Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (33 page)

I contact Professor Richard Breitman at American University; he has spent years unpacking how the U.S. State Department and the Roosevelt administration handled the question of would-be Jewish emigrants into America. Breitman patiently walks me through the policies that left many visa quotas undersubscribed and many would-be refugees trapped. Then he recommends I go further and match my grandfather’s and Valy’s efforts with the documents he collected while working on several of the books he has coedited; these cover the diaries and papers of
James G. McDonald, who served as high commissioner for refugees to the League of Nations and then as a leader of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees. McDonald was an early, vocal, and often lonely advocate in Washington on behalf of those caught in the maw of the Reich.

Already in June 1940, I discover, the U.S. State Department had cracked down on visas: factions in the State Department and consular systems were convinced would-be refugees were just as likely to be potential spies and fifth column infiltrators as genuinely persecuted
victims of Hitler’s policies. Consulates were advised to assure Washington they had “no doubt whatsoever concerning the alien.”

Advising the Roosevelt administration in Washington were two wildly conflicting points of view—that of those who shared the pro-refugee sympathies of James McDonald, and that of those who believed the entire idea of refugee desperation was a sham, a means of infiltrating the United States, of using humanitarian efforts as a path to overthrow democracy. In the latter camp fell Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, Avra Warren, head of the Visas Division, and, unfortunately, the ambassador to the Soviet Union, Laurence Steinhardt, whose own Jewish identity was often trotted out as a proof of sorts, verification that the Jews trying to leave Europe were swindlers because if he, as a Jew, believed it, then it must be so. (Steinhardt would later have a change of heart about his Jewish cousins; as ambassador to Turkey, his post after Moscow, he helped save thousands of Balkan Jews who fled in the direction of Istanbul.)

Breckinridge Long outlined a way for the State Department to stop the already very slow flow of immigrants. “
We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States,” Long wrote. “We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.” In August 1940, a representative of the American Friends Service Committee in Vienna had already written, “There is absolutely no chance for
anyone
, except in most unusual cases. FDR doesn’t want any more aliens from Europe—refugees have been implicated in espionage. . . . All part of the spy hysteria . . . Day after day, men and women just sat at my desk and sobbed. They are caught and crushed, and they know it.” The following month, James G. McDonald wrote, “Unfortunately the prospect of anyone being admitted at the present time to this country, who cannot prove that he is an eminent scholar or distinguished labor leader and is in imminent danger, is very slight.”

The internal State Department directives purposely produced confusion, and massive delays. By the time Valy is writing in mid-1941, no clear path had been drawn for those attempting to flee persecution from Germany or occupied countries; consulates were willy-nilly asking for extras in the means of guarantees needed to be presented by anxious would-be immigrants (trust funds, guarantors in the United States), and there were so many obstacles thrown up for German nationals that between July 1, 1940, and March 31, 1941, the full immigration quota for Germany—27,370—did not come close to being met: only 2,126 visas were issued from Germany itself. For Germans already outside Germany—that is, German nationals who had made it to a second or third or fourth country—an additional 10,020 visas were granted. But Valy, of course, is still inside the Reich.

The visa was not the only additional hurdle. Eleanor Roosevelt’s secretary, Malvina Thompson, wrote to James McDonald on February 3, 1941, echoing some of Valy’s concerns: Even if they had a visa, how the hell did refugees get passage across? Through Sweden? Spain? Portugal? Morocco? By May, McDonald wrote, discouraged, to the acting governor of the Virgin Islands, “In fact, after an American visa has been granted, there will still be the more and more difficult problem of getting transit visas through Spain and Portugal. Then following that, the present facilities for transportation out of the Portuguese capital give no promise of facilities for newcomers within a year and a half or two years. Meanwhile, the boats which formerly cleared intermittently from Marseilles have, with rare exception, discontinued service from that port.”

In June, the cause of stopping the (supposedly nefarious) refugees had been taken up on the floor of the Senate by the severely isolationist senator from North Carolina, Robert Reynolds: “
I wish to say . . . that if I had my way about it at this hour I would today build a wall about the United States so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of this earth could possibly scale or ascend it.” A new obstacle had been raised that month as well, and transit problems were now to be mixed with an additional,
disastrous holdup: anyone with a relative left behind in a totalitarian country was now suspect and would be denied a visa, or find visas they had already been issued suddenly canceled. That meant even if Valy would have been able—let alone willing—to travel out without her mother, they were now forced to travel as a pair: her mother would now be considered a potential means of espionage or blackmail.

On June 19, 1941,
The New York Times
published a front-page story blaring “U.S. Ruling Cuts Off Means of Escape for Many in Reich—Many Visas to Be Voided.” The piece went on to say that American Export, one of the shipping lines out of Lisbon, “has assigned space to alien refugees for sailings from Lisbon well into 1942, and the majority of these prospective passengers may be rejected by United States authorities.” Restrictions would be expected to “increase rather than relax,” and there was no point in searching for additional ships to bring out refugees, as seats on board wouldn’t be filled and “refugees’ prospects, already slender, would be reduced further.”

Editorial pages filled with vitriol, lambasting the new stipulations. In
The New Republic
, editors criticized the State Department for “persecuting the refugee”: “
Bars have now been raised making it almost impossible for political refugees to get out of Europe at all,” they wrote, pointing a finger at “anti-Semitic, and pro-Nazi forces in the State Department,” and went on to accuse the system of becoming needlessly impossible to navigate. “The Department is now demanding proof that the refugee can get an exit permit and a transit visa before it will give an American visa; yet our officials know very well that no papers can be obtained in Europe unless the American visa already exists. People trying to help refugees come out have found it almost impossible to get copies of the new application.” Thousands who might have gotten out to safer shores were denied claim.

Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was tripped up by the same State Department purposeful backlog. From April to December 1941, Frank begged for immigration aid from relatives abroad. The U.S. consulate in the Netherlands was no longer operational—and, like Valy, Otto
Frank tried to see about visas to Cuba, to Spain, to Portugal. On April 30, 1941, around the time of Valy’s telegram to Karl, Mr. Frank wrote to Nathan Straus, Jr., an old university friend and a very wealthy New Yorker. Straus was heir to the Macy’s department store fortune, and director of the New York City Housing Authority. “I would not ask if conditions here would not force me to do all I can in time to be able to avoid worse,” Frank wrote, as
The New York Times
quoted in 2007 after the letters were discovered. “Perhaps you remember that we have two girls. It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance.” Frank’s needs were enormous: five thousand dollars, exit visas from the Netherlands, entrance visas to one of the remaining European countries that still had a consular relationship to the United States—and then passage for every other member of his family so that none could be used to demonstrate the Frank family’s potential to be coerced or co-opted by the enemy. Even knowing some of the most powerful people in the States didn’t help them. The requests were not met. Straus couldn’t do it. Frank briefly procured a Cuban visa—on December 1, 1941—but Pearl Harbor and the escalation of hostilities prompted Cuba to cancel his papers.

Valy’s inability to emigrate and her increasing feeling of abandonment by Karl are tied up together, the failures are intermingled, they cause each other—they diminish her, they snuff out the bits of hope she still holds. She hints that failure may mean failure to see each other ever again, not just a separation of years, but a separation of a lifetime.

July 22, 1941

Dearest boy,

I no longer want to be so small to wait with my letters for your reply, to wait for a response to my questions. I will write to you, as often and as long as I am able to and will keep on telling you that I, despite everything, believe in you and will always believe in you and that I feel, time and time again, that I am your “creature,” now and always.—Maybe you are not even interested in all this right now, but I want you to know it. Maybe you will want to know one day and then it might not be so easy anymore for me to tell you. I am not at all sure why I am thinking of you so much again right now and why I feel that I am one with you. It was not always like that during the interminably long time of our separation. But now it is like that and I feel a great desire to tell you.

These lines are amazing to me. Is she saying goodbye? She seems unsure even to whom she is writing anymore—
“I am not at all sure why I am thinking of you so much again right now.”
It is a heightened version of so many love stories, in normal, less pressured, times: a love affair has ended, but the ghost of the lost person reappears, becomes present again, a triggered memory, a phantom limb of love, that tingles long after the relationship is over. Yet this is what gives me greater pause:
“Maybe you will want to know one day and then it might not be so easy anymore for me to tell you”
—does she mean because she, too, will be sent to the east? Or does she believe, more benignly, that one day she, too, will be in a relationship and, at that point, it will no longer be appropriate to share her feelings?

Above all I want you to know about the man whom I believed I loved, and maybe I even did love. I wrote to you about it in my last letter. You know, that he and I decided to forsake each other out of consideration for his bond with his wife and my relationship with you. It was not always easy for us. There were hours when I thought this was meaningless self-torture, making our poor, joyless lives even poorer and more devoid of joy. And you made it so hard for me to believe in you and in a future together. But maybe you—I—we did remain victorious in the end; and this makes me indescribably happy. And the fact that you remained victorious remains now undisputed!

I simply had to tell you these things, even if you might find them sentimental or uninteresting. I believe that we, or at the very least, I cannot afford to bypass or keep secret matters that concern us deeply.

And now, a brief report:

As far as my work is concerned, I am doing quite well at the moment. I work both as a nurse and as a doctor in a baby home—as a volunteer. I am probably going to write you more about this next time. Now I have to start preparing for the course I will present tomorrow.

Karl, I don’t think I have to tell you how much I am waiting for a letter from you! I no longer can write about this.

Many, many thousand kisses and warm regards to your dear mama.

Your Valy

Valy reaches out to relatives and friends, asking them to intercede on her behalf for emigration—and to shake my grandfather out of his writing torpor. Her Uncle Julius, who was struggling, though safe, in America, wrote to my grandfather in some anger:

New York, August 19, 1941

Karl . . . Assuming that you will be interested to know how our dear Valy is faring, I am attaching her letter. Unfortunately, emigration to the USA is currently out of the question, only to Cuba (ca. $ 1,400 per person including the ship passage). Even though she would love nothing better than to leave this hell, she is unfortunately forced to stay there. I am so sorry that I am unable to find a way out. Hopefully, she will be spared the “Arbeitsdienst” [the Reich Labor Service].