Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (18 page)

But one of the other USHMM-sponsored scholars doesn’t mind me; he is a jocular Aussie academic (by way of Holland and Germany) named Konrad Kwiet. I tell him about my grandfather and Valy, and of my discomfort with what seems to be my grandfather’s inability to help her. “I think one should not impose any moral verdicts on behavior,” he cautions. Konrad has a bald pate, a fringe of nearly fully gray hair, and a bit of a Falstaffian air. He is considered the foremost scholar on the Holocaust in Australia; it is a position of some renown: half of the country’s Jewish population descends from survivors, people who, mostly, tried to leave fetid Europe for the United States or Palestine and were thwarted. Konrad Kwiet was himself war flotsam. During the war, his Christian father and Jewish mother would have divorced but stayed together to protect her. Such
Mischehen
, as mixed marriages were called, were life rafts, preserving, often, the non-Aryan partner. After the war his parents, finally, broke up. But the good deed was done. All survived and Konrad, eventually, landed on the other side of the world.

“There are documents here of utmost significance, but it depends on the questions you ask the document,” Kwiet tells me. We are sitting in a mediocre café across from the archives; I am perpetually hungry reading about starvation. “It’s not a Holy Grail,” he says, “but it will change the direction of research. It’s not revolutionary—it’s not Hitler’s order to kill the Jews.” Again that phrase! “But it will become a place of institutionalized memory.”

I am curious if anyone from my family has ever searched for anyone here. It is one of the oddities of ITS that I might actually know that. A former NATO driving school houses an annex where the requests from families—called “Tracing and Documentation” files—are stored; it is a few miles outside town. The building has the feel of an abandoned elementary school: banging metal doors, wide stairwells, dusty halls. Everything is on paper. Piles and piles of paper. Stack after stack of desperation. The pages aren’t protected, merely preserved in the sense of not thrown away—set aside, open to the air. Dust motes hang in the air; each breath I draw brings with it the sweet smell of aging paper. I wander, overwhelmed, around the aisles, each delineated by metal shelves of the sort people use in basements, or rec rooms. The earliest files are yellow and crumbling, filled with tracing paper sheets in triplicate, missives sent among the American, French, and British zones after the war. Visitors can touch what they want. Loose reams of paper are piled in chronological order. Room after room with a thousand files per shelf. About three million requests for information, sixty-two years of desperate pleas to find family members; all are lost, endless suffering on paper. “Unsolved,” they are stamped with a special rubber stamp created just for this; or “Auschwitz, no further information.” I get lost for a time reading the story of a boy named Louis Clerc, whose mother, left all alone, her husband dead, searched in vain for her son for years. He had been seen, the file said, after the war, on the road to Ulm, he had been in the hospital, he had been released, his trail had run cold. His mother wrote every Allied country, begging for information. The file is in three languages. There is no end to his story. It simply trails off.

“When I am falling victim to routine,” Udo Jost, for many years Arolsen’s chief archivist, tells me, “I take out folders to read, and then I am angry again. I need this furiousness to be committed.” He takes
a drag on his cigarette. One year, the federal archive of Germany requested that Bad Arolsen begin microfilming and then destroying the original records. Jost lost his temper. “I say no! These are victims! They lost their names! They were given numbers! And in a few years, there will be no survivors, and then the victims will only be numbers!”

I first met Jost on a tour of the archives; he is a bearded, portly, unkempt man with a gentle, genial manner. We began that first day in an anteroom of the archives. He gestures behind him toward a plate-glass window protecting a sea of library-card files. “What you see here is the main key to the International Tracing Service,” he says, speaking in German and pausing for translation, though he speaks English nearly fluently. “This is the Central Names Index—CNI—which covers three rooms and includes fifty million references for seventeen-point-five million victims.”

Jost flips open an encyclopedia-heavy tome that explains an arcane alphabetic-phonetic formula developed in 1945 for researching Nazi victims’ names: in World War II prison camps, names changed from Cyrillic spellings to Germanic, Germanic to Francophone, Francophone to Polish, depending on who wrote down a prisoner’s details upon arrival in a work, concentration, or annihilation camp. In practical terms, that means there were 848 ways to spell the name Abramowitz, 156 versions of Schwartz. There are not nearly so many options for Scheftel, but the point is well understood. “ITS was not structured like an archive,” Jost continues. “The task was searching for victims and clarifying their fate. That’s why the documents could not be structured according to geographic or national criteria. Families searching for relatives generally did not know to which place their loved one had been deported.”

“There is so much that it is difficult to get a handle on where to begin,” explains Paul Shapiro, of the Holocaust Museum—arguably the person who took the archives’ closing most personally, who worked hardest, and who might take the most credit for its opening.

“It is very difficult to overcome sixty years during which the
material was never seen as a resource for understanding or teaching, it was only seen as a resource from which one could find a name.” He went on: “The most common description of the documentation at ITS that was used for fifty years was they are ‘lists of victims’—lists of prisoners, lists of names. But in the first place, it is more diverse material than that. And second, a list of names takes on a different meaning when it is observed through the eyes of a researcher or someone who knows the history, or through the eyes of someone who wants to understand the dynamic among populations, or what brought survival rather than death. Here you can sample different kinds of people as they made their way through—or failed to survive—the Nazi system. . . . The first challenge is having people understand that there is a broader significance to this material, and the material has to be mobilized and integrated into the way we understand the Holocaust.”

With Shapiro’s words in mind, I continue to comb the archives, hoping there is something more for me. I try different routes through the material, and one morning I find cousins in the “Displaced Persons” files—they list my immediate family as contacts in the United States when they try to emigrate: Henryka and Benzion Feldschuh, denied access to Palestine and the United States, request to emigrate to Sydney, Australia. Their exit interview with DP officials details their war years, from time in the Lodz ghetto through camp after camp, a bizarro résumé required for refugee status listed by date: 1936–1940, Lodz; 1940–1944, Lodz ghetto; 1944, Auschwitz; 1944, Bergen-Belsen. Similarly, jobs are listed—“teacher” gives way to “farmer” at a work camp—and the reason for termination is “liberation.” In their interview, they expressed a desire to
never return
to Poland (reason? “anti-Semitism”) or stay in Germany even if it meant settling three quarters of the way around the world.

Konrad Kwiet connects me to a genealogist in Sydney, who, I discovered, not only knew my cousins personally but had worked alongside Henryka in the 1960s. He tells me both died many years ago—news that I shouldn’t be shocked by, but which nevertheless
depresses me immensely. I am so terribly late to be contacting these people; I had had such an—I know—unreasonable hope that one of them would be alive, that one of them could tell me what my far-flung family looked like, that one of them could tell me how the family members contacted one another before the war, how they related to one another before the apocalypse and how they communicated after. Instead, the genealogist puts me in touch with their son, Michael, who is somewhere near my father’s age and thus too young to have known those for whom I search.

“A source,” Kwiet tells me, echoing the Jewish Museum’s Aubrey Pomerance, as I despair over the sketchy paperwork I have been given on Valy, “is only important by what you ask of it.” I go back to the desk that ITS gave me for my stay and look again at the files prepared for me upon my arrival. The best clue, the most dramatic and tantalizing lead, I finally see, is in the file connected to Valy’s. Hans Fabisch and Valy Scheftel share the same Tracing and Documentation file number—557 584. Their files also share a date: a request for information on Valy—and Hans—was first made in 1956. The query did not come from my grandfather.

Someone else had come looking for Valy,
I realize with a shock, and long before me. My grandiose idea of rescuing Valy’s story from obscurity was trumped two decades before my birth. A search for her had begun not long after the war, a desire to know her fate—and that of Hans—had been worried over, considered,
imagined,
more than a half century before I ever heard her name. The card stapled to the top of Hans’s file offers more: A woman, Ilse Charlotte Mayer, née Fabisch, had made the inquiry. The notation is very short, very dry: “Nationality: Stateless. Relationship: sister.” She had a London address.

I show this to Konrad Kwiet. He explains that the files likely represented the beginning of a restitution case. Germany paid monies to descendants and families of victims and survivors if the claimant could establish that the relative was, in actuality, lost or had survived a
ghetto or camp or forced-labor factory—or had not survived at all. He points to a line: “Valy was a Jewess. But they don’t have any [death] certificate.” He went on: “She left Berlin on the twenty-ninth of January, 1943, on the ‘twenty-seventh Ost-transport.’ It does not say here where she ended up. But ‘Ost-transport’ equals Auschwitz.”

January 1943 was a terrible time. As Wolfgang Benz had explained to me, back in Berlin, the killing machinery was fully up and running; the Final Solution had been agreed upon—“liquidation” had been announced—a full year before. Its effects were well under way; no longer were Jews being resettled; gas chambers efficiently extinguished the lives of men, women, children, day after day; a
system
was in place; there was nothing haphazard about it, there were none of the vagaries of bullets still being used in the east, there was none of the uncertainty of other means of death. Of the transports arriving, each day, from the west and elsewhere, some seventy percent of the people on each train were chosen for immediate death. It had been a full year since the SS had officially decided to liquidate the Jews. Rare was it, at that point, to be chosen for work.

It was also a terribly, horribly cold month, which hindered hiding in Berlin itself, if one was called for deportations; the cold further diminished the reserves of those who had already been diminished after months of malnourishment and deprivation. Had Valy tried to go into hiding? Nothing in Bad Arolsen could tell me. All I knew was that on January 29 she was headed east.

But before I even got to the circumstances of Valy’s deportation, I realized that if Ilse Mayer was searching for Valy, it meant that Hans’s family knew they had married. In other words: correspondence had been received from Hans and Valy, well after the last letters she had sent my grandfather. And, as Kwiet had explained, Ilse Mayer had possibly filed restitution claims on behalf of her brother and Valy. Would those files, those restitution claims, tell me what had happened to them both? Would those files have more information about what
the two of them had done in Germany, what they’d been forced to do, and how much of their lives they had been able to preserve in the time before they were sent to the camps?

As I read and reread Valy’s letters, I keep thinking back to Volkhard Knigge’s comment that the ITS archives are a kind of living memorial, a breathing, endless loop of representation, a witness of the individuals lost, forgotten, or displaced by the war. And of their relatives who wrote for decades—and, like me, are still writing.

Late at night, exhausted from pregnancy and walking the Bad Arolsen campus, I ask Jean-Marc to also read Valy’s letters. He finds them incredibly depressing, which is striking, as, of course, this is the work he does all the time. He reminds me that Valy’s luck was against her at the outset if she had waited to try to get out until after Kristallnacht; the numbers clamoring for entrance to the United States had far outpaced what the country was willing to accept.

I am keenly aware that even if I am to find Valy, she will be well into her nineties. I am late. Very late. One night I announce to Jean-Marc that I will continue to look for her—but also, I will look for those who knew her. I wonder if, if no one else, perhaps Ilse Mayer might just still be alive. He thinks this is a terrible, and terribly unlikely, idea. A search for ninety-year-olds, he says, will disappoint me. Whom will I still find, after all? If I had started this search a decade ago there might have been witnesses, but now? And if I do find anyone—will they have hardened in their memories? Will they share any more than they have already shared? Better, he says, to retrace her footsteps—to find where she’d lived and try to see if there are still traces of her there, if there is something that can tie her back to each location, even as she was scrubbed from the history. You must, he says, start by going back to Troppau, the Czech town where she was born.