Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (21 page)

Finally we continue to Karlsbrunn, where the first bathhouse was built by Maximilian, the youngest son of Empress Maria Theresa, in the 1780s. It is warm in the valley but it gets cooler and fresher as we climb. During Valy’s childhood, Troppau natives would escape the smog that blanketed the valleys in the years after the Industrial Revolution by visiting Karlsbrunn. These roads haven’t changed much since the 1930s, other than that these days they are paved, and navigable by cars; in Valy’s childhood, the area was reachable by a two-part journey: train followed by horse and buggy. The Jeseníky mountain waters are said to have curative powers. Sure enough, there are people bottling the water in massive jugs as we arrive, filling up at public taps. Pavel tells me, proudly, that Václav Havel took a cure here, for many months. During Communism, he says, the spa went from being the playground of the rich to a worker’s retreat. Now it is something in between the two.

Valy writes to my grandfather, reminding him of times they hiked and swam and skied together in the Austrian and Czech countryside, and elsewhere; in his album there are photos of her, in a dirndl, on the mountainside. She returns to these moments, often, in her letters.

June 7, 1940

. . . Now the third summer without you begins. Instead of going swimming or boating, hiking in the woods and sharing all the beautiful things with you, as it should be, I am sitting here, pounding insanely, madly and full of sadness at the typewriter.

I pay a small fee and go into the pools, alone. I feel completely dislocated as I bounce around, looking for the jets. There are several saunas, but pregnancy keeps me out of their warmth, so I opt instead for the “photo therapy” room, which turns out to be a floor of white
smooth stones, like a driveway, in a faux-hut, walls pasted with images of some distant tropical isles like a tanning salon and what look to be hamburger lights above. Czech women of various sizes lie on the ground wheezily gossiping and I join them, baking for a few minutes. I come out and see that Pavel is huddled over Facebook, updating his status.

For two days Pavel schleps me to places I don’t want to go. I feel childish and angry and stuck and spoiled. And I can’t explain exactly why it is, but I am deeply uncomfortable traveling with him to see Jewish graves from the interwar period, maintained or unmaintained, cemeteries that have large empty spaces where graves were disinterred, disturbed, destroyed, or large empty spaces where the rest of the community was supposed to have been buried but whose lives were cut short, who were never given the honor of a cemetery burial. He finds it fascinating, sad, but also, ultimately, anthropological. He photographs the gravestones, wanders among them. I find it terrifying, these whole stretches of land that have long since lost their original purpose—but remain empty, marked off, set aside. They are as good a representation of the loss of life as I’ve ever seen, and yet to be here with Pavel means I cannot express my sorrow without feeling like I am acting out the part he has created for me.

We are met, one morning, at the Krnov synagogue by a group of Poles who want to show me their town, Głubczyce, which once had a prominent Jewish family named Hollaender. I have lost my battle with Pavel over this Polish side journey.

We are, I start to realize, fighting over the rights to this story—he believes it is his to show me, his to explicate—the Polish Hollaender family, for example, as model Jews—because this is
his
region—his lost history, his current history, his past. He believes that understanding the story of this once-Prussian, now-Polish town, the past of the Jews there, will provide insight into what Valy’s family experienced. While that may be true to some degree (Valy’s family were transplants to the region, from Galicia, and then remained residents for less than
a full generation, after all), I am looking for something beyond what he can reveal. The moments I find illuminating aren’t those that Pavel anticipates, or provides: it is in the side story, the human interest, the individual experience of loss. I want to know what the cities feel like now, and what they felt like then—who the neighbors were and what they thought when a quarter of their population was destroyed. What happened to their shop? What happened to their lives? Towns like Troppau were strongly pro-Nazi and then aggressively anti-Semitic when Hitler came to power, especially after the Sudetenland was “returned” to Germany under the Munich agreement—but what was life like? What did it feel like to walk down the street? And how did it change under Communism? And how did it change after that? Did the memory of these people linger? Or was it just suppressed? I don’t want a faux-Jewish home in a once-Jewish town. I want the real thing. I want the moments like I had with that identityless survivor woman in Prague. They are not constructed moments, they can’t be orchestrated; they operate on a kind of serendipity that is very difficult for me to explain to Pavel.

One of the Poles, for example, out of the blue asks if I can help with his family’s search: he had one Jewish grandmother, he said, who believed she was the only one of her family to survive—she had been married to a non-Jew, which gave her a privileged status, protected her from deportation. But after Communism ended, he discovered that one of her sisters had survived, in the United States. In 1978, that sister provided testimony for Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, that explained
she
was the only survivor, that she had searched and found no one. The two sisters had each lived half a century past the war, always assuming they were alone in the world. They both died before the end of Communism might have led them to find each other. He would like to find that sister’s family, in New York, he tells me, hoping I can help him. I promise to try.

Of course his story provides nothing concrete about Valy or her experiences specifically, but it does draw again, and clearly, how many
of these not only unhappy but
end-less
endings exist; how possible it was for two sisters—let alone lovers—to live out the rest of their lives never knowing each had survived. It is another illustration of how these stories that have no ending extend for generations, permeate the edges of normal life with the tragedy of what came before, infuse the following generations with their
tristesse
. It makes me wonder, wildly, improbably, if perhaps Valy had the same experience—if she were stuck behind the Iron Curtain, could she have remained there, alive, after the war without my grandfather knowing? It’s a bit unlikely, but not totally impossible.

In the meantime, Pavel and I are at an impasse, which only worsens when we finally arrive in Troppau.

The peculiar thing about Troppau is that, at first blush, there seems to be nothing at all to connect the modern city—now called Opava
—
with the town that was before. At surface, today, you could easily never know its past: the Jews were expelled or murdered, and then, postwar, the rest of the Sudeten Germans were expelled and the city’s name changed. In the late 1940s, Opava washed itself clean of its German roots, started again with a new Czech life, and turned its back on the past, ending centuries of speaking, writing, reading, and using German in the town. It reminds me, when I first arrive, of something the late professor Fouad Ajami once said of the Turks under Atatürk: that by putting the language into Latin letters, and out of Arabic, the country no longer allowed itself to access the past. In Troppau, too, there is little access to the past: no one speaks or reads or grasps German at all, let alone remembers much of a time when there were Jews running half the city’s businesses. Troppau—especially Troppau’s Jews—was always oriented more toward Vienna than Warsaw or Prague. The town’s history is told in German, the town’s Jews were obsessed with German culture—which means this past is nearly inaccessible to most of the Czech youth I meet. Pavel can read and speak German; he is an exception.

In the Jewish archives of Prague, page after page in stacks tied
together with ribbon testify to the relationship between the Jewish communities of Troppau and Vienna, stretching well back into the nineteenth century.
By the early 1930s, smart girls like Valy were sent to Vienna to study. When she enrolled in the medical school in 1932, she was part of a second wave, a group of women who believed in their place as doctors, not nurses, and saw their enrollment as entirely normal, entirely obvious: feminists without using the term. There were dozens of women in the medical school in Valy’s year—and of those, more than half were Jewish.

She was a German aesthete—no money, but rich in the poems and music of the city she adopted. Her time in Vienna was a shelter for her, mentally, emotionally, a respite that she would return to, in her letters, in her mind, when life began to morph and twist into the horror of the Nazi period. When she graduated, five days before the Nazis took the city, she held in her hand one of the last degrees from the university given to a Jew before the Anschluss deprived her classmates of that privilege.

For some time I couldn’t understand why Valy hadn’t stayed in Vienna, or rather, why she hadn’t stayed long enough to flee with my grandfather. I assumed—I still assume—it was in part because she felt she must return to her mother, alone in Troppau. That sense of loyalty surely played a tremendous role. In her later letters she does nothing without her mother.

My mother is again with me. She was supposed to take on the management of a local home, but was not approved by the labor department, alas. Now she will probably have to take on a completely subordinate job—household or cleaning. It has to be that way. We are greatly saddened by this, because we fear that she will not be up to it physically. I just hope that it is not going to be too hard. We now live together in a furnished room and are truly happy to be together.

But it was also, I realized in the Czech Republic, because in March 1938, Troppau was a way of fleeing Vienna without having to go very
far. It was free. It was (relatively) safe. It was, she thought, they all thought, enough out of reach of the Nazi arm that they had time to collect themselves, to consider their options, before emigration. So she went to Troppau to organize her life, to escape the Anschluss, to reunite with her mother; and—maybe—to wait for a marriage proposal. And Karl continued on his path to emigration.

Valy began to write to him from the moment he set foot on the boat from Hamburg to New York.

Troppau. September 13, 1938

Beloved boy,

A warm welcome to America!

Europe and I send you greetings. We both grieve for you! . . .

When your card arrived, I wanted to fly to Hamburg. I simply could not fathom that you were leaving and that I had to stay back here by myself. It was inconceivable no longer to have you here within reach. Finally, I comprehended that you had actually taken the step you had been contemplating for months and that I must be happy.

Do you remember, darling, how you would console me when I used to be so unhappy at the onset of the long summer break because we had to separate for such a long time? “Be sensible, there are only six weeks that separate us; neither you nor I go to America!”. . . And now, many weeks and sky-high obstacles, an entire world history is between us! Isn’t that so sad that one might want to die? . . .

Valy

Her uncle, she writes him, is worse off than she—he is now considered stateless and is wandering from place to place, using up time in each country till he can find safe passage to a place he might actually stay in. Statelessness was suddenly a massive problem affecting Jews across the German-speaking world. Jews were increasingly deprived of citizenship, taken in by no one, wandering from border to border,
illegal, hungry, fearing their own incarceration. Erich Marie Remarque wrote a whole forgotten book on the phenomenon—
Flotsam
, on the unlucky ones (in his book, they are not only Jews) shunted across borders, never taken in, doomed to wander just like their stereotypes. The book appeared before things turned even darker; it was 1939 and the characters of Remarque’s imagination consider Paris. And Mexico. Valy does not immediately consider traveling toward France or South America; she wants only to meet my grandfather in New York. Her mother suggests Palestine; Valy doesn’t want that either.

The week Valy’s letter was sent, Chamberlain flew to visit Hitler. “
The Third Reich will win again—whether by bluff or by force,” wrote Dresden diarist Victor Klemperer on the twentieth of September. So: poor Valy. Only months after she is out of suffocating Vienna, and days after her lover has fled the Continent, her hometown is handed to Hitler; the Munich agreement gives him Sudetenland, and thousands of Jews flee into the Czech interior. But not Valy and her mother; they stay, with her mother’s shop, with their smothering surroundings. Even as early as September 1938, the small towns were oppressive for Jews. It got worse and worse. Kristallnacht was particularly brutal in the Sudetenland, an eager proof to the Nazi government that the newest citizens cheered the Nazis’ racialized violence: that night Troppau’s gorgeous synagogue burned, the fire department stood back, keeping the crowds, and the lifesaving water, at bay. Almost every synagogue, for miles around, was turned to ash.