Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (53 page)

Despite myself, I am overcome. My eyes, my throat, burn. When Walzer arrives I have tears running down my face. I say, “I didn’t realize it would be so bad,” which I immediately wish I could retract, as she has worked hard to better this space. On my tape I can hear my sniffling, my hurried attempt to pull myself back together.

Walzer explains that the cemetery was opened in 1784 and closed in 1885—it was open to all Jews, not just prominent ones—and it once encompassed a far larger area—she points to high-rise white buildings a few hundred feet away, public housing, she says, that stands on what was hallowed ground. “There were thirty thousand graves,” she tells me, “but you only see about eighty-five hundred tombstones now.”

A very prominent garden architect was employed here just after World War I, and this was once a marvelous place, a park. “It was well kept until 1938—until the National Socialists took over. Then the gardener was killed and no one ever showed up again. No one else was interested. It was totally forgotten.”

I ask about the desecration—the split stones, the open graves, the bones. Walzer says all this stems from just after the Anschluss. It took place while Karl and Valy were still here. The graves were exhumed, in part, after Hitler spoke to the adoring masses at Heldenplatz; the Naturhistorisches Museum took the skulls from these graves for racial
profiling, to display the differences in the Jewish skeleton. Further: this holy land was sold off in parcels when the Jewish community was forced to raise money for their own deportation. Money raised in these fire sales was used to pay for the trains that took the Jews to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, among other camps.

Walzer points to a building in the distance. Twenty-five hundred graves were once on that land, she says. A bulldozer “went into the cemetery and took the soil—with the bones—and this soil and bones were used to repair the streets of Vienna and around Gürtel Strasse, all in front of Westbahnhof—the train station. I want a marker there, because when you get out of the train, what do you step on? The cemetery.”

When I marvel that it has remained so overgrown, that the bones and the open graves still stand there, as though we have stepped back in time, she sighs. “In fact it is relatively well kept now,” she says. “I had to clean the whole place on my own. No one was willing to pay for that.” There is not enough money, the Jewish community has struggled with infighting, with what to do with this destroyed space. They
are stuck: to totally clean up the desecration will take away the visual impact of seeing the destruction wrought by the Nazi occupation. But to leave the cemetery as it is renders it unsafe for the general public to enter, ensures it will stay hidden, forgotten, forever. Walzer regrets, in some ways, having taken on the task at all, and yet I can see what drew her here, what made her feel someone had to do something.

I ask her how she started this project—Why her? Why this?—and she tells me that throughout her childhood, she felt, somehow, peculiarly connected to the period of German occupation. When she studied the war in high school, and her class was shown the images, the films, from the opening of the camps, “I had the feeling this has something to do with me. It was very strange.” Her mother refused to speak of the period. “She said, ‘Go talk to your grandmother.’”

With that, at age fifteen or so, Tina discovered her mother and grandmother—and therefore she herself—were Jewish. Her grandfather, she learned, had been deported, in the early years of the war, and her grandmother then fled east, to Shanghai. Before she did, uncertain of whether she would survive the journey, she placed Tina’s mother, then a toddler of one year, with a Viennese Christian family. In 1946, Tina’s grandmother returned and took her now-six-year-old daughter—Tina’s mother—away from the only family she had ever known. Her mother never forgave her grandmother for not taking her to Shanghai. “It must have been terrible,” says Tina. “And my grandmother didn’t understand why my mother was not grateful for saving her life. So, no one ever wanted to talk about this and my mother didn’t want to speak of anything—of being Jewish or Judaism or anything.” It was, yet again, the story of an unhappy survival.

Such secrets aren’t uncommon in my generation. Perhaps Tina’s is more extreme than some—a lost grandfather? A purposely suppressed Jewish past?—but is it really so different from the ways all families tell stories and create their own narratives? That night I go out with Herwig and Georg and we talk of family secrets, the things we have discovered as we have grown older, about our own grandparents—their
hidden lives. We talk again about the history we have all come to live through, to investigate, even as we move forward.

The following day, outside Café Sperl, the nineteenth-century
Kaffeehaus
that hugs a corner of Gumpendorferstrasse, all soaring windows, velvet banquettes, and surly service, and so iconic it was used in the filming of
Before Sunrise
, that Ethan Hawke–Julie Delpy movie about love and connections and youthful optimism, I meet another historian, Ingo Zechner. He has read my original series of stories on Valy and my grandfather, and I have the feeling he feels he knows me somehow and, as a result, that we are already intimates. He is young—or, at least, only slightly older than I—but he was involved in the incredibly belated efforts to compensate Jews for their lost property, and their (monetary) claims of victimization, starting in 2000. We talk about why he abandoned Carinthia, his childhood home, the area of Austria long sullied by racist leaders, why he became a historian, why he works so deeply in the history of the Holocaust, how he has been affected and directed by the history of Austria.

Many months later, in Washington, D.C., Ingo will show me a series of films taken in Vienna just after the Anschluss that have only just begun to be analyzed. They are home movies, amateur videos, taken by bystanders in March 1938. They show Jews scrubbing the streets, surrounded by pulsating, massive, jeering crowds, and storefronts defiled by anti-Jewish graffiti. They highlight the unbelievable number of flags and swastikas that appear suddenly from one day to the next in the streets. Indeed, these shorts reveal the takeover of the city in a way so tactile, so brutal, so visual, they underscore how deeply personal the Nazification of the city must have felt. In one film that I ask Ingo to play for me again and again, I see Karl’s precious University of Vienna appear on screen—the steps in front of one of the lecture halls are filled with goose-stepping Nazis singing
“Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles.”

By the time I see those films, I have given birth again, to another girl. This is the second daughter I have grown and birthed while I searched for Valy. My friends in Austria are having children now, too—Georg and his girlfriend, Ana, have a daughter just a week before my partner, Ian, and I do. We exchange messages, gifts, photos, promises to get the families together. Next summer, we say, we’ll climb the Rax mountain range, just as Valy and Karl once did. Do these girls need these stories, too? How can we impart this history without the burden?

Fourteen

E
NTZÜCKEN

Y
ears ago my father told me that the most jarring moment for him at the Holocaust Museum in Washington wasn’t seeing the cattle car that visitors are invited to walk through—though that was, as it is meant to be, emotionally manipulative, deeply evocative, and disturbing—but instead encountering a photo that museumgoers are presented with at the beginning of the permanent exhibit. The image, at first, appears to reveal very little: a line of women and men, hundreds long; they could be waiting for anything.

It is a photograph of Jews seeking exit visas in Vienna in the weeks after the Anschluss. My grandfather was on that line.

Recently, a new document was added to that section of the permanent exhibition. It is a massive flow chart tracing the steps Jews had to take before they could flee Vienna, drawn up, in 1938, by the Jewish community itself. It was only discovered, in an attic, after the turn of this millennium. There was a horrifically complicated system of looting and subjugation that each frantic Jew had to go through—my grandfather, of course, included: each step toward emigration cost a fee, a tax of sorts, and with each payment, a stamp was received. At the end, once all the stamps were presented to a final office, a passport
and transit papers may or may not have been issued—all of which had to be used within a tiny window of time, or the whole thing would expire and the process would start again. That any Jew was able to winnow his way through that morass, to come through to the other side, was in and of itself heroic, improbable.

The first time I came across the box of letters in my parents’ basement, “Correspondence, Patients A–G,” that very first time I pawed through it, I pulled out a folded, deeply yellowed sheet of paper with Valy’s basic information on it—her birth date, her address at the Babelsberg old-age home, her full name—Dr. Valerie Scheftel. It was dated 1943, and it was a request to HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; my grandfather had scrawled notes on it. He was already married, he was already in the army, and he was looking for Valy. But HIAS didn’t have any information for him.

I can find no further information about what happened to Valy after she boarded the 27th Ost Transport from Putlitzstrasse train station in Berlin Moabit to Auschwitz. She may have died en route. She may have been gassed upon arrival. I know only that she had no number assigned to her, and the vast majority of those who arrived in Auschwitz and received no number were those deemed, immediately, expendable. Extinguishable. If she survived the seventeen-and-a-half-hour journey, crammed up against her fellow Jews, crushed into that breathless space, she would have emerged onto the freezing platform into what seemed, that terribly cold year, to be an endlessly sleeting rain. She would have been bewildered, thirsty, exhausted. Immediately there would have been shouting. The Gestapo beat the prisoners with sticks, with rubber truncheons. Everyone was screaming at the selections—from the prisoners to the SS guards barking orders—
Remove watches! All valuables removed!
Valy would have been told to move to the left, and Hans to the right. Perhaps they cried out; perhaps they grasped hands, perhaps they tried to remain together.
But of this I can only guess. I can find no eyewitness accounts of those moments, of that particular day. And try as I might, I have not found a single person who heard from her after January 29, 1943. She disappears.