Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (4 page)

The envelopes boasted a philatelist’s dream world of antique foreign stamps, the sheer geographic spread a microcosm of the Holocaust’s atomizing impact: Shanghai, Sydney, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Lyon, Warsaw, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Haifa. Their thin onionskin pages plotted exit strategies, hailed successes, and rued failures. There was gratitude—a thank-you to my grandfather for an affidavit, for medical advice. But more: there were accusations—why wasn’t he rescuing them? Why wasn’t he responding? The accusatory tone, the number of angry letters, rankled. This wasn’t the history I had known. Where was my lucky family? Where was the story of racing to freedom as the doors were slamming shut, rolling under the gates in the nick of time, and pulling everyone along with him? Here instead were notes like this one:

Vienna, June 19, 1941

To Sarah Wildmann [my great-grandmother]
Dear Aunt,

I would again try to write you and my sister and my brother perhaps you would after 2.5 years have some emotions for me. And give me an answer.

It is directly a story from heaven, how you left me behind, ill. You probably know very well—you don’t think about asking us if we are still alive. I am ashamed when other people are asking if I received letters from you to say I haven’t heard anything from you. And I don’t get any sign of life. . . .

The panic, the terror, the anger, and the sheer verbal scrabbling for purchase on the slick wall of Nazi ascendency was so palpable, the sheets of paper themselves seemed to have been handled violently; the ink bleeds through the paper, the pages are crumpled. Here was a world, exploded, over the course of a few months, a collection of people once together who were never again assembled. The letters were as complete a representation of my grandfather’s old life as I could have imagined, and yet, reading them, I realized I had never really imagined what he had left behind at all.

In retrospect, the five who fled together to these shores was an enormous number, and, at the same time, not many at all.

Of course, on some level, I had always known my grandfather’s story couldn’t be neat—that our lives are never neat, never obvious, even when we live in neater times. Of course I had known that there was brutality behind the smooth escape, that nothing was smooth or easy in those years—hadn’t I interviewed dozens of survivors? Hadn’t I spoken to others who fled Vienna embittered by all they had lost, by all they had seen, by all they had experienced? But grandparents—even more than parents—exist only in relation to ourselves when we are young, when, usually, we know them best. Here, in this box, were dimensions upon dimensions of his story, all of which upended for good the easy ways in which I’d categorized my grandfather as a child.

It was the thing I had questioned the least—my family’s successful escape—and it was the thing that changed the most with this discovery. Those letters, dark, angry, dispossessed, seemed to be speaking of
another man, another family entirely. What did Karl think of these letters when he received them? Did he worry? Did he put them aside? Did he mourn? Why had he kept them? And did he believe my American-born grandmother would have been—what? Jealous of the experience she did not share?

Who were these people in the box, writing and writing and writing, these close friends, these schoolmates, these relatives,
my
relatives, who’d reached out to my grandfather once he had sailed to safety? Had he tried to help? Or had he spent his life in America burying a past he was ashamed of, or felt guilty about? Had he, with great effort and remorse, set himself to forever look forward and never back, and in that way, and only that way, was he able to go on? Or had he accepted that he had saved whom he could, more, in fact, than was even likely, and that those who had been left behind were not abandoned by him but by their governments, by their nations, by the world?

Either way, what the box showed me didn’t square easily with his public persona—which was one of luck and joy and endless good cheer. His photos are cocky and insouciant; he looks, at times, like he is running for office. But this is uncharitable. As I researched his story, and the history of those he had left behind, I came to understand it was not fake, his happiness, his outlook. It was not a veneer. It was the very thing that kept him alive.

That first night, spreading the letters out on my parents’ dining room table, I pulled out a folded, crumbling, yellow piece of paper. “Dr. Valerie Scheftel born 4 November 1911” was typed at the top, along with an address outside Berlin: “Bergstrasse 1. Potsdam.” Below that, my grandfather’s office address, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It was dated 1943. Stapled to the top corner was a small square of white paper, with my grandfather’s scrawl.
VALY
was written across the top and, beneath it,
HIAS
,
the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, an organization, I knew, that helped Jews immigrate, and that later searched for survivors and tried to arrange family reunifications.

Two photos emerged out of another envelope. They were staged
for a photographer. The woman in them was clear-faced and smiling slightly, a modest gap between her front teeth, hair cut at her jawline, wavy and thick. Her eyes, in one, looked directly at the camera, under thin, natural eyebrows; she had on what appeared to be a nurse’s cap. She wore no make-up, no jewelry, had none of the overly stylized look of other women’s photos of the era, and yet had clearly taken care with her appearance. In the second photo, she was bareheaded, looking into the corner away from the camera, her eyes creased like she’d been told a joke. She looked lovely, pretty, without affect, without adornment.

Then a letter:

Berlin, July 6, 1940

My beloved only one, my boy!

You will be with me in this world! This one sentence in your last letter stays with me all the time, wherever I am; I can hear it, see it and feel it. Always! When I am doing what I’ve been doing all these days, when I am dressing the children’s wounds, when they call out to me at night, when I cannot go back to sleep afterwards and when I am sitting by the window, sick with longing. Always your words—“you will be with me” are comfort and torture at the same time, because of the question: WHEN will I be with you? Please tell me, beloved, when? I do not know the answer, and the consulate has only a vague idea of 1–2 years, meaning an eternity, unimaginable, inconceivable—equal to a hundred years to me, who must be with you within the shortest imaginable period of time, right now and immediately. Now the third summer without you begins.

She was the girl from my grandfather’s photo album. Valy. The two pictures—like the funny folded photo note—were taken when he was already in America; she was writing to him from Germany, she had left Czechoslovakia and made it as far as Potsdam. She was the girl he’d left behind.

My grandfather had kept these papers and photos and letters, mislabeled, away from my grandmother, close to him, a reminder, a memento. Why? Who, really, was this woman? Had she found her way to safety with his help? Or without it? Had he kept her words out of love? Out of guilt? Both? As a quiet means of remembrance?

And then I wondered: Could I find her? Would knowing her explain something of my family’s story to me, fill out the myth of my grandfather? Or if I could not find her, if she were lost, murdered among all those murders, could I rescue her from obscurity? Grandiose as it sounded, it also seemed, strangely, achievable in the face of the enormity of the horror. If I could bring one person’s name back, wasn’t that a small victory? In that moment I decided that, of all the people of the box, it was Valy I wanted to find, Valy I would search for—that I would begin a journey to understand her life, and, in so doing, understand my grandfather as well—I could break through the myth of the perfect, spotless, clean escape and render it a clearer, less idealized picture. It would be dirtier, to be sure, but it would be, ultimately, a purer, truer representation of what he had lost when he had to leave everything behind. It would make more sense, in some ways,
to my generation as we grapple with this history, it would allow me to explain the period to my own children, when they came, in a tactile way, with a story of a single person plucked from the enormity.

Valy’s letters—there were dozens—were written from 1938 through the end of 1941, and mailed, mostly, from Berlin. Powerful, difficult, they begged, they pleaded, they cried. They were desperate appeals for my grandfather’s help. I scanned them and e-mailed them to native German speakers for help with translation. Slowly, they came back, one by one. And each unnerved me more.

I was becoming obsessed with her, and yet what I concretely knew about her was only a handful of things: her birth date, her address, her education at the University of Vienna medical school, her love for my grandfather—and her words. I felt compelled to recover her in some way, to imagine her world, to re-create as much of it as I could, so that she had not simply been disappeared. If I could find her, I believed that I could alter something, change history in some small way, even if only within my own family. In time, Valy came to stand for more; in a way, she represented for me all those other Valys, known and unknown, who had passed into history, if not without a fight, then, at least, without a marker.

My hope was both enormous and very tiny. I wanted to use these small clues, these pieces of paper to rescue Valy’s memory—retrace her steps from birth through school through the years she wrote her letters and, perhaps, even find her again.

I wondered: Had Karl and Valy’s been a romance of youth—not one, as most of ours are not, made to last a lifetime—or was my grandmother right: had she been his true love? What did words like “true love”—peacetime words—even mean to the desperate, to the refugees who lost everything, including often, if not always, the loved? Had my grandfather searched for her, reconnected with her? Or grieved his whole life? She was, it was clear, thought of often. In an envelope filled with passport photos—dated, my father guessed for me, in the
mid-1950s—there are several small images of Valy tucked in behind them. What had she gone through? What had she experienced in her years in Berlin? Her letters to my grandfather appeared to end in December 1941. What happened to her then?

I asked all my questions impossibly, childishly. Then I set out to find answers.

One

S
ITUATION
E
XCELLENT

H
ere’s one of the stories I heard as a child: Lacking a complete set of papers, fleeing Austria, my grandfather and his family traveled from Vienna to Hamburg—through the heart of the German Reich—in September 1938. They arrived at the city’s enormous port ready to board a ship armed in part with a set of lies, each prepared to bluff his or her way on board. Yet instead of terror, I heard only of optimism: As his mother and nephew huddled anxiously at the quay, my grandfather and his sister and her husband struck off to see the city in the hours before their scheduled departure. “Who knows when we’ll next get the chance to see Hamburg?” Karl purportedly said, blithely refusing to lose this opportunity. He then had to lie, I heard, to get past the border guards (banking on the inability of one to read English). He had, I heard—or perhaps I imagined?—enabled the family to flee.

In truth, he hadn’t discussed the escape much with me—or even with my father, for that matter—but that story, shadowy, vague, ultimately triumphant, was what I had always carried. The fall after I graduated from college, I asked my great-aunt Cilli about the stories I had grown up with:
Did my anecdotes leave anything out? Had they, for example, left anyone behind?
Her brother-in-law, she told me, tragically believed Poland would remain untouched—he stayed in Europe. But, beyond him? No, she said, there wasn’t really anyone else who might have come with them.