Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (34 page)

As you will see from the attached letter, she is inquiring about your well being; it is difficult to imagine that it is exactly only your letters that do get lost. . . .

Let me ask you to write her a few lines (surely you will be able to spare a few minutes of your time). I am convinced that you, too, do not approve of your own writing hiatuses. . . .

Best regards to you and your dear mother.

Your Julius

The letter included was the following:

Dr. Julius Flamm
522 W. 112 St. Apt. 41
N.Y.C.

From: Toni Sara Scheftel,
Babelsberg [Valy’s mother, though Valy is the author]
1, Bergstrasse Babelsberg, 07-27-41

My beloved Little Uncle [in Yiddish, Onkele]
and dearest Rozia,

We were overjoyed to hear from you and, in particular, to learn that you, dearest Rozia, are completely restored to good health. We were also terribly pleased to receive the greetings of Isiu Mann and Dr. Friedmann. We were so happy, but especially that you all live close to each other and manage to get together from time to time. I wonder whether a “half nine” will ever be possible again? I fear not, for a long time to come. Chances of emigration are, for the time being, almost nil. You cannot imagine how sad and disappointing this is for us. Supposedly, the entire immigration/emigration matter is now to be processed from Washington, and one would need people who are able to deal extensively with this issue and who also are in a position to make financial sacrifices. If you should be able at all to intervene in this regard with Dr. Feldschuh or if you could gain the interest of other people to do so, please do so. I cannot express how much we would love to be with you. Please let us know if there is anything you can do.

For the time being, we are doing relatively well. My mama continues to work very hard—but she does love it—and very successfully and with a lot of recognition, in her home; it is a “home” in the truest sense of the word. Not only for the patients and me, but also for many different people who find peace, quiet, hospitality and a loving reception here for many days. Two ladies from the RV [Reichsvereinigung] are, for example, spending their holidays with us and are extremely delighted and happy here.

For the past 6 weeks or so I am working in a large home for children and infants, functioning as both nurse and doctor. I have to take care of a ward with 4 children and, in addition, to discharge all medical duties. There is really a lot to do, but I am extremely happy to do it, and I am so fortunate to have this job. Unfortunately, the end is in sight, however, as we must leave the home. I do not know yet when this will happen and what will follow thereafter. My superior, who also was my boss at the Children’s Ward, continues to try very hard to retain me in the medical field. I am so grateful to him. Hopefully, it will also be possible in the future. I really do like my work; my children are so, so cute and I have become an almost perfect infant nurse. What I thought impossible in the past, namely to be able to keep a ward clean and orderly all by myself, I am now managing quite well; my dear mama is overjoyed that I, as a consequence, am becoming familiar with some housework and thus will become somewhat “domesticated.”

Let me close for now. . . .

Please also write to Karl on occasion and find out a little more about how he is doing, what he is up to and let me know. It should really be possible to find out what is going on with him.—And now, let me close, finally!

Thousands and thousands of warmest regards and kisses.
Your Valy

Please write to us very soon!

My dear Ones:

Valy has written everything already that is worth knowing. Let me ask you from the bottom of my heart, as well, not to leave any stone unturned to try and help. . . .

I will write more very soon. Please give my warm regards to Dr. Friedmann.

Toni.

Between this letter and the next, Valy’s angriest, most bitter, something finally gives.

To:
Dr. Ch. J. Wildman
St. Luke’s Hospital
Pittsfield, Mass. U.S.A.

From:
Dr. Valy Sara Scheftel
Potsdam—Babelsberg 2
1, Bergstrasse

09-03-41

Tell me, Karl, what is going on? Who am I to believe? You and my notions of you as my friend, my companion,
the
man, the most important person in my life, who will remain as such even though he may, in the firm confidence of my deep bond with him, not bother with me for a long time, for whatever reason? There may be so very many different reasons and I can understand them all. Or should I believe the people around me who keep telling me that your silence could have only one reason, namely that you have forgotten me a long time ago and probably even married and—that I simply
cannot
fathom—did not even think it necessary to tell me about it. One of them, however, is not all that convinced, although he, logically speaking, should be convinced, as he says. He thinks—forgive me, if this sounds somewhat vainglorious—that you are
my
friend and therefore incapable of acting in this manner.

Karl, I ask that
you
tell me what I should believe. I beg you to finally wake up and remember and understand that it is simply intolerable for me to live in this state of uncertainty. Do tell me everything. Do not let yourself be influenced by pity, nor by a temporary situation or fleeting mood that may pass. Only do write to me and don’t let me believe that I meant so little to you that it is unnecessary to let me share what is happening in your life. Karl,
where
are you?! I beg you to write to me and let me know.

I don’t want to write anymore today. Not today and not again—until I have news from you. Maybe these letters make you tired?! And I
must
know first how things are with you!

Farewell! I am forever
your
Valy

This—this last missive—this seems to have done something. The response her threat to stop writing inspires is the only response I have in all of my grandfather’s papers; it is a draft of the letter he sends back to her, handwritten, complete with cross-outs and false starts:

09-17-1941

My only beloved!

How can I explain that I did not answer your letters?
Your letters! Your sacred letters!

Beloved, I believe that you once read a book that begins with the words: “I want to write of a generation that was destroyed by war, although it may have escaped its cannons” and want to refer to this book. This is the only explanation I can give you.—I am dead because I have died—mentally and morally. I cannot remember having laughed even once during the past three years.

Shall I tell you that I have been terribly busy? Surely, I was terribly busy, but is this a reason for not writing to you?

Shall I tell you that I had so many cares and worries that I did not find the calm and concentration to write to you? Certainly, this is true as well, but is it a good reason?

Shall I tell you that I no longer love you enough in order to write to you? How could I when I feel every moment of my life how much I miss you, how much I long for you, how dear you are to me, how much I need you—your words, your laughter and your tears
your hot temper
, the inspiration of your great good and innocent character. . . . When you come here, little one, you will meet so many friends whom you haven’t met before and who have not seen you before, but know you so well through my talking of you, dearest one. . . .

Why did you not threaten earlier that you would not write to me any longer? I think, it is your fault!

Darling girl, I have not neglected anything regarding your immigration, nothing at all, and I am taking all possible steps to speed up the matter.
I have just received a letter from Isiu (??) and shall reply immediately.

I am a very successful physician. I have two practices, one in Pittsfield, and one in a smaller town nearby. . . . I see ca. 25–35 patients on a daily basis, I have two
assistants
secretaries; but, my little one, I am not happy at all!
I certainly did have girlfriends and more or less serious relationships.

Darling, will you answer right away? Please write immediately and I will write to you, every time and immediately, about everything you want to know.

Beloved, I kiss you a thousand times
Karl

He is, to put it kindly, telling only part of his story. He certainly has had girlfriends. Two who were quite serious—there was Tonya Morganstern Warner, in those early days in the United States. And then he met my grandmother, Dorothy, whom he would marry in the fall of 1942—surely there were others, but those are the ones I know of. Does he love Valy? I think he does. I think she was the love of his youth, the love of his Vienna years, the years that shaped him, and he loves her as much for what she stands for as for who she is. But his inability to get her out of the Reich makes her also a source of pain, of guilt, and this makes it hard for him to know how to relate, let alone how to write, to her. What will he say, after all? That he went boating with the woman who would become my grandmother? Or that he is worried about not bringing in enough money from one month to the next? By now he knows it does not compare to what she is facing.

So he doesn’t share his women, or his real woes, with Valy. Why? Does he want Valy to keep her hopes up? To keep believing in something? He is not lying—he has done everything he could do to aid her emigration—but he hadn’t the money or the connections he needed early enough. The one window of opportunity—if it even was that—for the hundred-fifty-dollar visas, twice over, to Chile came in 1940, at a time he could not afford his own rent, when his mother was selling her last possessions. He may be established, finally—but barely. And by 1941, connections and money simply weren’t enough. It doesn’t matter—the letter he sends picks her up, lifts her spirits. At her worst moment, so far, it gives her hope.

There’s not much to be hopeful for. Though the refugees have advocates in Washington—James McDonald and Rabbi Stephen Wise met with FDR the first week of September—their detractors prevail. Breckinridge Long wrote in his diary on September 4, “
Rabbi Wise always assumes such a sanctimonious air and pleads for the ‘intellectuals and brave spirits, refugees from the tortures of the dictators’ or words to that effect. . . . Of course only an infinitesimal fraction of
the immigrants are of that category.” Soon the visa wranglings in Washington are no longer the problem: the Nazis substitute forced retention for expulsion.

On the first of September, 1941, Valy is forced to sew a yellow star to her coat and clothing, to stitch it carefully, to ensure it was not obscured, and that it would not fall off. A hidden star was considered sabotage, grounds for arrest. No longer could she walk unimpeded; she was now marked. Jews were being picked up in the streets. There is panic everywhere.

Tuesday evening, September 30, as they had for centuries Jews began to celebrate Yom Kippur with the Kol Nidre service.

It would be the last Yom Kippur celebrated aboveground. Hundreds gathered at the
Levetzowstrasse Synagogue in the Charlottenburg district of western Berlin, words from Isaiah were carved in Hebrew over the doorway: “O, House of Jacob, Come ye, and let us walk in the light of the lord.” At the end of the services, the Gestapo confiscated the synagogue and turned it from a place of refuge and worship into a place of devastation and horror: a transit camp.

No longer was Germany interested in simply expelling Jews to other lands, now German Jewry would be forcibly relocated to the east. October 1941 began a push into ghettos, into an impoverished, bare existence that would make the deprivations experienced thus far seem almost minor in comparison. The east was something fearsome. The Warsaw Ghetto had already been open for a year; in the fall of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen, the special mobile military killing units, were endlessly mowing down Jews in Russia and across the Ukraine, in what would, decades later, come to be called in French the
shoah par balles
—the Holocaust of bullets. Vans retrofitted to pump exhaust inside, rather than out, pulled the breath from groups of Jews stuffed inside. German soldiers on leave were told not to speak of what they
witnessed, but some did: the black stories then trickled into the Jewish community. Rumors abounded.