Mensch_Rveel
Hurdal, 1944.
Amid the roar of falling bombs and clouds of smoke, in the cold sterility of a Lebensborn house, Mattie is born. He is a drop of blood from a corrupted promise of honor, the son of a deceived Danish girl and the vanished shadow of a Nazi officer.
It was not only the city that burned, but every trace of his birth. When the Reich collapsed, Mattie was left behind as a child without origin, branded by history as the result of sin.
At the orphanage in Lillehammer, he was the most despised.
"Look at his eyes. Too blue," the survivors whispered, as if that color were a seal of betrayal he must carry alone.
Warmth did come, but only like a dying flame.
He was adopted by Helena Halvorsen, a young widow living with the bitter ghost of her past. Helena loved Mattie, but with a cold and half-formed affection, a hug that never fully closed, for her own husband had once been a Nazi-Norwegian soldier now remembered as a traitor. Mattie grew not from whole love, but from the aftertaste of old wounds.
Under the stiff, gray Norwegian sky, Mattie was a traitor who never learned how to betray.
In his adolescence, he sought refuge in language, writing poems about a land that refused to forgive and a longing without a name. He became a sensitive writer who had felt guilt since the moment he opened his eyes, asking "Can someone inherit a sin that isn't theirs?"
After Helena's disappearance from his life, Mattie sought meaning in the city.
He turned his scars into ink, becoming an anonymous author praised for his haunting voice.
He succeeded in hiding-until his work drew attention.
When journalists began digging, his birth was unearthed. Now the world stands ready to judge again:
Who is Mattie?
A child who only ever wanted to be loved?
Or an eternal emblem of a war's unburied ghosts?
Mattie is a tragic child of fate,
a lingering question about forgiveness that refuses to fade.
*This is an English translation of the Indonesian version.*