Beauty is most captivating on a precipice: the flush and glow, the blush and go of youth in motion, teetering on the edge of maturity’s horizon. Teenagers compel us not for the accident of lanky limbs and full lips, but because they are pure momentum, spilling over in anticipation of everything, physical and emotional, still to come.
Such was the case for Anna Maria Hitz in September of 1964. She was sixteen, all but bursting out of her stylishly tight-fitted suits. In keeping with the times she worked hard to look grown, yet the propriety of the decade could not quite contain her. Bedecked in tailored wool and thick dark lipstick, her carefully flipped hair still somehow shaggy at the sides, she wore the stiff fashions like a costume that did not fit her spirit.
Like the girl herself, 1964 stood at a crossroads. Rock and roll, the war in Vietnam, the assassination of President Kennedy the year before: all of it had loosened something, a slow disillusionment bleeding out of the decade’s regimented shadows. Being well-to-do was no longer enough, least of all for a girl on the edge of becoming.
Anna Maria was ready. For what, even she could not yet say. But the readiness was unmistakable, in every gesture, every expression. The Washington department-store modeling photographs she posed for to help cover her and her mother’s expenses show a girl coiffed to other people’s taste, bright-eyed and arranged, waiting, at once impatient and unknowing, for her own life to begin.
It was a rainy September night when she went with her mother to a party at the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, a building barely a year old. Its sleek glass and sterile modern lines were meant to bury the old order, the Nazism and the war, and to beckon the future forward. In that, the girl and the building had something in common: like the new West Germany, Anna Maria was trying to leave a difficult past behind.
It was a rare treat that her mother, Anna Spring Hitz, could attend the party at all, let alone bring her daughter. The matronly Swiss-German frau worked there as a cleaner, humbled by the building’s quiet hierarchies.
Anna Maria would have dressed for the occasion. Perhaps it was an excuse to wear lipstick, to sneak sips of a wine spritzer, or simply to find someone who spoke her muttersprache, her mother tongue, Schweitzerdeutsch, Swiss German.
Whatever she expected of that night, she could not have imagined what followed.
It began with the fated arrival of a strikingly handsome man: Ulrich Bierschenk, the embassy’s night watchman.
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You did not have to be young or beautiful to notice how handsome Ulrich Bierschenk was, with his sharp cheekbones and his fair hair and eyes. Deadly serious at rest, then suddenly lit by an effortless, all-American smile, he had an allure that was at once dark and bright, mysterious and easy to approach. And he was young, and full of blood.
That, at least, is what the photographs suggest: the twenty-five-year-old’s university headshots, the thick horn-rimmed glasses, the close-cropped hair, still humming with life all these years later.
He was not American at all. As Anna Maria would learn, Ulrich was running from his past. He had been raised in Poland at the height of the Second World War, when bodies littered the grey streets and death was the ordinary weather. Family legend held that his father’s face had been left permanently slack, ruined by a ricocheting bullet that caught him in the cheek.
He came to the United States after meeting an American woman who offered him a new life, and he took it eagerly, abandoning everything behind him to study forestry in his wife’s home state of Utah. The marriage was a fresh identity, a clean page. He was a blank slate, and he refused to speak of what had come before.
When Anna Maria first saw him at the embassy, Ulrich was holding down three jobs to support a wife and infant son through his summer away from the University of Utah. Alongside the security post he worked as a translator and a waiter and did crop research for his degree, sending home what he earned to the family growing up without him.
No one, in all the years that followed, would ever fully understand what passed between Ulrich and Anna Maria that night. Young and beautiful, they met with an unmistakable charge, a chemistry built as much on longing as on looks, on a shared and unspoken need to escape. They were both runners, each with a history of leaving trouble half a world behind. Falling into each other, out of two burdened childhoods, may have given them a rare and temporary peace, a place where they could finally stop moving and belong.
That, at least, is one way to explain it. Because at first, no one could explain it at all, when Anna Maria simply vanished.