Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (42 page)

It was hard to know how to understand the shift because, while I knew and loved my grandmother, about Hans I knew nothing, other than that tantalizingly strange detail of his age: born in 1921, he was twenty-one to Valy’s thirty-one, a gendered age gap as unusual then as it is now, if not more so. How they met, I had no clue; when she had decided to finally give up on my grandfather and marry someone else, I could not say. It seemed that, because of him, she left Babelsberg and
her mother to live, once again, in Berlin. But all I knew for sure was that their names are linked beginning in late 1942.

Their names are linked not only at ITS. I look again at the two fat files that arrived in the mail for me—one from the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv and the other from the Entschädigungsamt Berlin, the indemnity agency that holds the reams and reams of paper regarding restitution and compensation cases. In the 1950s, a case was opened on behalf of Valy and Hans.

In Hans’s property files I received from the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv, I see that Valy and Hans, like all Jews facing deportation, were each declared enemies of the state. The couple, then, like Toni, were required to fill out detailed property files so that the Gestapo could thoroughly loot everything that they still owned. Their assets were inventoried, and appraised, as follows:

1. 1 linen cupboard, coated cloth, Reichsmark (RM) 20
   
2. 1 dressing table, coated cloth, RM 20
   
3. 3 tables, RM 25
   
4. 1 shelf, RM 10
   
5. 1 red plush couch, 2 armchairs, RM 25
   
6. 1 narrow rug (runner), RM 20
   
7. 1 narrow rug, RM 10
   
8. 1 carpet, RM 10
   
9. 1 microscope, RM 25
   
10. 1 ceiling lamp (3 parts), 1 table lamp, RM 5
    

About 50 books, garments, clutter [no value given]
Total value for this page: RM 170
Affidavit of service, January 27, 1943.

Living in one room, they list very little—two chairs, one bookshelf—but I’m struck by three items declared in her handwriting, things she must have dragged from home to home for years: a red velvet couch,
fifty books, a microscope. All those books! A microscope! Preserving her intellectual identity, I imagined, was a way of preserving her dignity. She writes to my grandfather of reading
Faust
; in fact, she writes of reading continuously, she quotes poetry, she writes of the time when they read together, when they were studying together—she does not say that these daydreams, that these reading projects were an act of private sabotage, a means of resistance. Yet it was, and they were: the destruction of intellectual freedom, of intellectual stimulation, was as much a piece of the Nazi project of daily deprivations as malnutrition. It was a mind-numbing stripping of stimulation, of humanity. Keeping those books was a way of staving off that starvation of the soul.

The documents continue: “October 1, 1942: notice that all the assets of Valerie Sara Fabisch née Scheffel [
sic
], born in Troppau on November 4, 1911, and of late residing in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, 43 Brandenburgischestr., are to be confiscated on behalf of the German Reich.” About her—very new—husband it states that “Hans Israel Fabisch, a metal worker, a Jew,” was “earning about RM 32 per week working for Siemens-Schuckert and, since August 1941, living in Berlin-Wilmersdorf at 43 Brandenburgischestr., 4th floor, c/o Striem. He has one furnished room, for which he pays RM per month to his landlady, Gertrud Sara Striem, also Jewish.” Rent was paid through January 31, 1943. But an archivist tells me that Gertrude Striem—who was, apparently, a pianist—was deported on January 29, 1943, to Auschwitz.

Hans also has assets of up to 2,500 RM in the Deutsche Bank—access to which he would have long been denied, as those accounts were blocked. As for “Valerie Sara Fabisch née Scheftel, Jew, profession: nurse,” her wages are listed at “RM 110 per month,” and she is “employed by Reich Association of Jews in Germany at a Jewish home for the elderly in Babelsberg, residing since January 1943 at 43 Brandenburgischestr. in Berlin-Wilmersdorf.” She lives in one furnished room, for which she pays RM 40 per month to her landlady, Gertrud Sara Striem, a Jew. On July 15, 1959, a request from the restitution
office for the files of Hans Fabisch was filed by the same Ilse Charlotte Mayer who wrote to the International Tracing Service on his and her behalf. Correspondence with Ilse went on for years.

What did Valy and Hans
know
, when they filled out these property forms? What did they expect? Were they preparing to go underground? Did they believe, at this late date, after more than a year of deportations to the east leaving Berlin, that the east could mean anything other than terror?

Inge Deutschkron, the woman who hadn’t remembered Valy from the Kindergartenseminar, tells this story, of her own incremental knowledge and her own realization that deportation would be worse than hiding: It was November 1942, and Jews in Berlin were leaving the city on train after train, headed east, though no one knew exactly what they faced when they got there. One day Emma Gumz, a laundress who had done Inge and her mother’s clothing for many years, beseeched the women not to go if and when they received a notice to leave for the east. Pressed to explain, Mrs. Gumz broke down—the neighbor’s son, Fritz, had come back from Poland. There he had seen terrible things done to Jews. Mrs. Gumz made the Deutschkron women promise to seek help from her and her husband and hide. Eventually they agreed.

“You don’t know what she knew. All you know is what those around her knew,” Marion Kaplan, the New York University professor and author of
Between Dignity and Despair
, tells me, when I start to relate Deutschkron’s anecdote. We had been talking about Valy, and she was steering me back into focus. “You can’t know. You’re barking up the wrong tree if you say
what did she know and when did she know it
. All you can do is paint a context in which you describe that she is a little fish among big fish—and those big fish probably did know. Did she know? Maybe she might have heard people talk or maybe not. Some knew from illegal radio broadcasts from the BBC. [Also] there are always people who sort of know some information but don’t absorb it for what it really means.” Kaplan tells a story of a family who all had
the same information—two couples—one goes into hiding, the other leaves with the deportation. Both believe they have chosen the safer route, though only the couple in hiding will survive.

As for Valy and Hans, she muses further: “Do I think they would have known by then, by the end of ’42?” Meaning, would they have known that deportation might mean death. “Yes. Because they weren’t getting letters or cards from the deported. Do I think the people in the
Judenrat
or the Reichsvereinigung knew? Probably? But am I positive? No. She is a little person. A nobody. Would they have told her? Who knows. But remember, the BBC is already reporting this in mid-1942.”

Hans and Valy were living together at Brandenburgische Strasse 43, in Wilmersdorf, Berlin, until January 29, 1943. With a bit of sleuthing, an archivist at the Landesarchiv confirms for me that the building was filled with
Judenhäuser
, those apartment-sized ghettos, once single-family or single-person dwellings, now layered with strangers: all Jews. Eventually, fifty-four Jews were deported from number 43 Brandenburgische Strasse alone, and 765 from the entire street. Those living there now have no knowledge of what these buildings saw. The apartments once occupied by doomed Jews were absorbed back into city life, often immediately upon the exit of the condemned inhabitants.

In the middle of Valy and Hans’s property files, notes indicate that Nazi officials began to clear their apartment of all the couple’s remaining possessions on June 12, 1943. It is all dry and bureaucratic: They reassess and decide Hans has overestimated—it is not 170 RM worth of goods, it is 100 RM. Then they sell it. All of it. Eighty RM for the remaining worldly possessions of Hans Fabisch and Valerie Scheftel. The next page notes there are still 600 RM in Hans’s account, left in Deutsche Bank, still to be requested on behalf of the Reich. In the meantime, Brandenburgische Strasse 43 once again became an apartment building like any other, with residents going about their lives, much the same as today. An immediate, purposeful fog of amnesia descended upon the street.

There is nothing further on the newlyweds. On all postwar documents, Valy is simply listed as missing after January 29. Her mother lived on in the city, alone, for another six weeks. On one page of Toni’s property files, where she is asked if any family members have “emigrated,” she answers affirmatively—Valerie Scheftel—
destination unknown
. After all that time trying to stay together, refusing to emigrate without her, Valy had been sent east without her mother. Had she thrown a postcard to Toni from the train, as some did? Did she try to get her mother word of what was happening? I don’t know. I don’t know so much. I am frustrated. I have hit another dead end. I wonder—could Valy have survived under an assumed name? Could she—like one survivor I meet—have been on a list to be taken but then slipped away? Could she have changed her appearance and her identity to live underground? Is this too fantastical to consider?

Sometime after I begin to parse these archival documents, I finally give birth. We name our daughter for my grandfather—his sunny worldview and cosmopolitan mien were things I was keen for my daughter to inherit. We decided our daughter’s middle name would bear weight: we would give her Chaim, his given name. For her first name, “Orli” had made the early lists: “my light” in Hebrew. It fit my grandfather’s unique ability to see the light, the opportunity, in every situation. It is the one characteristic everyone who remembers him recalls: his optimism.

Some months after Orli’s birth, Herwig comes to visit, from Vienna, along with his girlfriend Camilla. They ask where I am in my search, and I show them Valy and Hans’s files from Bad Arolsen, and the additional pieces I received from the German archives.

When I discovered Hans’s existence, I tell Herwig and Camilla over dinner, I began to construct a fantasy narrative about their relationship. How did she meet, let alone marry, a man so much younger? How did she, finally, give up on my grandfather? I spun romantic
fantasies.
Maybe he was a concert pianist.
Maybe they met at a bar, though those were banned, so perhaps not. Maybe they fell in love over music; maybe he swept her off her feet. She had so loved music, I think, just like everyone she studied with in Vienna.

But in speaking of them, I realize I needed to return once again to these thick files. I take them back out of their manila envelopes. In fact, I see immediately, the files easily explode the idea that it was music that brought them together. In Hans’s file, I find a clue, a curriculum vitae, filled out by Hans in his own hand.

I was born on April 29, 1921, in Breslau, the son of businessman Rudolf Fabisch. After completing the seventh year of secondary school [
Obersekunda
], I spent April–October 1937 at the Gross-Breesen agricultural training school for emigrants [for Jewish youths wanting to immigrate to Palestine], in Silesia, where I was trained in market gardening and farming. I left Gross-Breesen to attend Dr. Hodurek’s state-approved professional school for chemists in Breslau, which I had to leave, however, after two full semesters because of my Jewish origin. To complete my education, I attended the Rom School of Chemistry, a Jewish school, in Berlin from January through April 1939. Then I was offered the opportunity to work in the Israelitisches Krankenheim [the Jewish medical facility] in Berlin, as a trainee in the laboratory, and also spent two months working in the facility’s kitchens. Since August 24, 1939, I have been working in the lab of the Jüdisches Krankenhaus in Berlin, on Iranische Strasse.

His note is accompanied by a letter from the head of the lab at the Israelitisches Krankenhaus, describing Hans’s responsibilities there—it is a recommendation form, really—and a letter from Dr. Fritz Israel Weinmann at the private Chemieschule Hermann Rom, telling what Hans Bernhard Jakob Israel Fabisch studied at the school. Valy and Hans may have met at the hospital.

I’ve been frustrated, I tell Herwig, as the trail runs cold. But as we look at the pages together, I sheepishly admit I have overlooked something else: I have not searched for the woman who beseeched the International Tracing Service for the whereabouts of Valy and Hans. Hans’s sister, Ilse Charlotte Fabisch Mayer—the key to Hans, and maybe to Valy—began to look for them some twenty-five years before my birth. In part I did not look for her because I did not know where to begin. There is no listing for her in British phone books; she has, unsurprisingly, no online presence. The address she gives in London is no longer connected to her name. But I realize, as I look at the files with Herwig, in her restitution claims for her brother, she provided more information about herself than she gave to ITS in Bad Arolsen. On one page I see she listed the dates her three children were born. It’s small, but it’s incredibly useful. Even if she is no longer living, they likely
are.