Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (41 page)

“Somehow, for reasons that are difficult to explain,” Wollheim continued,

we felt a certain amount of relief, because after all these weeks of waiting, and these weeks of expectations, knowing that so many trains had left Berlin already before, we thought, “It’s a new
chapter,” and we were actually looking forward to that chapter with optimism and hoping or believing, envisioning that we would be taken to some kind of labor camp where we could work, but survive, and wait for the end of the war. . . . We had difficulties to find out where we were going, but when we saw we were going toward the east . . . my wife . . . she and others wrote cards, postcards, because we knew it from other things, from transports which had left Berlin before, that people had thrown out these cards and these cards had been mailed. . . . We were in such a rather good mood that we even started to sing. There was a song in the youth movement, it’s in Hebrew, “How nice it is when friends sit together and are together in friendship.” . . . It was Friday evening after darkness fell, one of the elderly ladies remembered she had taken some candles along and she was lighting the candles and saying the prayers and we found this somehow encouraging, though it’s so absolutely irrational now, it’s so irrational that here, but nobody knew . . . that ninety-five percent of the people on that train would not live to see the next evening.

Surely among those who did not live to see the morning was Valy’s mother. In 1943, that brutal year, women in their fifties were not often selected for work on the notorious selection ramps that divided the living from the soon-to-be-dead at Auschwitz. Surely she was shoved into the line designated for gas upon arrival at the camp. Surely she was chosen for death. But of that I can only guess. There is no further information about her; she received no number at the camp. Her story has no end. She simply
disappears.

Nine

A N
EW
N
AME

T
here are no brass
Stolpersteine
marking the lost in front of 43 Brandenburgische Strasse 43, the last Berlin address
I have for Valy. In the files I received from the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv, I confirm that, for a year or so after the letters end, Valy’s life remained in Babelsberg, Potsdam, with her mother, both women cut off by war from the outside world. And then, at some point, at the very end of 1942 or the very beginning of 1943, her time as the
Burgfräulein
comes to a close; like Toni, Valy moves back into Berlin, and out of the old-age home, just before all of its residents are sent to the east and, surely, to their deaths. The hope Valy writes of in late 1941—to hear the Shabbat morning service in the foyer for a long time to come—lasted one year.

I go back again to my box of letters to see if there is any chance I have missed something that can give me a clue as to what my grandfather and Valy were thinking or doing after Valy’s letters stop—during that crucial window from December 1941 until the beginning of 1943 for which I have nothing. When I first discovered the box labeled “Correspondence, Patients A–G,” I separated out a clump that seemed less immediately important. And there I see it. A letter
postmarked July 21, 1942, from the Berkshire County Chapter of the American Red Cross. It is addressed to Dr. Charles (!) J. Wildman. Perhaps that was why I didn’t open it originally.

“Dr. Wildman,” the letter reads, “We have just received the enclosed message for you from Germany, through the offices of the International Red Cross in Washington, D.C. If you wish to send a reply, the reverse side of the form may be used. Your message must be in English, must be typewritten, and is limited to twenty-five (25) words of purely personal character. The return message must be sent through the American Red Cross. . . . We shall be glad to forward it promptly for you, as one of the Red Cross Services. Very truly yours . . .”

There is nothing else in the envelope. Valy reached out, and my grandfather, it seems, replied. It was mid-1942. He got a poem from her, he responded in kind. But the words themselves are lost. I write to the Red Cross in Geneva, to ITS, to Sweden, and I wait.

Oh, what did they say! I call the archivists at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The librarian who answers tells me it is unlikely it contained much news—other than the very fact that she was still alive, still living in Berlin. He suggests it might be on file in Geneva, but it is unlikely. Representatives at the American Red Cross in Washington, as well as at the Pittsfield branch in Massachusetts, similarly turn up nothing for me. I open the envelope a dozen times hoping I have somehow missed something. The only piece of information I have is that they communicated, at least once, in 1942.

It is here where my grandfather’s story finally fully splinters away from Valy and Toni’s experience. It is unbelievably incongruous—almost unfairly so—to juxtapose what was happening for my grandfather the year that Valy’s life shrank from tiny to minuscule. In 1942, his practice has finally begun to thrive. The Vienna friends he hears from now are in Philadelphia, or Brooklyn—or they are trapped in Shanghai—desperate and poor, but relatively safe. He no longer hears from those who remain in Vienna or Berlin.

Letters still surface from strange parts of the world. In June 1942, an old schoolmate, David Teichmann, writes him unhappily from Tatura, Victoria, Australia, where he has been interned in a prisoner-of-war camp for German nationals. “You may be surprised to hear from me from as far away as Australia,” Teichmann writes, wearily. “Just a few weeks before I was due to leave for America from England, I was unfortunately interned and sent out here.” I read that twice—he was deported, I realize, with horror, from England to Australia. “I am not too bad, but I find life in here pretty monotonous.” He asks my grandfather to send him a few medical textbooks, as his own are out-of-date. Konrad Kwiet, the Australian Holocaust historian I met in Bad Arolsen, sends me a paper on these Jewish unfortunates. Some two thousand German Jews were interned in Australia, deemed potential fifth columnists, and stuck, like poor Teichmann, in camps like Tatura.

My grandfather may worry for them all, but his life is in an infinitely better—easier—place at this point. His relationship with Tonya, the girl he first dated in America, has fully ended—though she continues to write to him, to push for his attention. He is considering how to join the war effort. “It is every Jew’s duty—this is the only country in which we still have some freedom,” Tonya wrote that summer. And he is dating my grandmother, Dorothy Kolman, who herself seems to still be wooing him. Dorothy writes, that same month, “I came to Philadelphia yesterday and spent last evening with a southern friend of mine. . . . There, at long last I met her uncle, a young, brilliant lawyer about 27—whom I’ve been hearing about for years. . . . Funny thing, the family always considered us a wonderful match and were sure we couldn’t resist each other’s charms should we but meet. . . . When I met him all I could say to him was ‘Oh you’re the man I’m sure to marry!’ And he said practically the same thing. He is incidentally quite fascinating, and what quick wit!” I tell my father about this letter. He says he knew of it already, that it was part of the oft-told story of their courtship—the big trip she took, the way she told Karl there
would be other men, and the way he called her back and said he wanted only her, and asked her not to see any of her other suitors anymore. He may be passing messages through the Red Cross to Valy, but he is also moving on.

Dorothy Wildman, née Kolman, my grandmother, around 1941.

I have my grandmother’s letters to him as she traveled to North Carolina, for a college reunion, and New York. She notes the ramp-up to war, but life is not yet defined by it. “Near Washington we had to stop for an unusually long time so I raised my window shade to investigate. To my great surprise I looked right into a train just crowded with soldiers . . .” She, too, worries, about when and whether Karl, too, will be sent overseas. His army status remains unclear. By October, they have determined their own status: they will marry. She travels to New York to look for wedding clothing and to meet with his family; she investigates for him how to strip the second
n
from Wildmann—to remove that German stain. Their lives are otherwise so very normal: “Our trip down was pleasant enough. There was no traffic and conditions were ideal for speeding but we drove 55 miles per hour as patriotic citizens should.” She considers who will be in their wedding party. Cilli, Karl’s sister, she writes, has declined to be a bridesmaid, she claims she is too busy running after her children. Dorothy teases Karl in an earlier letter—“Your diagnosis is correct, doctor, I miss either seeing or talking to you and hearing your deeply philosophical observations on life and love or your scintillating analysis about such weighty matters as your right shoe.” But mostly she talks of how in love she is, how much she misses him when she is away. The words,
at times, mirror Valy’s. “I feel like kissing you but since I can’t I’ll just have to imagine it.”

In November 1942,
The Berkshire Eagle
will run a story about Karl and Dorothy’s wedding, accompanied by a lovely photo of my grandmother, her lips reddened, her face turned demurely to the side. “The bride wore white satin with a sweetheart neckline, a fitted bodice and a court train.” There was a violinist, a vocalist, and an Orthodox rabbi.

The walk from the train to Valy’s last address in the city is past a massive sex shop, the sort with cartoonish-looking photos of women of enormous proportions and furry handcuffs in the window. Brandenburgische Strasse 43, Wilmersdorf, is a mixed-use building from around 1910. On the ground floor I see there is a homeopathic medical practice, a lawyer, a taxi school; the upper floors are residential apartments. When a tenant enters the foyer, I slip in after him and begin to take photos. I am obtrusive. A man in his late sixties approaches and asks if I need help. I demur. But then I babble a bit: I tell him I believe the building had once been a
Judenhaus
. He looks perplexed.
I feel badly, suddenly, about saying this; he was clearly born after the war, or, at the very least, had been quite young. It is an ambush. “I’ve been here twenty-seven years,” he says. And the building, he tells me, has been standing on the same spot for over a century. He is confident I am mistaken: nothing of import took place here.

A much younger man joins us, with better English. “I’m a journalist,” I explain. “A woman I know was deported from here.” I pull out Valy’s International Tracing Service file that I received in Bad Arolsen and show them. “You see,” I say, pointing to the address listed at the top of her form. “She lived here. And was sent away from here.” They seem surprised. The older man invites me to dinner, he is curious to know what I have discovered.

I have discovered, I say, that life was increasingly unbearable. Even years before deportation.

Beyond the address, the ITS file showed me something else I had not yet wanted to think about, had still not yet known how to consider. Valy’s ITS file is not connected to Toni’s at all. At the beginning of January 1943, seven months after she reached out to Karl through the Red Cross, Valy changed her name from Scheftel to Fabisch, after Hans Fabisch, her husband. Like Karl, Valy married.

Unfairly, I found this heartbreaking to know—I simply couldn’t fathom what had changed for Valy after her final letter, which is still so filled with love and desperation—“
You know, darling,
when I am asking why a cruel destiny has separated me from you.”
What brought her to the point of agreeing to marry this other man?

Was she, like Karl, finally moving on? I wondered if this was a sort of final recognition that
this
was her reality, this diminished world, this life seemingly without a present; and to deny herself the only possible sliver of life, the closeness of another person, the normalcy of physical contact, was not only no longer a priority, but no longer even practical. In 1941, she wrote my grandfather that she passed up romantic opportunities for him; by the end of 1942, clearly, she no longer denied herself. Perhaps, I thought, this was a happy turn—this relationship—perhaps it gave her a bit of joy, a piece of something that could not be taken away from her. In the years since Karl fled, after all, her entire relationship with my grandfather had taken place in her mind. A romantic daydream, made more vivid, made more tangible, tactile, present by her increasing desperation, her “endless hibernation,” a life lived in black and white while his continued on, far away, in Technicolor.