Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (20 page)

The day prior, we had spent ten hours together, my first day in Prague, running from place to place—from the fortified, tiny Jewish archives (like nearly everywhere in Europe that caters to Jews, to enter one has to pass through a series of hermetically sealed rooms, show a passport, submit to a bomb-detecting wand), on to the Jewish community center, where I listened, ineffectually, to a group of frail former resistance fighters chat in Czech, and then a lecture, from Pavel, to a group of former hidden children also in Czech, about a Jewish newsletter he edits, and then struggled still further as a woman named Judita Matyášová gave a talk about a forgotten Kindertransport of a hundred fifty Czech teens to Denmark in 1939. Judita told the crowd she had spent the last two years trying to track down these “kids” and
document their story, before they are gone. To me she wondered about American funders: Where were they? How to find them? She was upset.

The day had been frustrating—I’d felt the keen stress of a short research trip and lost time. There was no one, among these aging Czechs, from Troppau. And therefore, unsurprisingly, no one had ever heard the name “Valerie Scheftel.” But then a woman, she called herself Mária Engelová, a formerly “hidden child” who spoke English, shyly approached me, after Pavel explained to the group my project, and asked me if I had been to Bad Arolsen. “That’s where this search began,” I tell her. With that she explained that she had spent years trying to get into the International Tracing Service. I asked what she was looking for. “I don’t know,” she said then, earnestly, with a strange half smile on her pillowy, moon-shaped face, “if I am I.” She was a large woman, wearing a wool, midnight-blue pea-coat and a man’s paper boy’s–style cap pulled low over short gray hair.

I don’t understand, I said. And she explained: She was born in 1943, hidden as an infant. And then everyone else was murdered. Everyone. Her parents. Her sister. Uncles. Aunts. Grandparents. After the war, the only two surviving relatives of this once-proud family—an uncle, a grandmother—stumbled back to their hometown and found each other. A local farmer, soon after, asked her uncle—
Didn’t you have a brother? With two girls?
He told the uncle the baby, he believed, was on a nearby farm. “I was found,” she continued, “in 1946.” The family who hid her didn’t want to give her up. But, eventually, she was brought to live with this uncle and this grandmother. Yet the grandmother, perhaps, never quite trusted that this little girl was the lost baby tucked away. When she was bad, or did something deserving, in the grandmother’s eyes, the elderly woman would murmur: “I don’t know . . . Are you, you? I think you are not you.” It was a seed of distrust, a fundamental undoing of the structure of her own identity that the girl—turned woman before me (she was a nuclear physicist, she mentioned casually, in addition to a searcher of her own past)—had
internalized, swallowed whole. When I asked what she knew of the parents, the nuclear family, she had had only for moments before they were sent away, she faintly shouted, “I was a small child! I don’t remember anything! I don’t know!”

And so, after Communism, she crisscrossed the globe, from Jerusalem to Brazil, looking for anyone who might have a memory, a photo, a link that would unpack for her her own identity. “You find one document after another, you collect—like an analyst!” She became animated. “When you are looking for information on only one person, is it not so difficult! But to look for a whole family?” She made a face that read:
impossible.
“I didn’t know who was my grandfather! I didn’t know anything about my mother!” A relative in Brasília gave her a photograph of her and her lost sister. She has no others. Once, she tells me, as a much younger woman, in the years when she was a university student, she was on a tram in Prague, holding on to the standing strap above her head, and a man seated below her asked her, suddenly, if she might, by chance, be related to a woman he remembered from before the war. And then, “He named my mother’s name. Maiden name, not married name. I met him one time—we went to a coffeehouse and we spent about two hours speaking together and we arranged to meet again. But he didn’t show up.”

It was a living nightmare, her story; a true-life
Twilight Zone
. The search I was on at least had the players in place, at least I knew for whom I was looking. I thought of how my own identity was shaped by knowing the experience of my grandfather, my parents, and how this search was about finding more pieces to the mosaic to reveal the bigger picture, as Volkhard Knigge, the Buchenwald director, had said to me of Bad Arolsen. Finding Valy was, in part, about fleshing out the person of my grandfather, in part about telling her story. I can’t stop thinking about this identityless woman, as Pavel, Judita, and I walk away, and then settle in for expensive cakes at Café Slavia, where once Kafka’s lover Milena Jesenská held court.

That night my friends in Prague, an American expat and her
Czech husband, find it amusing that I’m spending so little time in the capital and then rushing away to Troppau. “It’s as though,” says my friend’s husband, “someone arrived in New York and said with a great flourish, ‘But I’m really here to go to the hinterlands of Iowa!’”

The following morning, in Třebíč, Pavel and I run from place to place, visiting people he knows and picking up promotional pamphlets about the town that he will bring with him to Israel the following week. He is not tall, but he has the thickset look of a frequent gym-goer, with a slightly receding hairline and a line of stubble around his face; he wears a leather jacket and an enormous backpack filled with copies of the Jewish newsletter he edits. I am a burden; I can’t communicate at all, I’m totally dependent, bewildered. He insists we hike up above the town to take in the vista of the claustrophobic little shtetl streets, barely wide enough for a single car, the sloping red-roofed homes beneath us, the twelfth-century basilica in the distance, the nuclear plant further on. No matter how high I climb, it is not enough. Pavel eggs me further on, though I am wearing the wrong shoes, and we are not on any sort of path and I keep slipping, and though I am, I whisper feebly, pregnant.

On our way out of town, I tell Pavel I am mostly interested in Troppau, not Třebíč, nor in some of his other suggestions—like a Polish town on the other side of the border that once had a major Jewish family (now long gone) that the town has (belatedly) come to celebrate through an exhibition that he has arranged for me to see. I tell him, given my limited time in the country, I think we should skip our day in Poland, so I can be, simply, in Troppau, wander there, maybe run into elderly people, maybe catch some glimpse of the life of the late 1930s, navigate the city. But I have misjudged our relationship, and Pavel gets angry that I have questioned his judgment, his arrangements. “What will you find there?” he nearly shouts at me, exasperated with my singular focus, over the rattle and wheeze of the ancient train hurtling somewhere through the Czech Moravian countryside once we depart Třebíč. “Nothing! It was bombed! There is nothing to see
there! I will take you to see what you need to see.” I sputter a bit, mumble about just sitting in town, and walking; taking it in. Even as I say it, I realize it sounds vague at best; ridiculous. And so I agree, perhaps there isn’t much to see, but it doesn’t matter, I just want to be there, in Troppau, I repeat,
taking it in
. Pavel sighs and looks away, then picks up his phone and scrolls through his messages.

The trip from Třebíč to Krnov is exhausting, a dash from train to train, with a long pause in Ostrava, a cold industrial city at the edge of the country known, says Pavel, for “Gypsies, skinheads, and unemployment.” On the last train, a single car packed with Teva factory workers at 11:30 at night, it is a hundred degrees on board and the windows are badly fogged with condensation. I am exhausted. I had half assumed there would be nothing to be found about Jews in the regional archives, but, thinking aloud, I realize this can’t be true: Valy’s mother ran a shop. Surely that would be in the secular archive.

It is past midnight when we finally arrive in Krnov; and it is freezing, and wet. Pavel’s mother fetches us in a small lipstick-red Volkswagen. She is a tiny, plump woman with boyishly cropped hair dyed a deep red-brown. She speaks no English, but proudly shows me she wears a large silver Star of David around her neck bought, says Pavel, in Israel. She drives us, through abandoned streets, to a large nineteenth-century building behind a massive iron gate. You’ll be sleeping here, Pavel tells me, indicating the building, a pediatric medical clinic; it is his mother’s office, she is the pediatrician. And I realize they mean to leave me at this clinic, alone, to sleep on a pull-out couch in the attic, a room with a skylight for a window and a mirrorless bathroom with a refrigerator full of tetanus shots and walls covered with posters on baby development that look vaguely familiar but are all written in a language indiscernible to me. I’m in a full, sweaty panic as Pavel’s sweet mother, using sign language and simple words, shows me how to lock myself in—into the gate, the front door, the middle door, the upstairs door—and all the food she has brought to keep me fed while they are gone. As she unpacks—soup, bread, cheese, apples, oranges—and mimes using
the microwave, I cry out, stupidly, “But I can’t even say the name of this street!” looking out into the cold, wet night, the abandoned buildings all around, and I know I am irrational, and I know I will be fine, but I am hyperventilating. They leave me anyway—there really is no alternative—and I cannot close my eyes, I turn on every light, every sound in the marble halls echoes around me; I cannot even read, I don’t fall asleep until nearly five a.m. and I am a wreck and I don’t know why I’m there, traipsing the former Communist industrial corridor, so far from the story I am trying to tell.

As my terror subsides into general insomnia, I lie awake and wonder:
Am I closer to Valy in Krnov, this strange post-Communist town? Is this trip for nothing?
Thus far it feels like a vanity project, a chance to feel ill and foreign, but having nothing to do with my search. People ask me if I’ve read Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Everything Is Illuminated
, and I feel the question implies the search is redundant, the story has been told. The trip to the shtetl, hours in transit, hours walking these long-empty streets, feels gratuitous. I am reminded of my roommate in Vienna who returned home one evening as rain pelted the windows outside. “Two Jews on a rainy night in Vienna watching a Holocaust documentary,” she exclaimed, upon finding me and my partner watching a movie on television. “It’s like the beginning of a joke!”

Valy was not in Krnov. Is it absurd to be here?

Valy Scheftel and her mother, Hanna (also called Toni, Antonie) Scheftel, in the Czech mountains.

The next morning Pavel and his mother are late to get me; I am strung out and overtired as we set out into a beautiful morning, into the Czech countryside with a brilliant blue sky, driving down country roads past farms and gentle rolling hills, green as far as the eye can see, a kind of Eastern European Vermont, on our way to Karlsbrunn, now called Karlova Studánka, a spa town in the Jeseníky Mountains, built in the nineteenth century, favored by the bourgeois of Troppau during the interwar period. I am eager to get there, as it’s actually a place Valy might have gone—but Pavel insists that we first stop at the home of some friends, a stained-glass maker, who is helping to recast the glass for the semi-destroyed Krnov synagogue, and her husband. The husband wears a silver Jewish star around his neck; on his mantel he has a small shrine to Jews—a slice of Jerusalem stone, a photo of Jerusalem, Shabbat candlesticks, and a menorah.
“Baruch ata adonai!”
he sings to me as I walk in, and then, with a flourish, he shows me his necklace. On the wall is a poster of the Yiddish alphabet. They are kind, though, and offer cake and Nescafé, and I buy a pair of earrings wrought out of stained glass, as I assume I was brought here to do. The stained-glass maker, who seems lovely, despite our language barrier, comes up to me and, to my horror, rubs my stomach. She whispers, conspiratorially, “You will have many children, as the
Hebräisch
do?” Pavel, I realize, with chagrin, has shared with them the fact of my early pregnancy. I don’t know what to make of these judeophiles. They are all obsessed with the idea of us, but they seem to have met few actual Jews. We are like fairies, good-luck charms, surreal, unreal.