Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (39 page)

In Austria, Jews were less cautious, she says. They sought these extra-legal options—through Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, to Palestine—sooner, and more often, than their northern neighbors. What made the difference? I ask. “The German Jewish leaders were Germans!” She laughs, a bit bitterly. “They thought everything should go in an orderly way.” The Austrians just wanted out. Austrian Jews, she reminds me, had been swept under by a quick wave of institutionalized anti-Semitism that began with fury in 1938, with the Anschluss, when
five years of progressive anti-Jewish legislation endured by their German neighbors was imposed on the newly incorporated Reich in a matter of weeks. In Germany, on the other hand, the “German Jewish leaders became familiar with the rising persecution,” a slow sinking, a loss of footing, that took place gradually, from 1933 on. Each subsequent humiliation was endured, weathered, surmounted. “But as they delayed the chance to leave, the Reich decided that they wouldn’t let them leave after all.”

Not everyone delayed. More than half of Germany’s Jews had
left by 1938. It was the others, those left behind, the girls who had not been sent out, so their brothers and fathers could escape—as Valy tells my grandfather “only women are left”—the elderly, the infirm; it was the families that couldn’t quite believe it would get any worse—when that group began to clamor to leave, the doors had closed.

Jews like Valy and Toni scrambled to remain relevant; work was literally the difference between life and deportation. Meanwhile, the Nazis prepared to liquidate the population. But that process couldn’t take place all at once; extermination took time. The German manufacturing sector still needed this labor force, after all. And the camps themselves were not ready.

Meyer continued, narrating the movement from forced immigration to expulsion to extermination. “They needed trains and camps and guards,” she says. “First they brought [Jews] to the ghettos for a certain time and after that they would be brought to other ghettos far in the east but nothing was prepared. Then [the Nazis] decided to murder the Jews.” Murders were at a rapid clip in the east. Five hundred thousand had been killed between June and the end of 1941 by the Einsatzgruppen in the east. “But the decision to murder the German Jews, too, was made in December 1941.” There is no document that confirms this, but it is the date that most historians agree was the turning point for the fate of German Jewry.

Some who remained in the Reich when the deportations began received ominous notes from the ghettos of the east with coded words
like “widow” written after a name, so that those who received the message would know—a husband had died. But how? Why? That was unclear, unexplained. Those who were sent on early transports to the ghettos in Lodz and Riga had little contact with people back at home: a few letters, and a few eyewitnesses, reported conditions that seemed unbelievable—hygiene had disintegrated, food was scarce, death everywhere.
In 1942, Marianne Strauss, the girl who was in the Kindergartenseminar, the subject of Mark Roseman’s book
A Past in Hiding
, was able to discover a glimpse, through letters smuggled by a sympathetic—and daring—Aryan, the horrific conditions of the Izbica ghetto her lover had been deported to in Poland, along with his family.

But it was not merely the destination that was terrifying to the Jews of Berlin like Valy and her mother. The collection points in Berlin were also awful: Jewish workers in these makeshift transit camps, one based at the Levetzowstrasse Synagogue, another at an old-age home at Grosse Hamburger Strasse, were told that, under penalty of their own deportation, they could not report back what they saw; they could not pass messages back to those who remained behind. The so-called evacuations were terrifying, mortifying; a foreshadowing of deprivations to come. Inmates were subjected to body searches in front of their neighbors; rooms were locked to prevent flight; dozens upon dozens of children were packed into a room with space for, perhaps, twenty, with fetid air and endless anguish all around. “
A dreadful future awaited them, and some of them already guessed this. . . . The older ones wanted to be left alone. . . . The smaller ones cried for their mothers, from whom they were cruelly separated in the same building,” remembered worker Edith Dietz after the war. In the former Levetzowstrasse Synagogue, women threw themselves over the balcony to their deaths in the pews below; the sound of sobbing filled the air for hours, days, on end.

But if 1941 was dreadful, it was 1942—after Valy’s letters end—when the prospects for even those with work became much, much worse. That fall, Alois Brunner arrived in Berlin. “He was the Nazi
responsible for deportations from Vienna,” explained Meyer. The Gestapo in Vienna was considered more brutal, more efficient—more effective. Brunner—at the time, all of thirty years old—was brought to Berlin to streamline the deportations and speed them up in the goal of a
judenrein
, or
Jew-free, Berlin. Instead of random deportations, Brunner “changed the assembly camps in Berlin into a kind of prison and he caught the Jews in the streets and in their houses.” He would seal off whole city blocks, encircle entire apartment buildings; he gave orders to liquidate the old-age homes and orphanages. Deportations were no longer piecemeal; now everyone in the dragnet would be taken.

No one was protected any longer; not the Reichsvereinigung workers, not their charges. “Only the Jews who lived in privileged mixed marriages,” said Meyer. “But a normal Jewish woman who was not a so-called
Mischling
”—a person of half-Aryan descent—“was not able to avoid the star. Despite that fact, a lot of Jews didn’t wear it when they left their homes because they said it was dangerous to wear it and dangerous not to wear it.” With the star, they were targets in the street—of taunting, harassment, beatings, random arrest, or worse—but if they decided to forgo the star, woe be the man or woman who was discovered to be a Jew defying the law. That was considered sabotage; that meant immediate deportation.

“So they avoided [the star] but they had to wear it in their working place,” Meyer continued. “There were controls by the Gestapo and they had to wear [the star] when they left the house because non-Jewish neighbors could denounce them for not wearing it. . . . [Then] they would get a notice they [had been selected] for the next deportation.”

With or without the star, Valy and her mother, like all the Jews in Berlin at this point, knew that the chance of deportation was coming closer and closer, whatever it meant to be sent to the east; the reality of which remained unclear. “
These deportations were something monstrous,” wrote Camilla Neumann in Berlin, at the end of the war. “It was horrible when the dark car with the SS bandits stopped in
front of the door and picked up the careworn men and women and the innocent children. . . . A large number of people from the Jewish community had to participate in the round-ups. They were authorized by the Gestapo and one had to go with them. If one resisted, they used force. They said that otherwise it would cost them their own heads. We were very distressed that Jews allowed themselves to be involved in something like that. But it did not stop with that. Finally the Jews were caught like dogs. They were rounded up from the stores, from the waiting rooms of doctors, from the streets and were loaded onto trucks. If one did not climb on quickly enough, one was shoved on.”

As the existential threat of expulsion hung over them, the indignities and deprivations continued. Though Valy’s letters to my grandfather had stopped, from the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv records I see that Valy and her mother work on, through the following year. But life began deteriorating at an ever more rapid clip, and those who waited for word of her—my grandfather, her uncle, her friends—heard nothing further and surely feared what they were experiencing.

In early January 1942, Valy and her mother were forced to turn in all remaining warm items to the Gestapo: wool sweaters and clothing and socks; ski boots and skis; furs. In February, they were banned from purchasing newspapers; in March, they were stripped of the right to use all public transport unless they had a necessary seven-kilometer commute—and paperwork documenting that. By summer, the shopping hour restrictions were made stricter: Jews could no longer line up before the four p.m. start time, and they would not be served if the hour ended before they had shopped, even if they had entered a shop in advance of the five p.m. end-of-shopping hour. In October, Jews were banned from buying books. Many of the restrictions were published in the
Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt
, the Jewish newspaper controlled by the Gestapo. It got thinner and thinner as a paper and began to include practical life skills, like how to cook an omelet with no egg,
liver sausages with no liver, make coffee with no coffee. The editor in chief had a heart attack and died.

On one brutal day in October 1942, leaders of the Reichsvereinigung were told to assemble staff in the building of the synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse. Once inside, they were told to select five hundred lower-level workers who were no longer “necessary” for work. “There was a terrible scene,” says Meyer. “The head of the social welfare department,” the woman who likely employed Valy, “had a nervous breakdown, saying, ‘Take me, take me, but not my staff!’ And others refused [to choose].” Two days later, the Gestapo declared that for every person selected for deportation who tried to escape, one higher-ranking official would be shot. The Reichsvereinigung members themselves went to flush out those who had evaded the edict.

That was actually the second terrible event of 1942, says Meyer. The first was when a small group of young Jews, led by a Communist, attacked an anti-Semitic and anti-Communist exhibit on the Soviet Union, wounding a handful of Nazis. The resistance fighters were sentenced to death for the bombing, their family members were deported, and the leaders of the Reichsvereinigung were forced to stand for hours on end, facing a wall, not told what their punishment was being meted out for. In the aftermath of that incident, Meyer says, five hundred were arrested and two hundred fifty shot immediately.

Eventually, Meyer emphasizes, as the Reichsvereinigung prepared list after list of Jews to be sent east, those who remained in Berlin had come to realize that they were all to be deported, and the only reason they weren’t being sent at once was merely a question of infrastructure, not intention. This realization taints the image of the Reichsvereinigung and has shaped much of Meyer’s work. Why did they not warn people to hide? Did Toni—eventually a “leader” in the Reichsvereinigung, at least in terms of her old-age home—did she hold any responsibility? Did Valy, who was merely placed by these Jewish leaders but did, after all, receive her salary from them? They were cogs, more than anything, worker bees in an enormous hive.

But of the chiefs? Leaders like Rabbi Leo Baeck, those who determined the lists of deportations, those who heard more from the Gestapo? This conversation spawned half a century of debate.

Hannah Arendt unequivocally believed that the work of the Reichsvereinigung was akin to what their counterparts were forced to do in Poland, where the Gestapo strong-armed Jewish communities into forming
Judenräte
, Jewish councils, which were forced to aid the Nazi effort to destroy the Jews. Scathingly, she wrote in
Eichmann in Jerusalem
:

To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. . . . In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation.

Arendt believed, conclusively, that without these helper Jews, the sheer need for manpower alone would have mucked up the works of the Gestapo; that the Jews themselves smoothed the way for their own destruction. She believed that the immorality of the helpful work of the Jewish councils was as clear as the immorality of their executioners; that the moral breakdown of European society extended to the victims themselves. But Arendt’s worldview was predicated on her knowledge of the full destruction of European Jewry, knowledge that Berlin’s Jews (and Warsaw’s and Amsterdam’s) did not have.

I want to know: Where were Toni and Valy in that system? So, I ask Meyer, was the Reichsvereinigung culpable? But Meyer, like other scholars I read later, rejects the question, rejects the purity of Arendt’s argument. The Reichsvereinigung was in an impossible situation, she says, and the leaders thought they were doing the best for the community with the tools they had in hand. “
To claim that demonstrative refusal, open resistance, and a mass movement underground would have enabled a greater number of people to survive is mere speculation—and assumes that the majority of German Jews would have been prepared for this. . . . The tragedy of the Reichsvereinigung . . . is marked by the objective hopelessness of all attempts” to protect their own people. “The representatives became entangled in the Nazi policy of extermination, for which they were at the same time not responsible,” she wrote in an essay she sent me that was published to accompany an exhibit on the lives of Jews in Berlin under the Reich. In other words: the killing would have gone on, with or without their cooperation.