Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (12 page)

“I told a friend I was renting to a Jew,” my roommate, Hilke, says to me one morning as she pours her muesli and makes her herbal tea. Around us, crystal prisms dangling on fishing wire projected rainbows onto the yellow kitchen walls. “He said, ‘Oh! Don’t you feel you shouldn’t use that Nazi word, 
Jude
?’”

No, I reply, startled, Jew is not a Nazi word. But then other Austrians echoed the sentiment. Yes, says Karin, a friend from dance class, that’s how she felt growing up, too.
Jude
, even “race”—those were words not to be used in polite society. It was strange growing up
in Austria, agrees Sophie, a glamorous, chain-smoking philosophy student and, eventually, a good friend. For us, Jews were just dead, she says. It was odd to find them, later, in clubs, bars—living normally, unremarkably.

“Yes,” says Hilke back at home, impassively. Jews were just victims. And then she adds, as if in explanation: “I dated a skinhead as a teenager.” She hung around his crowd, gleaned his hates. “I rented to you because I realized you were Jewish when you said your grandfather had left in 1938. I didn’t want to be politically correct anymore. I wanted to ask you all the questions I’ve never been allowed to ask.”

Over lunch at the Institute the next day I blurt the story. The table goes silent, the Germans and Austrians look at one another and sigh. Then each of my dismayed colleagues, in turn, urges me to move. But I go nowhere. I’m curious about her. I think:
I can change her
. I think:
I’ll convert her
. So instead, I choose to use her ignorance as cocktail banter; I dip into the cartoon as armor. Vienna offers me a sense of foreignness I haven’t felt anywhere else.

Occasionally I walk to my grandfather’s old street and look up at its drab exterior. It is not far from my apartment, and not far from the Prater, where I’d gone with Herwig and where Orson Welles’s famous giant Ferris wheel looms. Every night Welles’s postwar classic 
The Third Man
 is playing somewhere in Vienna: a metaphor—Vienna, a city stuck in the middle of the twentieth century.

My roommate’s fascination with me stretched back years further than our acquaintance. As a teenager, she rebelled against her history-teacher parents, picking up Nazi paraphernalia and acting out in ways both juvenile—an illegal-in-Austria Adolf Hitler T-shirt purchased in London—and disturbing—on a mandatory class trip to the death-camp Mauthausen, she and her boyfriend ripped pages from a commemorative book, filled with photos of piles of dead bodies, and posted them around her bedroom. She told me she hated the “weakness” of the bodies.

“But the bodies didn’t start out weak,” I complain; even to my ears
I sound plaintive. She shrugs. She hated that Jews got to be the ultimate victims. I promise her that I have no interest in being a victim; she is unconvinced.

If you were to pass Hilke on the street, you wouldn’t notice her. Straight, unremarkable hair that falls just below her shoulders, the color of wet sand, close to blond; a kind of hippie-punk Mittel-European type, with a fondness for skirts worn over pants with hiking boots, and a kohl-lined eye. A few years back she had a shaved head, a style she sported until her early thirties as she studied the extreme Austrian art movement called Aktionism. Born in the 1960s, Aktionism is all about pushing boundaries and norms: it involves blood and semen and violence. In a film that won her a degree of fame in certain Viennese art circles, my roommate was hung from her wrists and beaten until she passed out. She called it
The Sleep of Reason—
after Goya. When I meet her, she is curating an exhibition called
Abuse
. One wall highlights an endless video loop of a woman being penetrated by a duck. An artist drops out of the exhibition, and Hilke, half seriously, asks me if I would consider wearing a yellow star as an art installation. I decline.

“There were centuries of persecution,” she says one afternoon as I put away groceries. “Don’t you think that means there was something wrong with Jews?” She wants to find a way to share the guilt between us, a means to draw a line blaming Jews, at least partly, for their own destruction. She wants us to be different.

I try to explain that, for centuries, simply not believing in Christ made Jews suspect, put them at odds with kings and states. This response bores her. “Look,” she says, and leads me into her home office, until now off-limits to me. On her bulletin board are photos of her grandfathers. Each wears a Nazi uniform, smartly pressed. She tells me she pinned them there to remind herself—both of what they had done, and her refusal to be ashamed of her lineage. I am suddenly hot,
and, I find, angry—angry because it is I who feels ashamed standing in front of these long-dead men, doing nothing to convert their granddaughter. I am ineffective.

The Germans and Austrians at my Institute are bemused by these stories. How, they wonder, have I managed to find a thirty-six-year-old woman who says things long considered unacceptable? Yet when my roommate asks, in one of her strange tirades about the war, wasn’t I bored with being obsessed with the Holocaust, it wasn’t clear to me that it was only I who was obsessed: Wasn’t she obsessed as well? Weren’t the others around me? There is Uli, a German who proudly declares that his country deserves to be dissolved for its sins. He is a Marxist and spends his free time translating for me the unsubtly antiforeigner posters placed by the far-right political parties in the subways. We walk the city together, late at night, around the Ring, once the trams stop running and the Viennese have long since gone home. We mimic my grandfather and his friends as we sit in cafés earnestly discussing history and the state of the world. I wonder, a bit, if my appeal is my Jewishness, as though I am somehow a part of a subconscious atonement plan. At the same time I don’t care. I like it, this strange connection. I like his anger. It feels entirely inappropriate to our generation; it comforts me that I am not the only one still thinking of these things.

And then there is Thomas, the one other Jewish fellow, a thin, beautiful, Budapest-born philosopher with dolorous eyes, an ever-present pack of Nil cigarettes, and a postcard for the 1924 movie 
Die Stadt ohne Juden
(
The City Without Jews
) pinned to his office corkboard. In the film, a city banishes all of its Jews and then falls apart; the city has to invite them all back. It is a comedy. I fall in love, a little bit, with them both, Thomas and Uli; I fall in love, a little bit, with everyone at my Institute.

It is here, in Vienna, when I realize I have always lived with ghosts. I have always sought, in some way, to understand what connects me to my grandfather, to this time. I spend night after night, for months,
drinking with Germans and Austrians; we reassure one another that we are disconnected from the war, distanced by more than time, that we are not to blame.

Yet I wonder, even as I collect a group of friends in this town, if I have any place here at all. In Vienna, outside my tight intellectual cohort, when I mention my family, the room turns silent and aggressive, or silent and sad, or silent and annoyed.
God. Another Jew looking for her roots,
they seem to be thinking.
Why must you people always be with your heads in the past?

I think of Valy often as I walk these streets, as I meander down Heinestrasse, the street listed as hers on her school forms, as I visit the places she mentions in her letters. Nowhere is Vienna more idealized than in Valy’s letters.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have much good to tell you about my work right now,”
she writes in late spring 1941
. “A couple of days ago, alas, I returned from the course I had written to you about. It was quite wonderful! Full of youth, spirit and verve! For the first time, since Vienna, I again felt glad and young! Now it has finally come to an end, unfortunately. I did a lot of teaching there and I believe that I have become a well-respected teaching authority there—your legacy, Karl! Upon my return, I unfortunately had to learn that I no longer can continue my work at the hospital and at the seminary for kindergarten teachers due to a general cut in positions. If I do not succeed in becoming confirmed as an itinerant teacher for various retraining facilities, I will have to start working in a factory before too long.”

Vienna, for Valy, the longer she stays in Berlin, becomes as much a symbol of freedom and life as my grandfather himself. She is a faithful recorder of her time in the city. She writes on it, muses on it, returns to it again and again. She and my grandfather, she writes, spent an
“unspeakably beautiful
” summer together in the Mediterranean-like warmth of Lake Wörthersee, in Carinthia, near the camp for Zionist Jews, swimming alongside the athletes of Hakoah of Vienna, the superstar sportsmen and women of the era, the best swimmers in
Europe. In the winter, they dance at the Medizinerredoute, the medical students’ formal ball. They debate how they can be together with no money: it is one thing to travel as students; it is another to live, forever, impoverished. One day, as they walk in the Augarten, my grandfather tells her that she should marry. She doesn’t understand what he means—to him? To anyone? Is it to pull her back from her mother, who waits for her in Czechoslovakia? Is it to keep her from focusing only on her work? She wants to know what he meant; she doesn’t ask.

The night after she graduates from medical school, they stand on the Ringstrasse, the grand Viennese circular boulevard with its enormous mansions. They are on the stretch of the Ring near Parliament, diagonally across from the lights of stately Café Landtmann. They stand there and discuss the future. I have been on the Ring dozens upon dozens of times, crammed onto trams, talking with friends, walking late at night when the weather turns warm. It is much the same as it was then, and I can see Karl and Valy there, beneath the glorious statues of the parliament, the imposing marble, alongside the electric streetcars with their peculiar distinctive smell of sweat and wood, I can hear the strange way the tram creaks and bends, like an arthritic elbow, the Austrian-accented nasal German of the recorded station-stop announcements,
Stadiongasse/Parlament, Rathausplatz, Schottentor.

They stand there together, basking in the glory of her degree, and she catches her breath, she has something important to say, she musters her courage: she wants to ask him to stay with her, to be with her, to marry her, to have a life together. But then she doesn’t say any of that; she hesitates. The moment passes. She loses her chance.

Four days later Hitler annexes the country, and crowds fill Vienna’s Heldenplatz, a pulsating mob with hands held high, palms out. Swastikas fill the city, overnight—there is a run on the flag, there aren’t enough to go around.

The crackdown begins immediately. Jews are forced to scrub the streets; the local newspapers run headlines, “Are we German? YES!”
Their precious Augarten is taken from them within six weeks. They can no longer sit on benches; they can no longer enter parks. My grandfather joins the endless lines searching for visas, he writes to cousins for an affidavit. Does he try for Valy, too? Does she want him to? “Not all of you have to go!” an acquaintance tells my Aunt Cilli. She scoffs. She says she knew they all must leave.

Violence tilts the city. Jewish stores are sacked. The wealthy students my grandfather tutored are looted; their fathers are arrested and sent to Dachau. Some don’t return. Jews are paraded for humiliation. My grandfather pins a Polish eagle to his cap and pretends to be a Pole. He can speak just enough Polish to render his disguise believable. Where did all these Nazis come from? Five years of what had been incrementally imposed anti-Jewish legislation in Germany was put in place in Austria all at once, in a matter of weeks. Restrictive measures were only part of the mortification of the community: the Nazis quickly began to confiscate Jewish property and art, shipping it all immediately into the
Altreich
, the heart of Germany, businesses are “aryanized,” taken over by racially pure business owners.

And as my grandfather knocks on doors and cuts the lines at the consulates, Valy takes the train three hours northeast to Troppau, Czechoslovakia, leaving behind her adopted city, and her lover. She can’t abandon her mother, in another town, another country. Even if he’d asked. And it does not appear he asked. Plus—at first—returning home
was
an escape. Czechoslovakia was not yet occupied, was ostensibly out of immediate danger.