Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (17 page)

Here is what it feels like upon entering the archives at Bad Arolsen: like a Steven Spielberg movie about an American lawyer of the 1950s, desperately searching for information on an escaped Nazi but with no computers, no modern technology, nothing but boxes and paper. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie with the Ark of the Covenant tucked away in a warehouse. There might be treasures here, amid a sea of seventy-year-old cardboard, but who would know?

To be fair, the staff at ITS were busily scanning documents when I came to town. By summer’s end, they would digitize 6.7 million documents on forced labor in the Third Reich. Soon, nearly all of it will be pixelated. But this was not the case when I arrived. Instead, the scholars I was with had the task of approaching the material and asking each box, each guardian of these massive rooms of paper what these holdings might reveal, and how the materials should be understood and integrated into greater Holocaust research.

The areas of ITS were divided into sections labeled vaguely “General Documents,” “Concentration Camps,” “Displaced Persons,” “Tracing and Documentation,” “Forced Labor.” In the general documents alone—a loose assemblage of items that were deemed worthy of saving, but unclear on their immediate category—there were 1,786 cardboard boxes filled with, among other things, documents on Heinrich Himmler’s Lebensborn experiment (the quest to populate Europe with Aryan children, using wombs from Germany to Norway and kidnapping children with Aryan features from Eastern Europe for adoption in the Reich), medical experiments, persecution outside Germany, maps, court cases, letters between members of the SS, the institutional history of ITS, mass graves, and exhumations. There are more than sixteen miles of files, with faded, neatly typewritten labels. Book after book of death lists, tied up with string. Typed documents drily, methodically explaining how, exactly, to turn a normal van into
a murderous gas van—an early and, ultimately, unwieldy method of mass killing.

An entire maze of basement rooms is devoted to thousands of
Arbeitsbücher
—little green books that document each forced laborer’s time. The faint smell of paper decay and dust hangs everywhere. In the hallways, hand-drawn maps of the Nazi advance and concentration camp system are framed and hung as art.

On my first full day in town, I join the scholars on a field trip to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a three-hour bus ride through Germany’s glorious western countryside, past villages so tranquil and storybook-like, it was easy to be boggled by what they had been witness to. It is almost grotesquely beautiful—all cows and fields of wheat and rye and oats and grass. The former camp is now home to a modern museum cast from concrete, glass, and steel; it is smooth-walled and suspended, as if floating, as the ground beneath is hallowed, and filled with corpses. The architects, KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten, won a prize for the design, which is purposely, almost completely, absent of all color. The museum soberly, and carefully, details the fate of prisoners and tells the stories buried in the fields that surround it: mass graves that now look like nothing more than empty, grassy knolls which can be strolled for hours on end. There is a gravestone marking the loss of Anne and Margot Frank, who died there, but it is placed arbitrarily. No one knows, really, where the girls were buried; and the camp barracks were, for the most part, burned to the ground at the end of the war to stymie the virulent typhus epidemic that killed the sisters and continued to claim victims long after their jailers had fled. Some fourteen thousand inmates died after liberation by the British. Many of those souls who had survived so long only to die in the transition to freedom were Jews.

It is Bergen-Belsen that shaped the world’s collective mental images of the horror that was the Nazi concentration camps. It was from
here that American moviegoing audiences saw the horrific piles of naked, lifeless bodies pushed by bulldozers, as well as the images of the opening of the camp by the British, and the emaciated walking dead they encountered, the skeletal remains of humans whose eyes blinked enormously from their skulls.

On the drive, Jean-Marc tells me that Marlene Dietrich’s sister had lived in the town of Bergen. When the actress toured Germany after the war, she came upon her sister, who revealed that she had run a movie theater for the SS guards of the camp; she maintained no interest in distancing herself from her Nazi past. Marlene, disgusted, eventually denied the sister existed. Some said the two never spoke to each other again.

When we arrive at Bergen-Belsen, hordes of German soldiers mill about the entrance. One of the scholars sees me gaping and explains that we are near one of the largest military training grounds in Europe and they are there for training—in sensitivity? In history? Perhaps both. It is stupidly unnerving to see them there; the soldiers are a part of a different story now, though not disconnected from this history. Yet toggling back and forth between the past and present makes my vision blurry. Fatigues and army boots feel disconcerting here.

Bergen-Belsen is, otherwise, strangely sanitized. It is beautiful, all that concrete so favored by architects and interior designers lately, with miles of texts and horrific videos, all arranged and presented in a way that feels as smooth as the walls, not easy—the subject matter is too heavy for easy—but not hard either. You can avoid the worst films if you’re weak of stomach; they are shown in mini-theaters hung with heavy velvet curtains. Survivors speak out from television screens, but they are many years past the point of their experience, and their testimonies are softly lit, their voices audible only once you pick up headphones.

It is far more modern than what we will see back in Bad Arolsen. Somehow the ITS archives, their condition, their presentation, pulls us all backward in time, to a pre-digital era, draws back the curtain, to
some degree, on the breakdown in communication between cities and countries—let alone families—that delayed survivors of the Nazi era from finding one another to begin with. ITS, when I see it first, is a hodgepodge of disconnected papers, each recording at length the difficulty the Allies had, the Red Cross had, the refugee organizations had, in tracking down survivors, in reuniting families, in finding places for the displaced to go. In Bad Arolsen, wartime confusion still feels palpable, the number of those affected is so immense, and the inability to search for anything—other than by the sheer legwork and real-time reading that marked research in the postwar era—makes all work cumbersome and paced in a manner completely contrary to the way we live now. “We need a very detailed inventory,” Jean-Marc says of these messy archives. “For the moment we don’t even know exactly what’s new.”

In my fantasy version of discovery, Valy’s file at Arolsen is filled with everything from handwritten notes (hers, her mother’s, friends’, lovers’) to details of her work assignments, to her path after deportation, to—and this was, in retrospect, the most fantastical—clues as to whether she survived. Perhaps, I think, as I tour the grounds, there is an
Arbeitsbuch
with her name on it, a detailing of the work she did in the Jewish Hospital, a record of the old-age home she wrote from in 1941. Perhaps she had to fill out a request to emigrate, and this, I hope, will be here as well.

Yet, as Wolfgang Benz had warned me might be the case, none of that is here. There is, however, a small stack of papers including a copy of her name on a deportation list and a last-known address typed neatly at the top of an official-looking Red Cross missing persons report.

But, no. There is more than that. Linked to her file is a similarly thin folder with information on a much younger man named Hans Fabisch, born April 29, 1921, in Breslau. Below his name, on his
card file, I see Valerie,
geborene
(née) Scheftel.
Ehefrau.
She is listed as his wife.

At some point after her letters to my grandfather had stopped, sometime, it seemed, around the same time my grandfather met my grandmother, Valy not only met another man—she
married
him. Hans Fabisch. I say the name aloud, the first syllables of both names so round and patrician and Germanic, though I note he was—obviously—also a Jew. How did it happen that a thirty-one-year-old intellectual married a twenty-one-year-old boy from Breslau? Did she love him? Was this a happy ending? Was it a marriage of convenience? Was this a means of survival? Here I had imagined Valy pining away, desperate, despairing, when war cuts off mail between Germany and the United States. I had imagined her shrinking away without the lifeline my grandfather’s hope gave her, desperately in love, and desperately angry, filled with recriminations, and waffling endlessly between those—I realize now—overly romantic sentiments. Was she instead curled up in bed next to a man a decade younger than my grandfather? It is strangely comforting, this thought, the idea that perhaps Valy finally understood there was little my grandfather could do for her from afar, that to deny herself human contact was a punishment she needn’t inflict upon herself, especially in a time of great punishment. Here was a glimmer of hope, or of resistance. To marry so late—clearly sometime in 1942, as my final letter closes out 1941, possibly as late as 1943—was, perhaps, a sign she believed in the future, or, at the very least, was no longer exclusively living in the past, no longer mooning over Vienna, but trying to find a path forward, a way of surviving, if only mentally, if only emotionally. The file is simultaneously enormously exciting and incredibly disappointing—I can merely guess at these things. I can’t know how they met. I can’t understand her motivations. I don’t know if she was in love, if this was impetuous, or exciting, or wonderful. Or was this merely a symptom of the persecution? Instead of finding answers, now I have only more questions.

Most of the scholars on this trip keep me at arm’s length. They distrust journalists, I am told; they think we will be too superficial in our analysis, or think we will scoop their scholarship, or think we will be too blithe in the way we cover this material—or all of the above. They will not be convinced otherwise. Most refuse to be on the record with me, or speak much with me at all.