Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (13 page)

Somewhere in those weeks of plotting for freedom, my grandfather began to morph into the hero who enabled his sister, brother-in-law, mother, and nephew to escape Vienna
in the nick of time
; the hero that I knew. Valy began to write to him from the moment he set foot on the boat—first from her mother’s, and later from Berlin.

You should know that I bought myself a flute because I am always so dreadfully lonesome. While I don’t think that my musical productions sound very good at this stage, I am really enjoying it.

And I am practicing an awful lot so I will be able to play really well once you and I are reunited again. You love music so much! And even though it cannot be piano which you would have wanted—I don’t have the sufficient means for that in more than one respect—one can make beautiful music on a flute, as well, don’t you think? And you are going to sing along with my playing, in your full-throated “steam bath” voice. And, whoever does not like it can just buzz off. We are definitely going to like it!

She dreams of everything they shared, a dream that she nourishes as the world around her becomes increasingly nightmarish and the past becomes the only sharp, clear, beautiful thing she can think of:

I live through all the different phases of our being together. Do you remember? The Friday nights. When we went to your Mama’s house. All the other evenings in your place. Everything you did. Do you remember? Talking. How can we without money . . . ? Skiing classes . . . The different relationships between us we lived, together . . . And this time cannot be over yet darling. I beg you . . . tell me. That this cannot be. It is impossible don’t you agree? It cannot be. Darling?! I think about all those things and I ask myself in which phase of your life you are right now.

I show these letters to friends in Vienna and Berlin. One friend tells me they are too personal to translate. Not only because Valy was trapped, but also because she did not sound like a woman who fully believed herself to be loved, to be supported, to be cared for.
“You are and remain far, far away, out of my reach, you exist only in my memories, in my wonderful, beautiful ‘sunny past.’”

Even more than emigration, Valy just wants the past to no longer
be past. She meanders for pages, she reminds him of the poetry they read together, the books they debated.
“Do you remember? Once, many years ago, we were walking through the Prater, it was in October, and you recited the Oktoberlied for me, talking about the overcast day which we wanted to make golden. . . . We were so happy then, or, at least, I was. With you, I never was quite sure how things were.”

I am struck, seventy years on, by the poignancy of that insecurity. My grandfather was in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, by the time she wrote those lines. It was fall 1941. By then his medical practice had been open a year, he was settling into his new life, he was dating my smart, pretty grandmother, who had gone to Smith College and then transferred—it was still the Depression, after all, and Smith was pricey—to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She was the daughter of Jewish immigrants (one Russian, one Latvian) who made a solid living selling wallpaper and paint. Her mother had been a businesswoman in her own right, as a fashion buyer in her early twenties; in all, the Kolmans were a very American, quiet-success story.

In Berlin, in the meantime, Valy was entirely living in the past, comforted only by a phantom version of Karl, a shadow version of their relationship that had long since become as one-dimensional as his photograph.

I discuss all this with Herbert Posch—the life my grandfather created, the life he left behind, the eventual American wife, the girlfriend, the lies, the omissions, the sadness—and he listens, quietly. I wonder aloud about what Karl told my grandmother, and what he knew about where Valy was during the war, and after it. I raise for him the questions that have been consuming me—about my grandfather’s lovers, about his guilt, or his lack of guilt.

I tell him that as a teen I made a pilgrimage with my parents to my grandfather’s former home, Rueppgasse 27, a street that, to my seventeen-year-old eyes, seemed gray and uninteresting: 
poor
. We took
the train from Munich to Vienna on that trip—schlepping a million bags from train to train. I remember thinking, I say,
How odd, how disturbing, to be asked for papers and passports in German
. In Vienna, my father went to the bank, to withdraw money. My grandfather, I learned only then, had squirreled away money outside America, should he need to flee again. This was a bewildering thought—Karl had not been sure enough of the United States to entrust our banks with all of what he earned. Instead, he opened accounts in Switzerland, perhaps also elsewhere, in the event that he was once again a refugee, he could enable the family to start over. Not only that—he had also secured a passport for my father when he was born, so the family could make a quick exit if they needed to—little Joseph Wildman is held up in his passport photo by my grandmother. The knowledge altered something for me, even then, opened questions I hadn’t known to ask before. That same anxiety that had prompted him to flee the city in 1956—sure that the Soviet army was on his heels—lurked elsewhere in his psyche. He hadn’t believed in his success as much as I’d thought.

I suspect Posch is used to this. He gets these same navel-gazing musings from all the others like me who have come to see him, all of us on a pilgrimage to a messenger rather than to a place.

Posch invites me to visit the tiny former synagogue on the medical school campus that is now a memorial site called Marpe Lanefesh—“healing of the soul.” For years it stood dormant, decaying, after it was forcibly decommissioned in 1938. By the 1970s, he tells me, no one remembered it had been a synagogue; it briefly became a transformer station, an electricity hub, a center for switches. But a researcher of the architect Max Fleischer, a prolific synagogue designer of the turn of the last century whose work had been entirely destroyed on Kristallnacht, wondered if, perhaps, the little octagon opposite the campus insane asylum (really) was actually a synagogue. In 2005, a Bulgarian artist—Minna Antova—created the memorial; in it she literally layered the history, placing three glass floors one on top of the other, the first layer a magnification of the 1903 architectural plans of Fleischer;
the next a series of words, a Nazi text calling for the destruction of Jewish holy sites on Kristallnacht; and the top a sketch of the electrical plan of the building. Visitors must put on gray felt clogs to walk on the glass so as not to scratch it; the roof was replaced with a glass cupola so Marpe Lanefesh,
even on the gloomiest of days, is filled with light. The feeling is not so much of a synagogue, but of a breathing memory.

In fact, says Posch, it is one of only two standing synagogue structures left in Vienna, though this one is not a functioning chapel. The other is on Seitenstettengasse; that one is gilt and lush, with a soaring ceiling painted like a starry sky and endless names of the dead on the wall, most of whom were killed in the Shoah. All of the other synagogues of Vienna were destroyed on Kristallnacht.

By that terrible night, neither Valy nor my grandfather remained in Vienna. On Kristallnacht, my grandfather was in New York. Valy was preparing to leave Troppau for Berlin. From her letters, I knew it was Berlin where Valy had experienced all of the horror and deprivation that would characterize the ensuing years.

Knowing this, I wondered if the key to finding Valy wasn’t in Vienna at all, but Germany itself. I dreamt of finding answers, of understanding some essential truth about her time there, of finding a clue to whether she might have lived through it all; and where she might be now.

Fantastical as my hopes were, I nurtured a belief that there was a place that might actually provide some of that—a complete mapping of her devastation and her path through the war; a final reckoning of the experience through Nazi records. That place was the enormous archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross—the International Tracing Service (ITS)—in Bad Arolsen, deep in the countryside of former West Germany. I had heard rumors about them for years; the problem was, they were not just closed but
barred
to researchers. ITS was created, solely, to reconnect families after the war, to provide answers, to provide an end to stories, happy or not. But so many legal barriers were in place to seeing what was inside, it seemed
impossible I would ever get in there. Yet the more difficult it was, the more I wanted to go.

My time in Vienna is ending when I read that the archives in Bad Arolsen would finally be opening to outside researchers.

After months in the imperial city, I finally understand my grandfather’s obsession with Vienna. When my fellowship draws to a close, I take a taxi to the airport; the driver takes me circuitously and, strangely, I find myself just at the corner of my grandfather’s street. And there, in the back of the taxi, I finally cry. It is, in part, because I have been lonely here, I have missed those who have been gone from my life for years now, but I have made my own connections in Vienna; I have complicated my relationship to this geography with my own friendships, my own intellectual curiosity. I open a book that Thomas and Andrea, my friends from the Institute, gave me as a parting gift. “Vienna loves you, little Wildman,”
Thomas has written on the inside flap.

I call Herwig and weep to him that I feel ridiculous for these tears, that I feel a part of me
is
here in this city, even though my German is not good enough, my time so superficial, that I have not found enough out, that I have not done what I came to do.

“You’ll come back,” he says.

Three

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T
he chaos that was Europe in 1945 was of an unfathomable, unprecedented scale. Berlin, like other flattened cities in Germany, is not an urban center at the end of the war; it is a mouth full of rotted teeth, buildings shorn in half; once-lush living rooms are open to the elements alongside twisted metal and brick—they appear, in newsreels, to be held up by twigs; glassless windows offer vistas of burned piles of wood and brick; dust mountains three times higher than the average man; city streets are pocked, lined with the burned-out shells of formerly grandiose architecture—museums, churches, monuments, train stations. Populations are shell-shocked, shoeless, dirty; hardened. It is a nearly uninhabitable postapocalyptic world of destruction. The task of reconstruction must have seemed insurmountable. In America, and elsewhere, those waiting for word of cousins, brothers, parents, girlfriends, saw those destroyed cities and began to hear the stories of the camps opening, saw the images of the striped pajamas, the corpselike survivors, the devastation of the cities, and panicked for news of those they’d left behind.

After six long years of conflict, there were some thirty-six and a half million dead, and millions more displaced persons, whole
populations residing, temporarily, uncomfortably, within the borders of their former persecutors, their former tormentors. By 1947, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was running 762 displaced persons camps and centers in the West, most in Germany. Nearly seven million liberated civilians were receiving aid. Orphans had gathered in major cities by the tens of thousands, forlorn, malnourished kids, smaller than their age, lean and hungry and educated only in the strange wartime school of wits. Millions of forced laborers, the cogs of the Nazi wheel, were suddenly free to return home, if their return countries would take them, if they wanted to actually return, if they could find a means of getting there. Communication among countries, among sectors controlled by Allied nations was tortured.

Civilians everywhere were desperate to reunite with lost family members—or to know they might begin to mourn their passing. The essential human need for what we, lately, call closure—that which makes us want to know the end of the story, to bury those we have lost, to find those who remain—meant that efforts to trace the lost began before peace was declared, before the cleanup. Requests for assistance in finding loved ones came from every country touched by the war and from the far-flung shores that took in refugees before Hitler invaded Poland. UNRRA helped, at first, and then when that was dismantled, the International Refugee Organization took over the task of trying to find organization in the chaos.

As the war ended, the collection of documents used to trace the living, the missing, and the dead was centralized. Eventually, the offices officially became known as the International Tracing Service (ITS); by 1952, almost everything had found its way to the small western German village of Arolsen (the town name was changed sometime later to add “Bad” before “Arolsen”—Arolsen Spa). Three years after that, the management of the files was taken over by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the doors were closed to outside
researchers, the collections available for one task and one task alone: tracing the path of victims.