Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (48 page)

Love,

Valy and Hans

Now I know: Hans had already saved Valy from certain death once. Their marriage, be it propelled, in part or more, by romantic love, was fueled entirely by the imminent fact of her impending deportation if she weren’t attached to an essential worker. Her time with the Reichsvereinigung had run out.

Among Carol’s collection, I find that Valy wrote to Uncle Walter, too. Her letter is far more formal; it is a thank-you, and an apology for upending their family, for being the cause of some controversy, between her age and the—apparent—hastiness of their marriage.

Sometime after these letters arrived, Walter took notes on what he had received:

From the letters that I received from Hans Fabisch and his wife “Valy” (Valerie Scheftel) between the time before Christmas 1942 from Berlin and January 14, 1943, I have the following personal knowledge:

In the letter before Christmas 1942, he told me (among many other things that do not belong here) that his marriage now was going through and that the wedding with Dr. med. Valerie Scheftel was set to take place in Berlin on January 5, 1943.

Dr. Scheftel, who comes from Troppau, studied in Vienna and worked at that time in the Babelsberg Home that is managed by her relatively young mother.

A few days later (the date is missing) Hans told me that the Nazis had decreed that the Babelsberg Home had to be dissolved; for this reason it had become imperative that I send him the papers that were required for the marriage, which I still had from his parents, as quickly as possible by registered mail. This, of course, I did immediately.

On 12-28-1942, Dr. Valerie Scheftel, to whom we had sent various items of clothing, wrote me a letter of thanks and apologized for having possibly upset us by the rather spontaneous marriage decision and other related matters. . . .

Additionally I received a [letter] . . . with a postal stamp of January 14, 1943.

Again a small package that, as it was often the case in those times, was returned with a notation that the recipient had moved to an unknown location. . . .

Thereafter, I did not hear anything at all.

It was nearly, but not totally, impossible to survive in Berlin, in the heart of the Reich. Ten to twelve thousand Jews attempted to hide in Germany, and five thousand or so actually survived, seventeen hundred in the capital alone. (By comparison, in 1925, there were 160,000 Jews living in Berlin.) The numbers are minuscule. It required great effort, a great number of people aiding you, unusually good luck—not to mention an unusually calm disposition, an ability to think on your feet, and the wherewithal to shift goals and locations on a moment’s notice.

Jews like Valy who came from other parts of the Reich, who did not know the city well and had no friends from before—especially those who knew no non-Jews, who had no longtime neighbors, and thus no network—struggled. And yet they believed. And they took tremendous risks. They had no choice. It was lonely, it was awful. But what was the alternative? Meeting Hans was a break—it was companionship, of course. Perhaps it was also love, physical, emotional, touch at a moment that was so cold and terrifying there could be nothing to shield you from that anxiety in the night other than your own exhaustion.

Ernest’s letter refers to the time period that Valy and Hans were writing to Walter.

Hans, Valy and I discussed the need to go underground. All
of us were in agreement that going underground was the only way to save ourselves from deportation. At that time we did not even know the full truth about Auschwitz. As a first step, Hans and I bought forged identification papers.

Siemens was beginning to welcome a new influx of workers. They were non-Jewish laborers brought in from the east and elsewhere. Ernest saw it as an ominous sign. His foreman told him to train the woman assigned to his same post. He was told to let her try his job, from time to time, to observe his actions. He suspected that this meant he was working to school his own replacement.

On Christmas Eve, 1942, Ernest’s mother, father, and teenage sister were arrested. From the transit camp at Grosse Hamburger Strasse, his mother relayed a stark last message through one of the Jewish workers who were pressed into service by the Gestapo: those who questioned her asked a great deal about her son, who had not been taken. The worker who relayed the message to her son had been a teacher in Ernest’s school; he still remembered Ernest, still cared for him. It was a stroke of luck: most of the Jewish workers were far too afraid of the consequences of passing messages to the remaining Jews in the city. The old teacher knew Ernest well enough to trust him, to care for him. Reading this I am reminded: Valy had no such person to warn her, in this city she was a virtual stranger. The message was both a warning and a love letter, a farewell kiss. With his mother’s words in mind, sometime before New Year’s Eve, Ernest stopped wearing his yellow star, he stopped working at Siemens; he moved out of his apartment, he carried his fake papers all the time and he moved into a temporary, and dangerous, “safe” house. It was risky to be on the street as a military-aged boy not at the front—was he a deserter? was he a Jew?—but more risky still to chance the roundups.

Ernest wanted Hans to join him underground. Hans preferred to wait. He thought that as long as he worked for Siemens, he’d be
exempt from deportation. Why go underground until he had to? Ernest argued that the Gestapo would hardly advertise the moment when their exemptions expired. But Hans was firm. He had his false papers, he said, he could go underground at any time.

Besides, his priority was to marry. It was Valy who hesitated: she did not want people to know their age difference. “Both of us are sufficiently intelligent to see the ‘ifs and buts’ quite clearly,” Hans wrote to his uncle. “Although I think it possible that we will stay together forever, the marriage at this point primarily serves practical purposes.”
And it was those purposes that finally convinced her. For Valy was about to be out of a job: the old-age home her mother ran, and that also employed her, had been notified it was to be liquidated; its tenants “sent East.” While Valy’s mother was still useful to the Reich—she had already been reassigned to Auguststrasse 14/16—Valy was not. Her best means to avoid deportation, she believed, and Hans believed, was now Hans himself. It had been seven months since Karl and Valy wrote to each other through the Red Cross.

Hans and Valy married on the fifth of January, 1943.

“Why did they marry?” I asked Ernest, that snowy day in Ann Arbor. “They were deeply in love,” he said, without hesitating, brushing aside everything else. “And they wanted to live together, and those days it would not be acceptable to live together unmarried—but I don’t think that it was only a practical question. I think they really wanted to be together.” Did you, I wanted to know, talk about the deportations? “Yes. Lots of discussions I think I write about in that letter—we had different strategies. I had my point of view. Hans had his.”

Hans still refused to leave Siemens. “And then we had that long-running argument; I mean he took that forged ID sort of as an insurance policy. He would go underground when no other option existed.”

They still didn’t exactly
know
, insists Ernest, what awaited them in the east. “We assumed it was work under brutal conditions and living under brutal, sadistic conditions. But at that time, at least, I had never heard of mass extermination through gas chambers.”

On January 18, Ernest crept back to his parents’ apartment for provisions. There he ran into an elderly woman from his old building. She told him that deportation vans were on Hans and Valy’s block.

It was a bitterly cold day in the bitterest month of the year. Ernest bundled up and raced over to Brandenburgische Strasse. The furniture van used to collect Jews like a dogcatcher’s vehicle was parked right in front of number 43. There were, Ernest knew, many Jewish apartments in that building, both in the front house and in the back. He knew Hans was at work, but not Valy. He had to try to reach her—otherwise, how would he ever be able to face Hans?

The apartment was on the fifth floor. He ran up the steps and rang the bell. When the door opened, a Gestapo officer stepped out. He demanded Ernest’s identification papers and began questioning him. From the door, Ernest could see no one in the apartment. The officer pocketed his papers and told him to leave, but to come and see him at Gestapo headquarters the following day. Ernest tried to look past the officer—the doors were open, but he saw no one, not Valy, not her neighbors. He was sure she was out.

Back on the street, Ernest positioned himself on a corner where he could spot anyone coming or going. He planned to intercept Valy. But an hour and a half later, the van had left and there was still no sign of her. Panicked and half frozen, he ran to catch Hans on his way back from the S-Bahn train, having finished his shift for the night. The two men jogged to the building, sheltered by darkness; it was now night.

They entered the courtyard and looked up; a thin band of light beamed out from under the blackout shades of Hans and Valy’s apartment. Valy, they agreed, relieved, must have come home after the vans had left, after Ernest had left his post. Together they sprinted up the stairs. At the fourth floor, suddenly, Hans paused.
Let me go on alone,
he told his friend. Wait for a signal. Then he continued, mounting the last flight of steps alone.

From his vantage point on the stairwell, Ernest saw Hans put his
key in the door. But, before he could turn it, the door opened, and a tall, older man in civilian dress was in the doorway, backlit. “Who are you?” he shouted down to Ernest.

Ernest flew down the stairs three at a time, out the door, into the street. He didn’t look back; he just ran and ran and ran and ran. Panting and spent, when he caught his breath, blocks from Brandenburgische Strasse 43, he realized what had just happened. He was free. No one was chasing him. And he was completely alone.

Twelve

W
HAT
R
EMAINS

H
ans and Valy had the foresight to buy fake papers. They married in time to save her from the liquidation of the Babelsberg old-age home. But they waited one day too long to go underground. The Gestapo agent waiting at 43 Brandenburgische Strasse took Hans with him.

Together, Hans and Valy were held under atrocious conditions at the transit camp on Grosse Hamburger Strasse, with hundreds of others, until January 29. The deportation process had been stripped of any vestige of humanity by then. There was no longer any furniture in the building at Grosse Hamburger Strasse. Now there were only fetid mattresses on the floor, and straw for those not lucky enough to have a cushion. There were bars on each window; floodlights illuminated the grounds; armed guards with orders to shoot escapees kept constant watch. Privacy had disintegrated; doors had been removed from the few toilets. It was here, on January 27, that Hans and Valy were forced to sign over the rights to all of their property to the German Reich, a bizarre formality that would set in motion a slow-moving but well-orchestrated dismantling of their home and the careful looting of their remaining worldly possessions.

From their transit camp, Valy and Hans were taken not to Grunewald, where so many of the rest of the city’s Jews had been sent before them, but to the Putlitzstrasse train station, in the Moabit area of Berlin, now known as Mitte. On January 29, along with 1,002 others, they were shoved aboard a closed cattle car bound for Auschwitz. The records the Gestapo kept of that day are very precise. On board were sixty-four children age twelve and below, fifty teenagers between ages thirteen and eighteen, 348 men and women between ages nineteen and forty-five, and 386 people between forty-five and sixty years old. The rest were the elderly and infirm. The train left at 5:20 in the afternoon and traveled for seventeen and a half hours through the German and then the Polish countryside. It arrived “on time” at the Auschwitz train station at 10:48 the following morning. Upon arrival, those who survived that terrible journey—and many died in transit, their bodies dropped to the floor beneath the feet of their former neighbors, their fellow Jews—were pushed onto what was called the Alte Judenrampe, the Old Jews’ Ramp, at the Oświęcim freight station, between the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, for the selection. (
The Birkenau selection ramp so often depicted in Holocaust movies and testimonies had not yet been constructed.) The group was then marched, in columns, to Birkenau.

On the morning of January 30, 140 men and 140 women were chosen for work from Valy’s train. Striped prisoner pajamas replaced clothes; hair was brutally shorn; arms were crudely tattooed with a number. Those were the fortunate. The other 724 men, women, and children who left Berlin on the 29th of January did not receive a tattoo, or camp number, or uniform. Those who had survived the journey were merely methodically stripped of their remaining earthly possessions and then immediately murdered by gas.