Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (23 page)

Troppau, January 31 1939

Toni Scheftel

All other assets are also listed. All bank account information and life insurance, all are listed to be despoiled; methodically she is stripped of all she owns. Here, then, was the disassembling of twenty-eight years of work, in ten sheets of paper, the undermining of all that Valy’s mother had built since her divorce. It is here, actually, that I discover that she was a divorcée and not a widow, as I’d originally believed. It is here I see that their street name—once Oberring—had become, like so many streets across the greater Reich, Adolf Hitler Ring
.

The archivist and Pavel are both very pleased with our discovery. Pavel implies that if I pay the archivist a bit, perhaps under the table, he will likely be happy to help me going forward. Waiting for us all this time, in the corner of the archives entrance, is a woman named Katka, who runs the “Lost Neighbors” program here in Opava, which aims to acquaint local youth with their lost Jewish past. She began it in part because members of her family witnessed the destruction of the Troppau Jewish community.

Katka, who speaks only Czech, has that kind of deep-red-dyed hair favored in countries of Eastern Europe and in parts of Israel; she wears it up in a ponytail, with heavy bangs and dark, thick-rimmed glasses. The three of us walk through town to a restaurant Katka recommended. As we sit she tells me—as Pavel translates—her mother-in-law was here, in town, the night of the synagogue burning, and they both want to know if I’d like to meet her.
Far more than eating!
I say. Katka nods and we abandon the restaurant and get into a cab. As we travel to the village where her mother-in-law lives, Katka rubs my shoulders and explains that she does energy healing; she thinks I could use it.

Just beyond the city limits of Opava is a small village filled with bungalows. This is where we find Katka’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Havlásková; she seems pleased to see us. Her parents, she says, as she limps around the kitchen, setting up cookies and tea, were dairy farmers. This is the house she was born in, she explains, sitting down heavily and placing fruit tea and chocolate cookies in front of me. She has deep wrinkles and a head of curls that may once have been blond but have faded to an ashy gray. “My mother had come to town with milk to sell and she said, ‘Come have a look! The synagogue is on fire!’” Mrs. Havlásková says in Czech, and Pavel slowly translates into English. “And we saw the smoke from it. And two Germans were standing there protecting it and they hadn’t allowed anyone to approach the fire. The synagogue was on fire. The Germans were standing at a distance and not allowing anyone to go to the synagogue because they didn’t want anyone to put it out.” Mrs. Havlásková’s mother had a soft spot for the Jews: she had worked for a Jewish family herself, before she had children: a bourgeois family named Meyer, German speakers, who were good to her, who paid her well, and gave her gifts on Christmas and made her feel a part of the family. Mrs. Havlásková insists she and her mother went to visit the Meyers, later, under the occupation, and that she was in the apartment, as a ten-year-old, and heard an argument between her mother and Mrs. Meyer. “The old lady Meyer said to my mother, ‘We have to go, they are moving us somewhere else,’ and my mother said, ‘No, hide somewhere!’ and Mrs. Meyer said, ‘It’s not possible. We have had Germans in the apartment already, and they ordered us to prepare our luggage, and pack things . . .’”

I am suspicious of the story, though it is fascinating. I think Mrs. Havlásková wants to believe she heard this, she wants to feel good about her mother, about the woman her mother—she thinks—tried to help, but I also think it is possibly too fantastic to be true, that these dairy-delivering villagers happened to be delivering in Troppau on the very day of the deportation of her mother’s former employers.

It doesn’t really matter anyway, Mrs. Havlásková is one of very few
people not only still living but still living near Troppau who remembers the synagogue at all, who remembers the night when it burned, when Valy and her mother must have huddled together—just two blocks away—wondering how they were going to survive. Where could they go? What would they do? When Valy must have realized, immediately, that not leaving with my grandfather was a much graver, much more difficult choice to have made than simply losing a boyfriend.

Sudeten Germans were expelled at the end of the war, so eyewitnesses, as old as they would be, were scattered far and wide. There are only the Czech elderly, who were children then, who remember the burning of the synagogues; few speak of it. That’s why Katka worked on this “Lost Neighbors” project—to tell the children of Opava who once shared these streets. Otherwise it would be very, very easy to forget. So few returned after the war.

Katka’s son has joined us at this point. He is young, nineteen, twenty, and his English is better than his mother’s. The two of them take me back to Troppau in a taxi and straight to the train. I want to stay and walk in town a bit more, but they are insistent that the time to travel is that moment, and so I obey, getting on a train to Ostrava, and then another to Prague. It takes five hours, and in the end, I am grateful to finally be back on my own, and grateful that they insisted I make the journey rather than push on to another interview.

The following day I go to the Terezín Initiative Institute, a project dedicated to the history of the Final Solution in Bohemia. Its headquarters are in Prague. I show up unannounced, but there I meet Tereza Štěpková, the director. She sees nothing in her files on Valy, but she sees that Valy’s father was deported to Theresienstadt in 1943. He died there. As she has not much more to offer me, we find ourselves talking about children. She has two, and she’s involved in this work because of them. “I think it’s better when the child knows very early in his life” about the war, she says. “It is better than if he or she comes to school and at ten years old, along comes the Holocaust and he or she
knows nothing about it. I think for the child it is . . . a shock. And it is not good for them.” I tell her I wonder if it is different, though, for Jews. Jews know from such an early age about their own persecution, perhaps we learn too early and too much about victimization. How can we navigate their relationship to the material? She considers that, but it is far from her own experience. For her, it is important that kids recognize ordinariness. The arbitrary. That those who were lost were their neighbors. Were kids like them. Otherwise they can be too distanced from the material.

And it is true, to some degree Valy sought ordinariness. She and her mother left Troppau—where everyone knew them as Jews, where her mother’s business had just been destroyed—and sought shelter in the most contrary place I could imagine—Berlin. In Troppau’s archives, I see what I know from my own collection of letters—by 1940, if not earlier, both women are ensconced in Berlin, in the process of being “retrained” for emigration.

Berlin had more work to offer Jews, and the city, counterintuitively, was less overtly anti-Semitic than the small towns. Their move to the bigger cities was part of a larger migration that began in 1933: Jews seeking anonymity away from the stifling villages. Valy was fortunate, to a degree: she was hired by the Reich’s major Jewish organization, the Reichsvereinigung—the Council of Jews organized and manipulated by the Nazis in Germany to control the Jewish population. It was organized, first, to push Jews out the door through legal emigration. It morphed into a macabre temp agency, putting Jews to work until they were sent to their deaths. Eventually, the organization helped the Nazi machine keep the deportations orderly. They thought if they did so, some would be saved.

Valy writes my grandfather that she desperately wanted to stay in medicine, not be sent to work in a factory, not have her mind shut down; and for a long time, she did that—she worked as a nurse, she taught, she saw patients. She ached for my grandfather more and more as time went by. He was not just her old boyfriend, of course—he was
freedom, he was the real world, and he was the difference between terror and normal life. She was endlessly, endlessly trying to emigrate. She was thwarted at every turn. When Germany invades Poland, Europe is again at war, and outlets for emigration—few to begin with—close day after day. At first, life in Berlin is easier than Troppau, but only marginally—the restrictions confining Jewish life come week after week. I want to find a listing of all the restrictions, to know what her days were like, to know how her liberties were stripped from her. I want to know if I can find more about what she actually experienced there. To follow her path, I will go back to
Berlin.

Five

B
ERLIN

B
erlin is a peculiar time for me. Pregnant, I feel vulnerable wandering these streets, looking for ghosts. I rent a room on Husemannstrasse in Prenzlauer Berg, in one of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings reclaimed and rehabbed after Communism by young Westerners drawn to the opportunities (and kitsch) offered by the old East. The building itself is older than so much of this rebuilt city, but the neighborhood is very new Berlin. On the ground floor is a center for ayurveda and wellness; the central courtyard is packed full of bicycles and baby carriages; the back garden is lush and green. My flatmate is a taciturn British artist who spends his days tutoring English and his evenings sketching eerie images of women whose faces he then purposely blurs out; he makes barely enough money to pay the rent and hardly ever goes out. The others in the building are far better-off; there are dozens of small children.

Among most of the people I meet in Berlin, there is more conversation about the Cold War than World War II. Unlike the ghosts I am chasing, the Wall is still a part of recent memory, still raw, especially here in the old East. For me, the Wall is further away, less tangible.
Even so, unlike in Vienna, the Holocaust is not subtext here, it is contextual; it is so present, it is almost absent, part of the texture of the streets, part of the culpability on behalf of grandparents easily acknowledged by those of my generation. If anything, it is overacknowledged, often apologized for. I am reminded constantly of the penitent prayers we say on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—
Ashamnu, Bagadnu
, “We have become desolate,” “We have betrayed.” Memorials abound. One night a group of expat acquaintances and I troop around the corner to the Rykestrasse Synagogue; the building survived Kristallnacht (locals feared fire would take down the neighborhood), the war, and Communism. The Israeli singer Idan Raichel was performing there that night. As the musicians took the stage, Raichel began to speak to the audience. His grandmother, he said, had been a Berliner; she fled, in the 1930s, for Palestine. Before he came to Berlin, he told the crowd, she urged him not to go—“Who will come see a Jew perform?” she said. The sold-out synagogue applauded and cheered. I began to cry.

So there are memorials, verbal, physical. But it’s for the
un
-memorialized that I’ve come here. So I begin to walk where Valy walked, go where she went. I request materials from the archives that might have information on Valy’s life, work, and residences during the war. There was careful documentation of all property looted by the Gestapo from Jews, notes on their restricted movements, their work, their highly observed and constrained lives. For Valy and others in Berlin, these, largely, remain on file at the Landesarchiv Berlin (the Berlin state archive) and the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv in Potsdam (the Brandenburg state archive), and they include the notes of the Oberfinanzpräsident Berlin-Brandenburg, the financial tallying of all those looted by the Nazis before deportation or expulsion. I send away, too, a request to the Compensation Authorities—the Entschädigungsbehörde—at the state agency that facilitated indemnity requests for those who had been forced laborers or concentration camp inmates, indeed for all German Jews who had
been persecuted; compensation was paid for having to wear the yellow star, for loss of professional advancement, for loss of family members, for physical damages (and psychological ones).

I want to know if anyone filed a request on Valy’s behalf for monetary damages—or for any compensation—or on behalf of Hans Fabisch, the man mysteriously linked to her name at ITS. I hope I might find whether Valy survived the war, or, at least, gain some larger understanding of her experience under the Reich. In the meantime, I begin to visit all the places Valy wrote from—there are at least a half-dozen, she moved a lot—and I finally start to parse the letters more fully, as the key to understanding Valy best is her own words, and those of people she knew slowly making their way out of the Reich.

I have never actively craved motherhood, I realize, yet somehow this pregnancy makes my journey much less lonely. I talk to my belly as it grows; I photograph it. I am suddenly desexed; men do not notice me. I am often alone on an old bike that I bought in Mauerpark, the flea market in the Cold War–era no-man’s-land where the Wall (
Mauer
) once ran, from a Swiss kid who sold it to me for twenty-four euros and later wrote to me, worried that he had sold me a lemon in my condition. I try to picture Valy writing to my grandfather. She never speaks of motherhood, though the years of her letters bring her into her early thirties, late by the standards of her day, and she is working with kids.

The children in Valy’s care are patients, or they are work; they are both darling and a nuisance—or they are leaving, in droves. They are not a source of wistful imagining. Perhaps the hope of emigration was enough wistfulness. Perhaps Valy hadn’t wanted children. In truth she wasn’t in a terribly good position to have them—pregnant women and women with small children did not fare well under the Reich, not in the time of deprivation—as children become, intentionally, aggressively, more and more malnourished—and certainly not by the time of deportation. Children were not useful to the Nazis; so they were, eventually, destroyed, murdered in ways I can barely stand to read
about. I feel ravaged by story after story, especially knowing I am growing my own child.