Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (49 page)

Memorial at Grunewald Station, Berlin.

Toward the end of my first stay in Berlin, still pregnant with Orli, I took the S-Bahn train to Grunewald. The station serves the
eponymously named pretty suburb-within-the-city known for its large park. The S-Bahn 7 train rushes through every ten minutes. There is a third track, or
Gleis
, that is easily overlooked. As you descend from the S-Bahn lines, you see signs indicating Westkreuz, back toward town, or Potsdam, in the other direction, and then there is
Gleis
17. As you ascend the stairs for 17, you see two long metal lanes and a track that seems, at first, no different from any other. But the platform is cast from steel, and every two feet is a date, a number, and a direction. It looks like this:

12.1.1943 / 1190 Juden / Berlin–Auschwitz. 12.1.1943 / 100 Juden / Berlin–Theresienstadt. 13.1.1943 / 100 Juden / Berlin–Theresienstadt.

The tracks stretch out into the distance, covered with vegetation in places but still totally visible. The memorial covers every deportation from this city; it lists the numbers sent and the days on which each of the fifty-five thousand Jews deported from Berlin was sent away. More Jews left from Berlin than from all of Belgium.

I was completely alone there that day, save for the little Jew inside me, and through the trees I watched the S-Bahn trains rushing back and forth a few yards away, the distance between normal life and terror just a few feet and sixty-five years.

But that sunny late September afternoon at the S-Bahn station in Grunewald, I didn’t yet know that, as alone as Valy had been, she was not nearly as alone as I’d once believed. For twenty-four days before that train trip, she was married. For twenty-four days, she had lived with a man who cared enough to try to rescue her, who didn’t want her to be alone in this pitiless city, who couldn’t let her be sent away. On the twenty-fifth day, they were deported together.

After the war, when the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen was first set up, when Europe was still smoldering, and buildings in nearly every major city across Germany were still in ruins, Jews, weary, nearly destroyed, across the Continent, in America, from Palestine to Australia—they all tried to find one another. Valy’s world, too, began to reconnect, asking if anyone knew anything about where she—or her mother—might be. Hope, tentative, uncertain, not quite crushed, remained.

At this point my grandfather was finishing his own tour of duty—he had enlisted, hoping to serve in Europe; after all, he spoke several European languages. Instead, he was sent to the Pacific theater, where he served in a MASH unit at the front. I have photos of him, standing on a temporary wood platform, afloat in a sea of mud, a pistol on his hip, outside army tents. He spent a year overseas, working as a surgeon; he wrote a paper, “Active Immunization Against Malaria.” It won the Henry S. Wellcome Medal for 1946, from the Association of Military Surgeons, as the best paper on the contributions of the World War to the advancement of medicine. Dozens of letters poured in from around the country, congratulating him and asking for reprints of his scientific work. The medal, and the notes, were together with
the original box marked “C. J. Wildman, Personal.” I found it the same night I discovered the letters. But, like everything else in that period of my grandfather’s life, his time in the service was very vague, all broad strokes, all bright—he enlisted, rose to the rank of major, served in his own profession—medicine.

Karl and Dorothy Wildman with Cilli and Carl Feldschuh, my grandfather’s sister and brother-in-law, around 1946.

Working in a frontline hospital as a surgeon must have been grueling. There were always rumors he had been very ill at some point, though no one knew exactly from what, or where he recovered. Instead, we heard cheerful stories, like one about how he saved a young (Jewish) soldier’s life in triage who turned out to be my grandmother’s best friend’s brother (really—the thank-you letter was also in the box). I write to the National Archives requesting information about Karl’s military service and I am told my grandfather’s files were burned in a 1973 St. Louis fire that destroyed thousands of army records of the era. They can offer me nothing, other than proof that he served.

As his time in the service ends, he was starting to hear from—and reach out to—his European world once again.

The letters in my “Correspondence, Patients A–G” box that came as the war began to wind down are often just as terrible to read as
those that arrived as the war began. Some are angry; some are supplicating. Bruno Klein, once my grandfather’s closest friend, writes thanking him for an affidavit and letters of support he has provided; he shyly inquires whether the embers of their youthful brotherhood can be fanned into adult friendship
.

Most of all, the tone of your letter pleased me very much: it brought back memories of young friendship—despite everything. I am sure that I will feel at home in the US much more quickly than I ever did in Switzerland. Do you still have contacts with “the old guard”? Probably, one has the wrong impression of the distances involved—Zwicker in Los Angeles, Bobby Weiser in New York etc.

He sounds so tentative, so formal
—
but then again, it is twelve years since they have seen each other. A lifetime. They left each other as twenty-six-year-old recently graduated students, and here they were thirty-eight-year-old men; they had lived through war, they had lost everything they had ever known, they had started their lives again, and again. My grandfather had been to the Pacific and back; Bruno had remained a refugee in Europe. Bruno will spend his life shuttling between New York and Switzerland, never quite at home anywhere. They will rebuild their friendship—I have their letters stretching until the 1980s, where the two men, at that point well into their seventies, joke about Kurt Waldheim, the Holocaust, American Jews, pathos, and memory.

But Bruno’s hopeful overtures are nothing compared with the letters of those who knew Valy and searched for her, back in her hometown.

“At last peace has arrived after 6 difficult war years,”
begins one, mailed October 25, 1945.

In spite of the beautiful word “peace,” there still is no peace, the innocent and guilty equally being subjected to terrible suffering. I keep waiting for our beloved Valy and her Mama. Knowing that she is alive would be the happiest day in my life. I would be happy to give her the items, which I safeguarded and remained intact throughout the Russian occupation. Also, there is one of your pictures, which I safeguarded together with the rest of the items and pictures. It was painted by Professor Morino. I would be delighted to hear from you. . . . 2 years nothing from Mrs. Scheftel and Valy. Now I have let you know what’s most important.

This was Maria Richterova, author of a half-dozen letters, written in Sütterlin script, an old-time written German that I have to track down special interpreters to read. She is a Sudeten German in Czechoslovakia, and a—what? A neighbor of Valy and her mother in Troppau? A former maid? It is unclear, never explained. Maria writes, increasingly anxiously, about her uncertain future: she is about to be expelled, along with twelve million other ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere; they are all about to be resettled, brutally, outside the only country they have ever known. She claims to have held on to all of Valy’s possessions that were not taken along with her to Berlin.

Her letters are wrenching, lamenting her lost neighbors, and ruing her current situation. “Foreign items safeguarded by locals are not supposed to be confiscated, but everything is seized anyway, and nobody will ever see any of them again,” she writes in another letter.
“Therefore I am asking you, Venerable Doctor, to help me to continue safeguarding these items and also put in a word in favor of our things. After all, the British and Americans are in power.”

They are so sparse, her letters, and yet so full. It is as though she wants to argue to someone—if anyone will just listen!—that she did well by Jews, she tried, she hoped, she prayed, she kept their things, she did not loot! she plans to return them! Was she telling the truth? Had she really done these things out of altruism? Could Valy or her
mother—or their neighbors—have truly believed they would really return to Troppau after the war? Of this I don’t know.

Maria wants to know from my grandfather what she should do, and if he can help her. “To be able to hand those over to our beloved Valy would count among one of my happiest hours, because she was the best and noblest human person whom I have ever known.”

She writes again and again, her situation worsens. “Yesterday I walked 28 kilometers on foot to the district government agency asking them to release to me the items belonging to our beloved Valy, her beloved mother and you, so I would be able to take them with me during resettlement, but they bluntly refused . . . if the Venerable Doctor were to write to the district government . . .”

Perhaps Maria saw this as her own opportunity—as her letters continue, the only clear thing is her own need:

Dear Venerable Dr. Wildmann,

I just got word that the families have been informed, how much they will be allowed to take along for resettlement. It is so little, that one can carry it with one’s bare hands. Dear Dr., I would be forever grateful, if you could put in a word for us and our relatives with the powers that be belonging in the victorious countries, as all of us were opposed to fascism, after all, and I would be very happy not to leave here like a pauper and be allowed to take along enough for minimum household needs.

Her naïveté put too much faith in my grandfather’s abilities to negotiate, on her or anyone’s behalf, with the new Czech authorities, with the occupying Allies; but her anxiety was totally justified. There were death marches of Sudeten Germans; some three million of them were not just expelled but vigorously, aggressively persecuted in the months following the war, a stain on the Czech relationship to Europe that extended until the early part of this century. Thousands died on the
marches away from their homes that Maria describes. I can’t find any further information on her—and her last name, I’m told, is so common as to make it nearly impossible that I ever would. Her letters are a microcosm of the Sudeten German postwar experience, a mini drama that unfolds from 1945 through 1946 and then fades away.