book handles its big ideas well. It asks hard questions about shame, belonging, inheritance, and whether truth heals or just rips old wounds back open. For me, the answer here is both. That tension gives the memoir its bite. It made me feel angry, tender, and reflective all at once.
I would recommend Illegitimate to readers who like memoirs that mix personal history with larger historical fallout, especially books about family secrets, postwar identity, and the long shadow of trauma. I would also hand it to anyone who has ever felt cut off from their own story. I came away moved, unsettled, and grateful that Lock wrote it. This isn’t a light read, but it’s a worthwhile one.
Pages: 269 | ASIN : B0G5PD7LX8
