A quiet girl with a dramatic story kicks off the first episode of season 2 of the series Unknown Heir. Spoiler alert: The following text reveals part of the episode, but not the ending. A link to the episode can be found at the bottom of the text.
The episode starts with Kai Samuel and Tarjei visiting Tatjana's grave. Despite her death in 2013, there is still only a temporary cross on the grave of the quiet refugee girl who lived to be 78.
She is buried in Bergen together with her son, who died two years earlier. Despite the fact that she had sisters, no one has succeeded in finding heirs to the NOK 1,500,000 she left behind.
Who was this woman who was abandoned in the forest, just ten years old? By going through Tatjana's application for Norwegian citizenship, Kai Samuel and Tarjei get a quick overview of the family Tatjana never found her way back to.
She came to Norway in 1951 from Lviv, formerly part of Poland, and trained as a seamstress. Ten years later, at the age of 26, she applied for Norwegian citizenship.
When Tatjana was four years old, World War II broke out and the Soviet Union took her hometown. When the Germans conquered the town, the Soviet Union burned everything the Germans could use.
Her family was sent to Germany, where they became forced laborers on a farm, joining the statistics of the 15 million people enslaved by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Towards the end of the war, Tatjana's father and eldest sister were killed. During the evacuation, the sisters got away from their mother and Tatjana then got away from her sisters.
After the war, Germany was flooded with refugees and displaced people. The old, the sick and the orphans were the least wanted by the countries that could help. They were called "minus refugees" and Norway was the first country to take in this type of refugee.
Tatjana came to Norway after 6.5 years in hospitals and refugee camps in Germany.
Kai Samuel contacts archives in Ukraine, Germany and Poland in search of more information about the time before Tatjana came to Norway.
While Kai Samuel and Tarjei wait for an answer, Tarjei visits the farm that was Tatjana's first stop in Norway. Berit, who at the time was the farm owners' six-year-old daughter, welcomes Tarjei, shows him pictures and tells him about her impression of Tatjana.
The answer eventually comes from Ukraine and Poland, but they have no information about the young refugee girl.
The solution is to contact a local genealogist in Ukraine.
From Germany, however, the answer is positive, there is archive material about Tatjana and with that Tarjei gets on the plane.
The archive material from Germany shows that Tatjana was ill; she was hospitalized with tuberculosis. The illness is also said to be the reason why Tatjana was abandoned in the forest by her sisters just before the end of the Second World War. Did they go for help? Did they think she was dying? Are the sisters still living in uncertainty? The questions just keep coming for Tarjei and Kai Samuel.
