Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (44 page)

“You must take some time with this,” Carol says, urging me to wait until she is gone to read. Then she adds that I might want to return: she has hundreds of letters at home, from Hans, maybe from Valy, from her grandparents, from others connected to them.

“He was my Uncle Hans’s best friend, and he writes about wearing the star and trying to go into hiding,” Carol says of Ernest Fontheim.
They met on the first day they were both conscripted for forced labor at Siemens on April 29, 1941. Fontheim describes their days—their predawn first S-Bahn train to the factory, to the people who worked alongside them, to the total deprivation of cultural life for Jews—just as Valy wrote in her letters.

“I would like to tell you so much about me, but when I start thinking I find that, most of the time, my life is so poor as far as inner content is concerned, and thereby I mean positive experiences, that it hardly makes sense to talk a lot about it,”
Valy wrote in October 1941.
“It was and continues to be some kind of stupor, a type of hibernating condition, an eternal waiting for you. Somebody once said that the best and most tolerable way of dealing with a long wait is to fill the time with lots of activities. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. My outer life absolutely is characterized by keeping busy and, maybe, even working.”

Skimming quickly, I realize: Finally I have a means of understanding how Valy, ten years Hans’s senior, had met and married, and when. Suddenly the shadow character of Hans, the also-ran, the man who was not my grandfather, takes shape, begins to turn into a real person, an incredible character, as drawn by his friend, dashing, mischievous, studying surreptitiously to become a doctor—he was waited for, vainly, desperately, by his older sister, who had made it to the United Kingdom. Hans, I read, had prepared papers for himself and Valy to go underground. I look at Carol. Here is this other person I hadn’t known existed, who cared. Here is this whole
group
of people, rather. Carol, her father, her siblings. Suddenly there is a whole additional family for whom this story mattered.

I put the letter down for a moment. It is too long, and answered so much, and raised so many questions, I couldn’t process it without taking great time.

Carol begins to talk. In the early 1990s, she interviewed her mother, along with her mother’s circle of German Jewish refugees. It
was a tight-knit group; the women had become family to one another during and after the war; most, if not all, had suffered tremendous loss. “All of them had come out of Germany and had met here, and became the replaced families throughout their lives. It was all through women. The men didn’t have intimate relationships. I have a tape of her and her friends talking about what it was like to come to England. They talk about their kids and personal stuff.” After Carol’s interview, her mother announced it was time for her to return to Breslau. Carol was shocked to hear her say it.

“She had always said, ‘I’m never going back to Germany,’” she explains. “I was really worried. I thought she’d be destroyed. But she came back and she was so happy! She said, ‘All these years I’ve hung on to the pain and ghastly memories and couldn’t talk about it. But I’ve gone back and found the happy childhood that I had. And my school and all the good things that there were as well in my younger life. It was fantastic.’ She said she couldn’t have done it if we hadn’t had that conversation.” The trip allowed her to reclaim some of the joy of a German childhood that had been comfortable, wealthy, assimilated, and, above all, joyful.

Carol has two girls, Charlotte and Jessica, in their middle and late thirties, respectively, and a toddler grandson named Leo; his photo filled up her mobile phone. Charlotte and Jess were raised only nominally Jewish. It was Jess who looked me up on the Internet, read my stories online, and told her mother, I imagine, that I was legitimate.

Paul, Carol’s father, is still alive. A gifted athlete, he would have competed in the 1936 Olympics, in the decathlon, Carol tells me, had the anti-Jewish policies not been in place. The family story is that there was an “alternate” team of Jewish athletes, ready to go in the event the International Olympics Committee insisted Jews be included. No such team was called upon, but Paul remained active in athletics his entire life.

After arriving in England, Mayer enlisted in the British army, joined the SOE—Special Operations Executive—and parachuted
behind enemy lines in France and Germany. After the war, he founded the Primrose Club, a youth and recreation center that helped survivor children and teens reclaim normal lives after their distinctly abnormal childhoods. In an effort to return joy and normalcy to the (mostly) boys who had survived the camps and emerged to find themselves virtually alone—their entire families, in so many cases, murdered—he introduced them to other Jewish British teens and involved them in dances and sports.
Mayer was profiled in Martin Gilbert’s book
The Boys
, about the unlikely convoy of survivor children—mostly teenagers, mostly boys—liberated from camps and taken to the United Kingdom in the summer of 1945. He was, all in all, generally acknowledged for having addressed the trauma of those returning from camps in ways far ahead of his time; the idea of integrating these kids in groups with those who had lived the war years relatively normally, in England, was itself revolutionary, and fantastically successful. In the 1990s, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Potsdam University. Until recently, he lectured extensively on his life.

Carol says he has a trove of papers from Hans and the family—letters, photos, artifacts. “The next time you come,” she insists, “you’ll start to go through them all with me. You must come meet my father. And it has to be soon. He’s ninety-eight.”

“Now! Now you must write this book,” pushes Jean-Marc, who, by that point, has joined us.

As I get up to pay for our coffees, I realize I am witnessing an unspooling, an interconnectedness I haven’t remotely anticipated. The story is no longer just about Valy. It is a microcosm of the strange ways in which we remain connected to our history, the peculiarity in which the tragedy of the individual, amidst the greater horror, somehow allows Carol, me, our families to understand the war better, to incorporate it into not just our sense of self, but also how we internalize it, make it our own, how we relate to the past, all of us, and how we hold it, selectively, simultaneously close and at a distance.

Carol, too, has given me a tremendous gift: the opportunity to
understand the rest of Valy’s story. Back in America, I read and reread the rest of Ernest Fontheim’s letter. But before I do, I look him up. Still alive, Fontheim lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is a professor and research scientist emeritus of physics at the university. I call the number in the phone book. His wife answers. “I’m calling about Hans Fabisch,” I blurt out, realizing I have not prepared what to say. “I’ll get Ernest,” she
says.

Eleven

T
HE
O
NLY
P
OSSIBILITY

S
ometime in the lonely summer of 1942, Valy—bereft of even the rare letters my grandfather had provided, bereft of credible options to
get out
—sometime in those miserable months when it seemed the rest of the world had forgotten her and her mother, sometime in that period when it seemed nothing could ever shake the torpor that had settled over them, the endless waiting, the dreary sameness of their days, caring for the elderly and worrying they would lose even the small semblance of normalcy their lives still retained, by being sent, like their neighbors,
east
, whatever that meant, sometime in those months, Valy met Hans Fabisch. And as bleak as her world was, as miserable as she felt, and as hungry—and oh, they were so very hungry, food was all they thought about—suddenly there was something to wake up for again
.
He made her feel young, for the first time, really, since Vienna.

Hans was raffish, still a bit pudgy about the cheeks, despite malnourishment, despite entering his twenties. He had a stick of hair that stuck up in front, and a streak of noncompliance with authority, with the rules of the day, that felt, to all who met him, like opportunity. He had studied chemistry for as long as he was allowed to go to school
and then he found work at the Jewish Hospital, as Valy had, but by the summer of 1942, he was a regular forced laborer, working ten-hour days on his feet in armaments at Siemens. Hans told Valy, with great confidence, his dream was to go back to school—it wasn’t an idle thought. He was only twenty-one. Their ten-year age difference meant Hans had been deprived the trajectory of a normal education: having grown up under the Reich since the age of twelve, he had been able to finish high school but not to go on to university. He would, he told her, become a doctor. He firmly believed the war would end, and he would find his way into a classroom—somewhere, he hoped, other than Germany. He was so certain of this, so refreshingly optimistic about his chances of survival, he was determined to keep up with his peers in his studies. To that end, he had started to train himself, he’d collected books; he studied on his own. Valy—as she had with my grandfather so many years before—offered to tutor him, to serve as a teacher, a sounding board, to quietly resist the system by refusing to let him be undereducated. In turn, Hans introduced her to his world of Jews who were fighting to remain sane—to remain human.

It was a welcome moment of forward thinking. Working at the Jewish Hospital, and then working in her mother’s old-age home, Valy had filled her days first by caring for the miserably malnourished children; speaking with the anxious parents who themselves seemed to wither away week to week, their clothes battered and patched, their spirits waning; and then trying to prop up the elderly who lived under her mother’s care, to keep them going physically and mentally.

Valy sewed a star onto each of her uniforms. She hoped her shoes would not wear out; if they did, she had no recourse. The fear of being sent on the next transport dominated every conversation, every waking moment. “
What could we possibly talk about?” wondered Gerda Haas, a nurse at the Jewish Hospital. “We couldn’t go to a movie. We didn’t [have] concerts, or any of the culture that normal people grow up with. We couldn’t go shopping. We didn’t have any new clothes to show off. What are we going to talk about? Transports and going
underground, and we had no family left. We couldn’t talk about family anymore, so we talked about that all the time. It was like ruminating—the same thing all the time. It was a very unnatural life actually.”

Hans Fabisch.

Ernest wrote:

In normal times, both of us would have studied at the university. Hans’s goal was to become a physician, and I wanted to study either chemistry or physics. The path was now blocked for us. Hans and I were very conscious of the fact that the combination of long hours at hard work in the factory and total lack of any cultural or intellectual stimulation would lead to a complete proletarisation in a cultural and intellectual sense. Economically we were already proletarians anyway. . . . We consciously decided to fight this trend. . . . We got together with a circle of Jewish young people, all of them forced laborers in the German war machine, all of them well educated and intellectually curious and frustrated over not being able to have any intellectual stimulation. This group of young people was not a formal organization, which would not have been possible anyway because it would have run afoul of Gestapo regulations for Jews. Most of us had some connections to Jews of the older generation who had been kicked out of their professions and were frequently eager to give informal talks to young people. We met periodically in each other’s apartments to listen to such lectures. . . .

Hans prepared himself very seriously for his medical career. . . . He had several medical books for this purpose. He did some of these studies with the support of Dr. Valy Scheftel, a Jewish physician from Vienna who then lived in Berlin and, of course, as a Jew could not practice medicine. . . . Hans and Valy fell in love and got married on January 5, 1943. Valy was several years older than Hans. She was a lovely and very warm person, and she and I also became good friends.