Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (9 page)

He never spoke of persecution, not to his children, and certainly not to his grandchildren.
He did not tell us of the rumor (surely apocryphal but still telling) that the last time the radical revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky spoke in Vienna, in the winter of my grandfather’s graduation from medical school, the speech ended cinematically—with Jabotinsky holding up a suitcase and shouting in the packed Konzerthaus, “Run, Jews, run!” He never talked about the virulent xenophobic wave that drowned his Vienna when Hitler was received like a messiah; he did not speak of leaders of the Jewish community scrubbing the street on their hands and knees, of windows smashed or painted over with the word
Jude,
a word that would come to feel like a curse rather than a description, or an identity. He did not mention that in the heart of the gorgeous first district, amid all those ornate buildings and lovely shops that carried the best of the best, nestled up against the stately Staatsoper, the grand opera house, a massive billboard had gone up promoting a “special edition” of
the anti-Semitic rag
Der Stürmer
, festooned with the tag line
Judentum ist Verbrechertum
—“Judaism is criminality”—and accompanied by the most base, awful caricature of a hook-nose Jew the artist could conjure. He did not mention what it looked like when the Kärtnerstrasse main drag, the Madison Avenue of Vienna, was filled with massive red Nazi banners, or what it felt like to walk those streets the moment that somehow everyone, overnight, had armbands and flags that identified them with the Nazi Party. He did not speak of the terror that the marching hordes brought with them, the bands of men with their arms raised who rode through the streets on trucks, nor the shouting, ecstatic Viennese girls thrilling to the presence of German Nazi officers. Nor did he speak of the looting that began overnight, immediately—the stealing from Jews that ranged from wresting the works of great art held by high families to the pillaging and destruction of humble shops. He neglected to mention that, when he first returned to Vienna in 1950, it was not so much simply to visit, but to look for survivors, if not of people, then of the city itself, to take in the destruction, to contemplate what was left, or really, what, who, was gone.

And to me, at least, he did not mention Valy, the girl with whom he had taken classes, who had pined for him, until he finally noticed her, swept her off her feet, wandered in his city with her, taking in all things they could on their limited funds. He did not speak of this girl who sat in on class for him, took notes for him, freeing up his time so he could tutor other kids and bring in money for his family, for himself. He did not tell us that in those heady, awful, terrifying early weeks of Nazi rule, not only did he lose his freedom, he lost his lover when she ran back to her home country to care for her mother, to plot escape on her own. What would he have said, after all?

Instead, what we heard, what we were schooled in, was the importance, the near perfection, of Vienna’s symphony and art and parks, of Goethe and Zweig and Schilling and Schnitzler and Freud. For my grandfather, as Tony Judt wrote in
Postwar
, “
in the early years of the twentieth century Vienna
was
Europe: the fertile, edgy, self-deluding
hub of a culture and a civilization on the threshold of apocalypse.” It was the city of his friendships, his essence, his very being. Only rarely were there hints to what lay beneath. As October turned into November 1956, the year after Vienna finally emerged from occupation by the Allied powers, the year Vienna picked up her head from the curfews that still, to this day, keep shops closing at six in the evening, the Hungarian uprising was suddenly crushed. My grandparents were in Vienna when the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest; it was the only time, my grandmother told me later, she saw my grandfather panic, the only time she saw a glimpse of whatever had settled into his marrow in 1938. He hustled them, immediately, to Paris, sure, or at least sure enough, that the Soviet tanks would continue to lumber west and engulf them, too; this time he didn’t want to wait around to see what happened
.

But he was suppressing more than simply a sense of dread in those October weeks. The city Karl cherished already no longer existed when he came back in 1950; the people he had known were entirely scattered—or dead. I suppose I didn’t really think this way as a child, it was only later that I came to understand the peculiarity of postwar refugee life: that even if one got out—with a great story and four other family members—you did not necessarily ask what had happened to the man who’d sold you bread, the girl who sat next to you in class, your doctor, your butcher, even your cousins and their wives. You simply did not see them again. And, especially after time passed, you assumed. Any expectations—if you had them—of returning to life as you had once known it had long since dissolved; that life, that community, was no more.

He finally took his children to meet the city in 1963 and again in 1965. Together, both times, they walked through the Innere Stadt to pick up the aboveground tram, line 21, at Schwedenplatz. They sat as the tram made its way up Taborstrasse, winding through the second district, staying on board when the tram turned right on to the boulevard Heinestrasse. They stepped off at tiny Rueppgasse,
whose centuries-old buildings look impressive only to the untrained American eye and are, merely, simply, old. A whole trip just to look up at his old home, not even to ring the bell. To his sister, Cilli, he wrote a postcard with a single line in German—“
a backwards look at yesterday.”

It is years after my grandfather’s death when I receive a journalism grant to live and work in Vienna at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen—the Institute for Human Sciences—a place that sounds both grand and improbable and terribly European. I have vague thoughts of embracing the city as my own. My fellowship is named for
Milena Jesenská, Kakfa’s lover, a journalist whose opposition to the Nazis landed her in prison after prison from 1939 until 1944, when, in Ravensbrück, her body finally succumbed to the years of deprivation.

My arrival in Vienna is unheralded. I know no one; my plan is completely inchoate, my German limited to the niceties of grandparents. I know nothing of the city after 1938. And really, I don’t even know the city of 1938; I know snippets, overheard fantasies; nightmares. I choose my apartment, at random, off Craigslist. It is not the best choice. When the taxi pulls up at the door, in front of a dark nineteenth-century building in the working-class twentieth district, far from the lights and music of downtown, the driver turns to me and says, “Perhaps you’ve made a mistake.” It seems a poor omen.

The woman who answers the door at Wallensteinstrasse 38/40 does not alleviate that concern. She is as cold as the street below, and remarks without cheer, or cheek, that I have brought more bags than things she owns. When I tell her I have a fellowship to write about insiders and outsiders in Europe—Muslims and Jews, immigrants—she murmurs noncommittally. Then she pauses, turns, and asks, almost sheepishly, “Are Jews Muslims?” to which I want to make a joke, but I realize she is serious, and so I try to carefully, briefly, explain the
difference. Then she shows me to my spare, spartan room; she has neglected to tell me in advance that to reach my sleeping quarters I have to walk through the bathroom of her (always locked) office. I am in a hidden space. In the morning, after I wake, I discover I have literally been locked into this room accidentally. Panicked, I scream out my enormous fifth-floor window into the freezing air below,
“Hilfe!
Hausmeister!”
—Help! Superintendent!
—
hysterically waving to the Turkish grocer across the street, to various strangers heading to work or running errands, until, after some thirty minutes that feel like hours, I am rescued by the
Hausmeister
. Freed, I walk the streets, lost, off kilter. I entertain my new colleagues again and again with the story of that night; I tell it as farce—“
Hilfe! Hausmeister!”
I’ll repeat over and over—though, really, I was terrified, convinced I would have to flee the city immediately.

I am thirty-one and still living in the fantasy spun by Karl. I ride the trams around the cold, marble, glorious Hapsburg architecture of the first district up to the still-poor tenements of the second district where he once lived and a handful of 
shtreimel
-wearing ultra-Orthodox Jews now live again, warily, alongside the tattooed young and glamorous and foreigners. I meander through the city—it feels 
old
, the demographic average skewing higher, it feels, than sixty, with few baby strollers—and I walk where he walked, attend the opera he loved, squat in the back at the Musikverein with my three-euro standing ticket, sit in the Staatsoper with a cheap ticket and obscured views, gleaning the nearly free music, as he once did. I sit, alone, in the new restaurants nestled in the Museumsquartier. I photograph everything I see and then paw through piles of old photographs in the sprawling Saturday flea market near Kettenbrückengasse; I pick through the images sent home from fathers at war in 1941, men on the wrong side, I can’t help thinking, as I look at their Wehrmacht uniforms, their arms slung casually around each other, their beaming faces.

And then, somehow, between the music and the art and the coffees obsessively accompanied with glasses of water, between the streets
of the first district, the perfect apricot tarts at Julius Meinl, a food emporium of spices and high-end gastronomy, I, too, start to fall in love with Vienna, enjoy its gray skies and dour ways, carve a space for myself among those people who can’t muster even a
guten Morgen
in my chilly, decrepit building, become a regular at certain stalls in the never-ending open market, the Naschmarkt, with its multilingual hawkers and gorgeous food.

It comes in part, this falling for Vienna, because I love, love,
love
everyone at my Institute. They are Germans and Austrians, Norwegians and Canadians. We go out drinking night after night, in clubs and bars tucked into the archways of the Otto Wagner–designed U-Bahn stations of the Gürtel, the “belt” that hugs the city’s outer ring, with the elevated trains rushing above our heads. We flirt and dance, we sit in lectures with a relentless series of smart speakers, philosophers and historians and sociologists. We are in love with our lives and our luck; money for nothing; money to sit and think and write. I have a small office in the Institute’s building that faces the Donaukanal. I am giddy with lack of sleep and intellectual pretention. My grandfather, I think, would have been proud. In fact, in part, I wonder if I am performing for him, or his memory, when I take the train to Budapest in the snow, when I fly to Paris for a week of reporting, when I walk the streets of Vienna, alone. I have conversations with him in my head; I long to introduce to him my adult self, long to be able to say I am following his model, loving his city.

I’ve had this feeling before, this sense of performing to his memory. It was in Paris, at the end of my twenties, a different fellowship. An acquaintance introduced me to Jean-Marc Dreyfus, a young historian with a bald pate and an impish mien, who, with sociologist Sarah Gensburger, had just finished
an extraordinary book about three forgotten slave labor camps in the heart of the City of Light. One night, over dinner, he explained: The Gestapo wanted not just to eradicate the people who had been sent away, but to erase them, to blot out all memory of these Jews and ensure that no one could reconstruct their
lives going forward. Each camp, tasked with the gruesome responsibility of sorting and redistributing all the useful material goods of the Jews being sent to their deaths, and burning their personal belongings, had been fully absorbed back into the city and then, eerily, themselves forgotten. The task of erasing, of wiping clean the histories of those who had been here, had been remarkably, horrifyingly, successful.

I returned to Paris again six months after I first learned the story and sought out for myself each camp—Lévitan was now a gorgeous advertising agency building in the tenth arrondissement; Bassano was now an haute-couture atelier near the Champs-Élysées; Austerlitz had been housed alongside the eponymous train station (and is alluded to in the book by W. G. Sebald)—now it was a massive construction site—and listened to the stories of those who had been forced to sort through the detritus of the deported. Dreyfus’s discovery asked a question I had never thought to ask and now contemplated endlessly: What happened to the goods of regular people, the Sarah Wildmans, if you will, who were deported? Not wealthy, not poor; Jews who didn’t own great art but certainly had a home filled with the appurtenances of modern living: A dining room table and chairs. Beds. China. Cutlery. Notebooks. Photos. Clothing. Cribs. All gone.

The survivors of these Paris camps all had lived out the war under duress, but protected—most were married to non-Jews, a class of Jew that, oddly, stymied the Nazi machine, and so were set aside for later—and when they discovered the truth of the other camps, the death camps of the east, they settled down to live with a deep shame, a shame they shouldered as penance for that protection. That modesty about their own experience—that
pudeur
, as they called it—created a silence that they broke only at the very last moments of their lives. And yet within that
pudeur
there was also humanity. One man told me he was just twenty-four the year he spent in one of these camps; he was selected to help the Gestapo move the pianos stolen from deported Jews. And he would plot to meet his Catholic wife—not to escape, but for sex.