Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (50 page)

So I know this: in 1945 into 1946, Maria let my grandfather know that Valy had not, at the very least, returned to Troppau. But then again, no one was going “home”—if home was Troppau or Vienna. Perhaps my grandfather still held out hope that Valy and Toni were in a displaced persons camp somewhere in Germany. There were so many who were.

When I first started to think about Valy and Karl, a Holocaust historian directed me to watch an episode of
This Is Your Life
broadcast in 1953. The honoree was a young and beautiful woman named Hanna Bloch Kohner. She has a slight accent, is dressed gorgeously, like a sketch of a 1950s Chanel model, with a fitted jacket, white gloves, and full skirt. At one point in the broadcast, the announcer intones, in that distinctive voice, “Looking at you, it’s hard to believe that during seven short years of a still-short life, you lived a lifetime of fear, terror, and tragedy!” At the end of the broadcast, there is a special guest—“your brother, Hanna . . . The last time you were in touch with Gottfried was in a Nazi concentration camp nearly ten years ago. Now here he is, from Israel! Your brother, Dr. Gottfried Bloch!” And Hanna begins to weep and weep, overwhelmed with an emotion well beyond the show’s normal scope.

It was the first time anyone had seen a Holocaust survivor on television. The brother is the most extreme, but actually, all of Hanna’s “long-lost” friends hail from her seven years of internment—in Westerbork, in Theresienstadt, in Auschwitz, in Mauthausen—and the period just after the war when she wandered Europe, stateless and in
shock, until an old boyfriend, who, like my grandfather, had fled Europe in 1938, shows up at her door, in a U.S. Army uniform, a knight in shining armor. Eventually, they marry.

It is shocking to view the show now, in part because she was so very young, so lovely. Our survivors had always been wrinkled and old. But in the early 1950s, they were still young, even though terribly, terribly scarred. Hanna Block Kohner had lost so much that
This Is Your Life
did not remotely touch—her first husband was murdered, she terminated a pregnancy to save her own life. Who is assembled here for her, really? Who could the producers produce to represent her past? It is a weak, random group of the strays who survived. Not her parents, murdered in camps. Not her other friends—all are dead. And yet they describe her time from camp to camp—You were down to seventy-three pounds!—as though it were a time in finishing school.

Hanna’s tragedy disguised as happiness underscores something that has hovered with me these many months: The stories of these survivors were not happy stories, there were no neatly tied-up endings, and often, there were no endings at all. Survival alone did not equal happiness—unless happiness was the path that survivors chose, obstinately, like my grandfather did.

“Correspondence, Patients A–G” offered dozens more stories from the end of the war. There are the many, many letters from the Binder family, close Vienna friends, stuck in Shanghai from 1938 to 1949 and desperate to leave for America or Palestine. They ache and scream, these letters; they are poor. Terribly poor. And they, too, want help from my grandfather: they want him to bring them to America. As awful as their experience may have been, these letters have a happier ending than some: they are scattered—a son to Palestine, a daughter to San Francisco—but they are not dead.

These postwar letters come from my grandfather’s entire old Viennese world; hands that reached out to him from cousins and half siblings, friends and acquaintances, the remnants of a Viennese old
guard of the 1920s and 1930s, a population that would never again reassemble. Angry, bewildered, tentative,
weary
, they wrote.

September 18, 1946

Dear Carl,

I got your address from your sister Cilli, and I’m delighted to hear about you and to know how you are!

I heard you’ve gotten married in the meantime and have a little boy. Please accept my warmest congratulations.

If you feel like writing, I’d like to hear from you in person and learn what you’re doing and how you are. After you left, nobody heard from you, you never thought of finding out what was happening or had happened to your relatives. Don’t take this as a reproach, because even if you would like to make up for it, it’s already too late.

Unfortunately, we had a great many victims. Our dear parents died in concentration camps, and our dear brother Alfred in Palestine passed away a year ago.

You see, things don’t seem so jolly in our family, and that’s why I’m asking you to write to Regina and to me, so that we don’t feel so alone in the world. You know, when husband and wife are together, you can bear everything much more easily, but Regina’s husband unfortunately was traumatized by the war and is incurable. You can imagine what pain this causes my dear sister. My husband was deported three years ago, and now we have lost our oldest. Believe me, Carl, it is terrible, and I don’t know whether you can understand me. That’s why I’m asking you again to write us once in a while, it will make things easier for us.

I would like to have some pictures of you and your family.

With my regards and kisses to you and your dear wife and child,

Lotte

P.S. Write to Regina, she’ll be glad.

Regina Hirschfeld, 17 Chesney Court, Shirland Road, London W9

Lotte was the daughter of my grandfather’s half brother Manele. My great-grandfather was married twice; his son from his first marriage was thirty years older than my grandfather. Lotte was somewhat younger than Karl, but she was his friend and contemporary. When they were all in Vienna, surely, given her age, she looked up to him.

My father was the boy born that Lotte mentions, and such a thing is strange for him to know—that six months after his birth, the world his father left behind was reaching out to chastise; to implore. When I read it to him, my father is fascinated but perplexed. He knew Lotte, but not that there was a rift between her and my grandfather. By the time he met her—in the mid-1950s—any rancor had long since been set aside; he remembers warmth. He certainly never knew about all that she had lost in the war.

In 1950, Lotte settled in Lyon, France, married again, and had another child. His photo is in a subsequent letter, a small boy in a tub outdoors. “Georges” is written on the back. The next letters are far more cheerful; they speak of family and visits, and they talk of meeting in Europe—my grandfather and grandmother, at that point, had begun their biannual sojourn in Europe, and they saw Lotte in France, in Switzerland, in the United Kingdom, where her sister Regina had settled. The boy in her photographs, I realize, must be about sixty now. He has the same last name that Lotte took in her second marriage—Sudarskis. I track him down and e-mail him, this Georges. He is a money manager in Abu Dhabi, he has a home in Venice. He has done well. It takes him, literally, years to respond.

But when he does, it is amazing. He is thrilled to hear from Karl’s granddaughter. He remembers my grandfather well—he himself went to university in Montreal—and he would come south to swim in the lake by my grandparents’ house in Massachusetts. His mother loved
my grandfather very much. “I remember the tenderness with which she would speak about Karl,” he says, as we chat over Skype, echoing my father’s memory. He remembers once, maybe in the 1970s, meeting a son of my grandfather’s who spoke French. That would be my father, I say.

He tells me his mother never spoke of the war, but as a fifteen-year-old he stumbled upon papers that suggested she had once had another name, another life. Even this is a memory he cannot quite conjure. He describes finding out she had a past husband in the way we describe events of our childhood—it is like a dream; he cannot quite remember how he knew, or what he knew, and when he knew it. He knows he confronted her, and he knows she offered only the most basic response:
Yes,
she said
. There was another marriage.
She did not invite further questioning. He thinks the first husband told her to leave Vienna without him. She traveled through Germany, to the Netherlands, and on to Paris sometime in 1939, all on her own. This much he knows for sure, it is the only thing he knows with certainty: for a very long time, she was alone.

Later I’ll see that in the Yad Vashem digital database of victims’ names there is that of one man, Eugene Stryks, born in Vienna in 1916, whose last name is the same as Lotte’s first married name: Stryks was deported from Drancy, the transit camp outside Paris, to Majdanek, on March 6, 1943. I wonder whether this was Lotte’s first husband; if it was, he made it as far as France with her when they ran.

Georges never pressed his mother about her wartime experiences. On some level, he says, perhaps he was too afraid of what he’d hear. More: he was too convinced she didn’t want to speak.

“Look,” he says, “you were born in America,” and years after the war. “But in 1950, when I was born, it was only five years after that war, after that terrible war. And I would never ask questions, and my brother didn’t ask—all the children of this generation that I know never asked questions of their parents, during this period. In a definite sense they felt it was unspeakable. And I agree. In all senses of the
term—it is terrible . . . it is unspeakable.” Georges, too, has never heard of Valy, never heard her name, never heard his mother mention her, though surely, in Vienna at least, Lotte and Valy would have known each other.

So then I ask about that line—the “oldest one,” a boy—perhaps a son?—who seems to have died, and Georges is startled. He has no idea what I’m talking about. I read him the letter. He is shocked. Overwhelmed. I say that if Lotte lost a son—if that’s what that line means, unless she is referring to her older brother—perhaps she felt it was too much of a trauma to share. He is horrified by the idea. Completely shocked. We hang up uncertain, both intimates and strangers. I have a hard time reaching him again. I’m not sure he wants to hear from me. I feel terrible about having disclosed this information to him, about having made him consider the possibility that there was something even more devastating his mother had never wanted him to know. Who was I to insert myself into this narrative? This wasn’t even my story to tell.

Yet despite this transgression, I press on. I want to know—because I know Lotte and my grandfather were close—I want to know what her sons know. When I find myself in Israel for work, sometime after that Skype call, I arrange to meet Georges’s brother, Gilbert, who made aliyah many years ago, from France. Gilbert explains that his father was one of a large Polish Jewish family that moved to France just before the war—a half-dozen brothers and sisters, leaving their parents behind. Those paternal grandparents, just like Lotte’s parents, were murdered. He thinks Lotte and his father met sometime during the war, that she found work with his father.

I then tell this Israeli Sudarskis about Lotte’s first postwar letter, and that strange, melancholy line
we have lost our oldest
—and the child I believe Lotte lost. He, too, does not quite believe it; he has never heard anything like it; his mother certainly said nothing. I tell him, too, that since my conversation with Georges, I have been able to discover more of what happened to his immediate family. But perhaps because we have just met, or because our meeting is rushed, a breakfast
in the center of Jerusalem, a civilized moment of poached eggs with asparagus in the upper-middle-class posh neighborhood of Rehavia, or perhaps because he is so very happy that I reached out, I don’t tell him that I have a letter from his grandparents, accusing my grandfather and great-grandmother of not helping them. It was one of the letters I first read when I began looking for Valy; it was so shocking—so devastating—my neighbor, a German journalist, who read it with me shook as he helped me decipher the impossible handwriting.

Vienna, June 19, 1941 To Sara Wildmann
[my great-grandmother]

Dear Aunt,

. . . It is directly a story from heaven, how you left me here, sick. . . . You don’t think about asking us if we are still alive. I am ashamed when other people are asking if I received letters from you to say I haven’t heard anything from you. And I don’t get any sign of life.

. . . I had to sell everything I have so that I can survive. . . . I am here with my family and I have no clue and I am completely helpless. Dear aunt. The only thing I cannot understand is that you once had a good character. And now you have forgotten us. I am now desperate. And God should forgive our bad thoughts. And so dear aunt I ask you . . .

It is written in a manic scrawl, with ink that bleeds through the paper. The author is my grandfather’s half brother Manele, and, accusations aside, I now know he actually had a chance to leave but didn’t take it.