Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (24 page)

But Valy doesn’t speak of motherhood in part because she is still more engaged with her role as a daughter. Valy leaves her mother in Troppau while Toni grapples with the forced closing of her business, to see if—away from the stifling, virulent, small-town racism that had engulfed them since Valy returned from studying in Vienna—the two women will find a path to emigration together in Berlin. With her mother’s source of income taken over by the Gestapo, Valy now needs to find work, to support them both. All around her, the once-affluent Jewish community is disintegrating—from 1933 to 1939, the Jewish population of Berlin halved, from 160,000 to 80,000 Jews; those who are not able to leave are progressively, purposely, poverty-stricken.

It is mid-1939 and, outside the Jewish community, there is virtually no work available to Valy; she and her mother are teetering on destitution. They are in good company. Factory owners and businessmen have been forced to give up their businesses, or sell at purposely ludicrous fire-sale prices—even the wealthiest soon have little to nothing, their assets tied up in blocked bank accounts, their meager stores of cash left to ransom themselves or their family members, if they are lucky. There is no social safety net left for Jews—they have been stripped from the rolls of welfare, even as the number of Jews needing welfare climbs higher by the day; about one in three German Jews will need assistance by the time Valy arrives in Berlin.

Valy registers with, and begins to work for, the Reich’s main organization for Jews—the Reichsvereinigung. This wasn’t simply smart; it was compulsory. Work was the only way to scrape together funds for day-to-day life, and registration with the community was mandatory (eventually this would be a helpful way of organizing the Jewish community for deportation). By the end of the 1930s, over a third of Jewish social welfare institutions had been shuttered because of lack of funds, lack of staff, or by police—and the Reichsvereinigung was
scrambling to staff up the remaining Jewish institutions serving the poor, the elderly, the youngest, the ill.
Before my grandfather had even left Europe, some sixty thousand Jews were out of work, but there was a need for women like Valy, for nurses and caregivers and doctors and those who could take over old-age homes and kindergartens.

Valy in Berlin. The photo was enclosed in a letter dated August 8, 1940.

Though the Reichsvereinigung was formed officially in 1939, and was, by then, controlled by the Gestapo, the bones of the organization had been created by the community itself; the structure dated back to Hitler’s takeover in 1933. The first incarnation was known as the Reichsvertretung, and it gave the diverse Jewish community a loosely unifying structure in which to pursue emigration out of Germany, and to lobby for the needs of the community with the Nazi leadership. Its leader was Rabbi Leo Baeck. His, and the organization’s, independence was increasingly compromised, until the original body was ostensibly dissolved and then reformed as the Reichsvereinigung, at the behest of the Gestapo. (Confusingly, Baeck remained the head of the organization, many of the leaders remained the same, and, similarly, the Reichsvereinigung’s putative raison d’être remained getting Jews out of the Reich, though it did so with far less agency and mobility, constrained by the ever more oppressive regime.)

So the new organization that Valy joined, the Reichsvereinigung, served both the Jewish community (for good, mostly, as much as it
could, trying to reorganize and keep fed and clothed a steadily more destitute Jewish community) and the Gestapo (first by pushing Jews to emigrate and, later, by organizing deportations). Early on, Valy was assigned to work with children and to teach in what was called the Kindergartenseminar, one of the last ways for young Jewish women to find an education and certification that (they believed) was transferrable, even useful, should they secure a job and a visa to go abroad. As anxious as Valy was to get out of Germany, the seminar was an oasis in an ever more worried city, a source of intellectual stimulation, of a (Jewish) social life. She was, at first, not terribly unhappy:

August 3, 1939

My Darling,

For such a terribly long time I’ve wanted to write you, and it was so totally impossible until today—and actually it’s impossible today too, because in a moment the children will be awake, they’ll cry and ask for their “Auntie Doctor,” and they’ll need to be washed, dressed, tended to, and supervised; they need me so badly to play, to pester, to not-obey, and to love. You see, I’m employed—really employed, Darling (me!!) and I’m earning money (!) (50RM [Reichsmark] plus board and lodging); I’m in a training college for kindergarten teachers, where some children (the number changes, at the moment there are 6) are housed as well! I’m with these children right now, and in addition I’m in charge of the trainees; they’re young girls from the big city, exuberant, sassy, in some cases very smart (in some cases not so smart!), who naturally don’t have a glimmer of respect for me and do whatever they want to. A few of them are nice and smart and don’t exploit the friendly relationship that I emphasized right at the outset (to my great disadvantage). But most of them do! And they honestly try to prevent me from “being happy” here. But on the whole, things are wonderful for me here (relatively speaking, of course!). We live in a gorgeous mansion in Grunewald [an upper-class Berlin neighborhood], with a garden, balconies and all the trimmings. I have a small, very charming (at noon, very (!) hot!!) attic room with such a lovely, charming, peaceful view over the treetops and mansion roofs. I greatly enjoy sitting at this window! And dreaming. And I so enjoy dreaming, only I have so very little time to do so!

Valy’s school was at Wangenheimstrasse 36, a stately villa in a neighborhood of villas in the lush Grunewald neighborhood deep in the far western half of Berlin. I take two overland S-Bahn trains out to this edge of the city and wander the streets until I find it. There are mansions all around, most built at the turn of the last century. But “36,” when I find it, looks all wrong. It doesn’t seem terribly old and I cannot tell if it is the right address—hers was supposed to have been built in 1909—but there is no one to ask, on the street, or around the building. On a Sunday, this suburb-within-the-city is leafy and green, and totally bereft of foot traffic. It might be that it is one of the grand houses across the street, one with turrets and small attic rooms, as Valy and others who recalled the seminar described. Though number 36 looks as though it may have been torn down and rebuilt, the rest of the area looks as though it has not changed at all since the turn of the last century. But I don’t know. There are no markers, no suggestions of the upheaval witnessed here. I linger as long as I can, wondering if anyone knows that this neighborhood was where Jewish girls came for their last hope of a good education as the 1930s drew to a close. Some long suburban blocks away, there is a small café where I order tea and
Käsekuchen
. But the waitress there appears to be in her twenties; she has no idea what the neighborhood once held.

The coordinators of Valy’s school, the rank and file of the prominent Jews remaining in Berlin, morphed into a new role as 1938 turned to 1939. With so many new regulations, there was a need for an
interlocutor between Jews and the Reich leadership—so that Jews would understand how to navigate those rules, and know how to remain on the right side of the ever-shifting bounds of the law. The Reichsvereinigung filled that role, too. As I stir my tea and look out over this calm suburb, I wonder if Valy knew that, when she took her position at the seminar.

When Valy came to live in Grunewald, more and more indigent people were on the streets of Berlin; the desperation for emigration was becoming ever more frantic, as the funds necessary to leave were elusive, nearly impossible to come by—for tickets, of course, but also for the onerous system of fleecing and “taxation” imposed upon Jews who wanted to flee. Unfortunately for Valy,
women were often seen as having needs secondary to those of men, as men had already experienced the brutalities of camps like Dachau and Sachsenhausen, where some thirty thousand were sent during the widespread pogroms of Kristallnacht. There was some trepidation about letting women leave alone, that they wouldn’t be able to provide for themselves, or live honorably. Men were privileged with the chance to leave first.

“
The emigration problem demanded our greatest labors,” wrote Alfred Schwerin in 1944, after his escape to Basel, Switzerland, in a manuscript published, in part, in the book
Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries
. Schwerin, a Reichsvereinigung worker, had himself been sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht, though he was released within a few months. “We registered children and adults with the emigration aid agencies, filled out the endless questionnaires, wrote testimonials, and took care of providing funds for the journey and the purchases needed for it. This often entailed quite considerable sums. . . . The Reichsvereinigung did not approve immediately and readily, because it wanted to help as many people as possible and tried to avoid spending too great an amount for any one person.” Jews lingering in the Reich made the Nazi authorities angry; yet as angry as the delay in expelling the population made them, they did everything they could to make the process of emigration arduous, ruining, demoralizing.

The
Kindergartenseminar at Wangenheimstrasse opened in 1934, the brainchild of the women of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (
the League of Jewish Women, a remarkable feminist organization that lobbied for women’s suffrage and against prostitution before 1933; after the anti-Jewish laws came into effect, it became an advocate for Jewish women in the Reich) and the Reichsvertretung—the earlier representative body of Jews of the Reich. The idea was a school to train teachers, a place where girls could go after high school, or even just before graduation, and receive an education in pedagogy. It remained open as Jews were dismissed from all other areas of Aryan life. Students studied education theory, psychology, history, literature—as well as hygiene, civics, “gymnastics,” drawing, and music. There was also Hebrew, Judaism, and Jewish history.

Marianne Strauss was nearly sixteen and among the youngest of some thirty girls when she enrolled at the Kindergartenseminar in April 1939. Wangenheimstrasse 36, she told historian Mark Roseman, whose book about Strauss’s astonishing underground life is called
A Past in Hiding
, was a “very good address, like The Bishops Avenue,” in the Hampstead Heath neighborhood in London, “enormous, with I don’t know how many really splendid 1920s [era] bathrooms.” The building, previously the home of a Jewish banker, had been donated for use by the Jewish community in the mid-1930s. Number 36 housed the Seminar as well as a boardinghouse with space, at the outset, for fifteen girls and women who had come from other parts of the Reich. Strauss told Roseman that that attic room—perhaps the very one Valy claimed for herself—for a time, was the “plum,” the room everyone wanted, tiny, but with a fantastic view down Wangenheimstrasse through one window, and Lynarstrasse through the other.

Writes Roseman, “The elimination of opportunities elsewhere”—the closing of doors to Jews across the Reich and into Austria—“was a boon for the school as a glittering array of intellectuals and inspired teachers had joined the teaching staff. Aware that in different circumstances many of the students would have sought a more academic
education, the college offered a far more intellectual and wide-ranging course than was usual for kindergarten teachers.” Rabbi Leo Baeck, the head of the Reichsvereinigung, was on the school’s board.

The Jewish community of Berlin provided not just education but also social and cultural services. With an eye to the needs of a people accustomed to steeping in opera and art, plays and concerts were arranged by the Jüdischer Kulturbund, employing the suddenly out-of-work Jewish actors and musicians in the big cities; tours were set up for the areas beyond.
Only works by Jews could be performed, and each performance was vetted by Nazi henchmen; the Gestapo attended each event. The image is bizarre; I daydream about a room full of once-prominent Jews, a nefarious character in the back, out of
Indiana Jones
, taking notes in a small leather-bound notebook with a silver pen, a swastika armband gleaming in the darkened theater. These performances kept the girls of Wangenheimstrasse 36 culturally engaged for as long as they were allowed. The Kulturbund was dissolved in 1941, well after Valy had left the Kindergartenseminar.