Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (37 page)

11-17-41

My beloved, now I have been writing a letter to you every weekend for the past six weekends. What do you think of this veritable letter barrage?! It’s kind of strange to be writing letters, one after the other, without knowing how you are reacting to each of them.

I wonder how much longer I will be writing like this “into the blue”?!—You know, darling,
when I am asking why a cruel destiny has separated me from you, I keep thinking that maybe the purpose of our separation is for us to become mature enough for each other, so that our togetherness will not be trite or banal, matter-of-course like, that missing each other will show us how much we really mean to one another. I, at least, do know how much you mean to me and that being together with you will be an unending feast day to me. . . . Only, I don’t know when that will be.

Dearest one, do write to me! Can it really be possible that you do not write at all? I implore you to make Cuba possible. Dr. Friedmann will help financially. A couple of days ago, a notice arrived for RM [Reichsmark] 22.00 with Carl Feldschuh, Brooklyn, as the sender. What is to happen with that money?

We are doing well, considering our circumstances. There is much work to be done, but we do it gladly. During my leisure hours I read and—now you surely are going to laugh—study “Handwriting and Character” by Ludwig Klages. This is a very interesting, yet rather dry and difficult book that requires a lot of concentration. And that’s good.

Darling, I have to see to my patient now. He rang for me and therefore I am quickly sending you many kisses.

Your Valy

Again, here is the address of Ms. Schnell who got a Cuban visa for her sister and who might be able to advise you as she by now knows all the ins and outs.

Ruth Schnell

1002 East 17th Street

Brooklyn, N. Y.

And then, suddenly: silence. My letters—her letters—end abruptly. After Pearl Harbor, when the United States enters the war, communication between Germany and the United States comes to a halt.

I wonder if I will ever find out anything more about where Valy went after November 17, 1941. Did she hide? Did she go underground? Or try? How hard was it to do?

Eight

B
URGFRÄULEIN

A
fter the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States entered the war, it became all but impossible to send letters between Germany and the United States. “Some tried [to write], via Switzerland,” Barbara Scheib tells me; Scheib is a researcher of quiet do-gooders, the Germans who helped, those who fed the Jews who went underground, or who hid Jews, or who found Jews hiding places—those we commonly call “the Righteous.” Mail service, she explains, along with borders and diplomatic relations, was cut off. We are sitting in the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand—the memorial to Nazi resistance, on the street named for Claus von Stauffenberg, the German army officer who was part of the plot attempt to assassinate Hitler toward the end of the war; it is the very building occupied by the German High Command during World War II. The building was preserved and it still feels, vaguely, like walking onto the set of a Nazi film, but creepier, as it is real.

Scheib and her colleague Dr. Beate Kosmala spent years working on the Silent Heroes Memorial, a project devoted to those who hid or assisted Jews in hiding. The women are of a certain type, not quite as
old as my mother, but closer to her generation than mine; this material is the work of looking into their own parents’ generation. Kosmala is blond and bespectacled, she walks lightly, speaks softly; her presence is unobtrusive to the point of nearly being absent. Scheib wears her dark hair short, with blunt-cut bangs. They both wear tasteful silk scarves. It is a contrast, their work, with the building we meet in—the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand is all about the big stories, heroic tales of high-ranking military brass, aristocrats, diplomats (all men), many of them disappointed Nazis, most of them anti-Semites, who tried to kill Hitler in a coup on July 20, 1944. Scheib and Kosmala are more concerned with the silent heroism of “ordinary Germans,” the quiet righteous, who were just as often women.

“In the end,” Scheib continues, “post was only possible through the International Red Cross. Only twenty-five words were allowed. It is a poem.” Even “Aryan” Germans were annoyed by the difficulty in communicating with friends and family abroad after the war began, she says. I ask about telephone calls and they both, vehemently, shake their heads. It was prohibitively expensive to call internationally, for one, but price was secondary: Jews had been barred from owning or using phones for some time. Telegrams, too, were dearly priced. Charged letter by letter, the telegram Valy sent in the spring of 1941 would have cost her nearly a month’s salary. When I look at the telegram again, I notice something I’d overlooked before: at the bottom are the words
Hilfsverein
,
Tzedakah
—a likely reference to the Reichsvereinigung’s emigration department.
The Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden was an organization created at the turn of the twentieth century to help poor and persecuted Eastern Jews who arrived in Germany escaping eastern pogroms—
Hilfe
means “help.” But by the early 1930s, it was helping German Jews to emigrate, providing subsidies for tickets, and paying for everything that led up to getting passage to another—safer—country. The organization aided some ninety thousand Jews in fleeing the Reich; eventually its work was folded into the Reichsvereinigung. Valy’s Uncle Julius mentions it in one of his
missives, in 1940, when he and my grandfather were hoping to get the women visas to Chile. By 1941, charity was needed not just for tickets, but also to send a simple telegram. The desperation was that great, the need that strong.

Kosmala and Scheib tell me that while we—we Jews; we Americans; we American Jews—are obsessed with the who, how, and why of going into hiding, Germans have a flip side to that: the who, how, and why of
helping
;
of eluding the system, fighting Nazism from within, of simply aiding those underground. Kosmala and Scheib want to explode the myth that it was impossible to do so, that repression was so great, the consequences so dire, that it was life threatening to step forward on behalf of Jewish neighbors. In fact, there were not always mortal consequences to aiding Jews; whereas in Poland those who aided Jews were shot, in Germany some of those who assisted their Jewish neighbors were sometimes barely punished at all. But the fear of punishment was enough to keep many out of the business of aiding their former neighbors.

At the same time, Scheib and Kosmala are quite clear that they don’t want anyone left with the impression that a large percentage of the population helped—Silent Heroes is not only a project of unearthing the righteous, but also exposing the casual cruelty of bystanders who assumed helping was out of the question. Nor do they want anyone to believe that those Jews who did survive did not suffer. Indeed, they were often the worst off, psychologically, once they emerged and realized they were totally and completely alone in the world. Nor, as well, do they want me to believe it was easy for those who managed to slip into the underground system to survive day to day, let alone until the end of the war. This last, they emphasize, is important in the case of Valy. Who would have been her support, after all, given that she was a newcomer to Berlin? Who would have come to her defense, given how often she moved and how shallow her roots? Often those below ground were aided by a dozen or more people. Whom did Valy have in this cold, frantic city?

As 1941 turned into 1942, the deportations to the east picked up pace and cruelty. But first the German manufacturing world used this slave labor, drove it into the ground, complained that this skilled labor force, so cheaply acquired, so annoying to lose, was necessary. With deportations increasing in frequency, more and more people considered hiding.

For those who were successful in going underground, the stories highlighted in the Silent Heroes memorial are not remotely, let alone universally, happy. Like Alice Lowenstein, who went from hiding place to hiding place with her two daughters, aged four and six, in an exhausting run made more so by her younger girl, who had a dangerous habit of telling strangers about the men who had come to take away her father. Alice decided to get the girls as far from Berlin as she could, and in 1944, she finally found them a place on a farm, in Weimar, about 175 miles southwest of Berlin. Alice was able to write to her children for some time, but then the war and the world began to disintegrate around her and services like the mail no longer functioned; for six months or so, there was no correspondence. Alice didn’t know it, but during that time the girls were denounced and the Gestapo brought them back to Berlin, back to their original home, to determine if the kids were Jews. All the tenants in their old building said they did not know the girls; that is, until the
Hausmeister
, the building superintendent, ran after the Gestapo to confirm: these girls were Jewish. With that, the Lowenstein girls were sent to Auschwitz, just months before the war ended. When their mother came to claim them, she discovered, instead, that they had been murdered.

And yet, as wrenching as Lowenstein’s story is, as crushing as it reads even just on paper, her experience is considered a success. And therein lies the complexity and incomprehensibility of survival. Thousands tried to do what Alice did. Of half a million Jews living in Germany at the beginning of the war,
some 270,000 to 300,000 were able to emigrate. About 180,000 Jews were deported from Germany; the remaining 15,000 or so included those in mixed-race relationships
who were “protected” from immediate deportation to the ghettos and camps of the east. In Berlin itself, once a thriving center with some 160,000 Jews, some 5,000 to 7,000 Jews went into hiding and about 1,400 survived. When we think of the millions dead, of course, we include the swath of east and south—Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Greece. But Germany itself, the heart of the Reich, had, ironically, far fewer Jews at the outset.

But before I continue to investigate what happened to those who ducked beneath the waters of legitimacy, disappearing in plain sight to blend into the world around them, those who were able to survive despite losing food rations, and beds, and family members, before I can dig deeper to see if Valy was among those illegals, before I can even ask how she might have been a part of that system and what it would have taken to survive under false identity, I am still wondering about those last years aboveground. Especially for those who, like Valy and her mother, worked for the Reichsvereinigung—work which, for a time, protected its workers.

Endlessly bothering me was this: I knew that, like many women her age, Valy did not try to flee immediately. Instead, she remained in Europe, largely, I suspected, for her mother—whose name, at first, when I found Valy’s letters, I did not know, and whose life, at first, I had no clue how to penetrate beyond the small details. Unlike Valy, after all, I didn’t have her mother’s testimony. Over time I gathered pieces: she had been a young mother when her marriage dissolved, and then a successful businesswoman, and later the competent, caring manager of an old-age home. Perhaps, I thought, if I knew more about her, I could better understand Valy’s motivations, better know Valy’s story. Her name, at least in Valy’s letters, was “Toni.” It was clearly a nickname. It got me nowhere in official databases of the dead.

In the Yad Vashem victim database, there are 177 names of the murdered that are linked, in one way or another, with the surname
Scheftel: there are alternative spellings, two
f
’s, an
a
instead of an
e
; there are children, including one born in 1940; there are the elderly. But as, finally, I turned my focus to Toni, I kept coming back to one listing: Hanna T. Scheftel, born on December 27, 1885, in Borszczow, Poland, and deported on March 12, 1943, to Auschwitz, on the 36th Ost (East) transport, from Berlin. The age of this Scheftel seemed closest to correct, and though she was deported from Berlin, not Babelsberg or Potsdam, she seemed the most likely to be the woman I wanted to know more about.

In the
Gedenkbuch Berlins: Der Jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus
—the remembrance book of the murdered Jews of Berlin—there she was again, Hanna Scheftel, née Flamm. Flamm! This was the same last name as the “Uncle” Julius writing to my grandfather. This must be her. Still, there were no clues about who she really was, let alone whether she was the woman I truly sought, how she went from Troppau to Potsdam to Berlin—and how she avoided the deportations from her own old-age home in January 1943. I wrote once more to the ITS archives at Bad Arolsen, requesting any files they might have on this Hanna or Channa Scheftel. Within a few days, I receive an e-mail with these details: “SCHEFTEL née FLAMM, Chana, born on 27.12.1885, last address: Berlin N 4, Auguststrasse 14/16.” (This building, I knew, had long been controlled by the Jewish community of Berlin, and hosted various social service agencies.) “Deported from Berlin to Concentration Camp Auschwitz by the ‘Geheime Staatspolizei [Gestapo] Berlin.’ Category: ‘Jüdin’ [Jewess].”