Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (14 page)

I first learned about these archives at an off-the-record meeting at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum a few years before my Vienna fellowship. It was 2004 and I had just written about the forgotten camps of Paris, proving, I suppose, that I had an interest in buried stories. Could I write about the archives? wondered directors of research at the museum. They wanted the popular press to raise awareness that these documents existed but that they were locked up—there were answers out there, they said, answers to questions we didn’t yet know how to ask, and that early decision to keep ITS exclusively for survivor reunification, or searching for victims by family members, had had a chilling effect on scholarship. (Ostensibly closed, at first, to keep the focus on reconnecting families, the archives had remained closed in part due to stringent privacy laws in Germany.) The State Department, they said, wasn’t taking the issue seriously enough, and survivors were dying without knowing the end of their own stories.

I agreed to dig into it. It was, after all, a good story. And somewhere in those files, I thought, might be something on the girl I had learned of so long before. Somewhere in there might be more to understanding what had happened to Valy.

Exactly what was in the ITS collections was a bit unclear. Some I spoke to maintained that it was just a place of lists: names on lists, places on lists, lists begetting lists; a dusty assemblage of boring German efficiency. The truth was a bit stranger than that. The basic facts were these: As the Allies crossed Europe, liberating concentration and labor camps, cities, villages, and towns, they collected documents left behind by the Nazis, and over time, these collections were deposited—sometimes haphazardly, sometimes methodically—in Arolsen. The holdings were immense, and uncatalogued. Biographical cards from
displaced persons camps ended up here, as did millions of files on forced labor, concentration camp inmates, the Nuremberg trials, Nazi activity, and gruesome medical experiments—along with correspondence between Nazi officers, files on the dead, transport lists, sick lists, crime lists, and so on. The material covered political prisoners from across Europe, deported Jews, incarcerated gay men, Roma, millions of forced laborers, and displaced persons—Jews who had survived the ghettos and camps, as well as Eastern Europeans in flight from the Red Army. There were also prewar and postwar photos and “personal effects”—rings, watches, photos—taken from prisoners. There were reams of postwar documents that followed the paths survivors took after the war.

When the Red Cross took over, eleven countries—Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United States—created a strict, official policy for the next half century: the ITS documents were exclusively to be used to trace survivors and victims—and to help families seeking restitution from the West German government. Under West Germany’s (and, later, unified Germany’s) indemnity laws, victims had the right to pursue economic grievances against the German government for everything from being forced to wear the yellow star to death in a concentration camp. But to obtain compensation, they had to somehow provide evidence of their experience—like a documentation file from ITS. Those who could make claims included Jews, of course, but also thousands of non-Jewish forced laborers (from Eastern as well as Western European countries) who served brutal years in factories and on farms; slave laborers in concentration camps, political prisoners, gay men and lesbians who were persecuted for their sexuality, and those who experienced the horror of the Nazi medical experimentation projects.

In the 1960s, the Holocaust Museum directors told me, ITS puttered along; historians hadn’t yet begun to agitate to see what they had inside. But eventually the archive began to falter at its only task—
tracing victims. People said problems began with the arrival of Charles-Claude Biedermann, a Red Cross official appointed to take over ITS in 1985, who ruled the barracks at Arolsen like a fiefdom. He hired only locals to staff the more than three hundred stations inside the archives; they became (and remained) curiously specific experts in parceled areas of research—deportations to the extermination camps, say, or displaced persons but never both. The different departments didn’t speak to one another; the department heads knew nothing of the other areas of research. Almost nothing was digitized.

In 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell, hundreds of thousands of new demands for information came pouring in and—it was said—a backlog of requests piled up. The wait for information began to stretch out over years; victims were dying before they found the information they sought on themselves, in order to receive long-overdue restitution payments, or their loved ones. Some survivors had never discovered the fate of siblings, parents, or spouses. Angry families and survivor organizations agitated for the archives to be opened to public scrutiny. Rumors began to swirl that there were secrets hidden there; secrets that Germany, and German companies in particular, didn’t want revealed. Germany countered that opening the doors to research would violate the strict privacy laws that protected, they said, the rights of the victims.

In 2001, representatives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum requested access to the files. Paul Shapiro, the director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, and Jürgen Matthäus, the director of Applied Research Scholars, traveled to Bad Arolsen; they were made to sit in an anteroom for hours—after which they were denied entry to the collections. Frustrated, they began an intensive campaign to get inside—and to bring the files to Washington.

After my meeting at the museum, I, too, tried to get into the archives, with no luck. And yet, though several years would then pass, I couldn’t let it go.

Now and then I’d ask historians what they thought about the
black box of ITS. Half of those I spoke to were reverential about what they believed was hidden in Bad Arolsen—there was a belief we’d find, perhaps, more companies that had used slave labor, the role of the churches under the Reich, the paths victims took and how they lived their lives during the war—an essential truth that had thus far remained elusive. For my part, I wondered if it would show me the path that Valy took, walk me through the work she did, and if, or how, she might have lived through the war. When I told this to the naysayers, the period experts who believed the myths were just that—trumped-up stories and rumors, a search for a gun that had long since stopped smoking, a search for narrative where there was only dry chronology—most shook their head and cautioned me not to hope for too much. Yet despite that, I fell somewhere closer to those who hoped for revelations. I wanted to know if the Gestapo had kept track of Valy’s life after 1939 and, especially, her experiences after 1941, when her letters to my grandfather stop. And if there was material on her, I wondered, what would it reveal?

I began telling the story of Valy to all who will listen, to all who might give me a glimpse into how best to search for her—to all those who might agree that Bad Arolsen is the key to understanding what happened to her, after her letters end. I wanted to know if she was the key to Arolsen, as much as Arolsen was the key to her. How important, I wondered, was one individual story? Was this long-closed archive the key to the individual story as much as the group?

I write to Jean-Marc Dreyfus, the author of the book on the Paris camps, and tell him I believe Bad Arolsen is the key to my search. He immediately cautions against my enthusiasm—my conspiracy theories—and directs me to read Éric Conan and Henry Rousso’s
Vichy: An Ever-Present Past
. Rousso is an expert on Vichy, the French state during the Nazi years—but also on the myth and reality of the French relationship to the past. I met with him while investigating the
Paris camps to discuss whether their quiet presence in the city was due to the French inability to face its past. (Rousso was quite sure it was not; he was adamant that the word “taboo,” so often assigned to the French regarding the war years, was a misnomer.)
Conan and Rousso present the problem of opening historical material to a public that does not exactly know what to do with it, and the creation of scandal where there is, occasionally, merely bureaucracy.

Scandal was exactly how the closure of the ITS archives was described to me. It was the Largest Unopened Holocaust Archives in the World (capital letters intended). It was Kept Closed for a Reason. What that reason was, no one knew. Obviously, many said, there was something we weren’t supposed to see. As for me—I was less concerned with slave labor at big companies like BMW (though I found it fascinating) and more interested in what the archives could reveal about how Valy fared as she navigated the waves of deprivations that characterized life for a Jewish woman in the Reich.

It is 2008 by the time Jean-Marc writes to tell me that the museum has finally gotten permission to bring the first group of scholars to ITS—four years after my first meeting with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, two years after my Vienna fellowship (though, by then I had, as Herwig had predicted, been back several times to the city of my grandfather). I ask to accompany the museum’s group, and in early June, I arrange with editors to write the story of the archives, apply for grants to support my work, and then fly to Berlin to begin talking to people about the myth of Arolsen—and Valy—with a plan to meet up with the scholars by train a week into my trip. Though I have often traveled alone, this time I am actually accompanied—I am at the very beginning of a pregnancy, carrying a little Jew in search of the fate of old Jews.

Before I left the States, I got in touch with Aubrey Pomerance, the immensely busy chief archivist of the Jewish Museum Berlin, the
Daniel Libeskind architectural marvel in the center of the city, to discuss the impact of the ITS archives opening, and Valy’s story.

Pomerance is a permanent expat. A Canadian by birth, he has lived in Germany for more than a quarter century. He is the first of many who urge me to consider donating Valy’s letters to his team, or to other teams of researchers. When I mention that her story is frustratingly incomplete, he waves a hand. “Be careful when you say ‘incomplete,’” he says. “There is no collection that documents a person’s life from moment of birth to moment of death. But you can cull a lot of information from one single document.”

We discuss whether it may have been possible for Valy to survive in Germany, in hiding, and for how long. Pomerance doesn’t rule it out. He muses aloud about Valy’s case, and others like her, as well as the most spectacular example of survival—“The Jewish Hospital in Berlin survived to the end of the war because it was the hospital for Jews in mixed marriages, that couldn’t be treated in normal hospitals,” he reminds me when I tell him she worked there for a time. “We have a collection of a family, he was a pharmacist, and he survived [at the hospital] with his wife and child.” All three were “full
Juden
.” In other words: among those with two Jewish parents there were a few exceptions. But very few.

Pomerance is very thin and never lost his Canadian “ehs” and “abouts.” He is balding; the hair left may once have been a vibrant red, but it has faded into a very, very slight shade of strawberry. He is nearly paler than white, and he is wearing a pale blue shirt, as though he is attempting to blend into the fading bits of paper he works with.