Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (19 page)

Four

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his much I know: On the fourth of November, 1911, Valy was born in what was then called Troppau, a Moravian Sudetenland town so far east that, these days, it practically brushes up against what is now the Czech–Polish border. By the time she was thirty, the town had flown three national flags: but at her birth, Troppau was part of the Austrian empire; it became Czech after World War I—“Sudetenland” being the German appellation for these slices of land, largely German ethnic and German-speaking, that were among the first parcels of territory Hitler would claim for the Reich; locals call it “Czech Silesia.” (Historians sometimes refer to the “Czech lands”—Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia.) In any case, the geography is unnecessarily confusing because Valy came into this world at a moment of political and geographic upheaval. Today Troppau is known as Opava, and it is uncontroversially Czech. The joke among Jews in the interwar period, when the villages of their childhoods seemed to change nationalities every few years, was that they didn’t emigrate, their towns did.

Valy’s birth came two weeks after what would be the last major Hapsburg wedding—Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma and Karl I, whose lush ceremony, at the Renaissance-era Schwarzau Castle, was
actually
filmed
for newsreels. Pretty, teenage Zita is coquettish in a lace column, the new slim-line dress that for the first time allowed women to drop the bustle, step out of the unnatural corseted styles of their mothers, and really move; she looks happy and innocent and fresh.

Zita and Karl got immediately to work having children—one, nearly, for every year of their marriage—and enjoying their relatively minor royal roles, until the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo bumped Karl up to heir presumptive behind the aging Franz Joseph I. Two years later, upon the emperor’s death, suddenly Karl and Zita were emperor and empress. It wouldn’t last long. Exiled in 1919, as eight-year-old Valy frolicked in Troppau’s main square, Karl and Zita ran from rapidly dissolving Austria-Hungary to Switzerland (by train; Stefan Zweig described the weeping masses at their processionals) and then, forced to flee again, to the Portuguese island of Madeira. Dragging an entourage of staff for her seven children, and heavily pregnant, Zita watched her husband die of pneumonia (he had a bad heart) and then took the entire clan to Spain, on to Belgium, and eventually to Quebec, where they lived out the war years before returning to Europe. Zita, who lived well into her nineties, never wore a color other than black after she was widowed at age twenty-nine. Her eldest son, Otto, lived until 2011—long enough to be able to publicly declare, on the seventieth anniversary of the Anschluss, that the Austrians were the first victims of Hitler.

When Valy was born, Troppau was still Hapsburg-controlled; the town was Austrian, and Zita and Karl weren’t yet in power.

Her mother, Toni, I will eventually learn, was twenty-six; Valy was her first and only child. The marriage wasn’t happy: her father, Franz, I will discover in the town’s archives, was gone before Valy was even a year old (Valy doesn’t acknowledge that he’s even alive in her school forms), and Toni set to work, running a shoe store in the center of town. She raised her daughter alone, and the two were entwined in the way mothers and daughters can be when there is no sibling, no father, and no relatives nearby. Valy’s letters worry about her mother, endlessly, and about her grandparents, her uncles and aunts—but they make no mention of a father at all. It’s not clear she ever heard from him again.

But before the worry: what a highlight it would have been, for Toni, who sent her only child to the most important school in the world, after all that work. Her single motherhood paid off, her daughter achieving all she’d hoped for her; more.

After all, Troppau was closer to Vienna than Prague, both geographically and culturally. Although, as the guns of World War I fell silent, the flag raised above the town was Czech, no one in Troppau seemed to acknowledge the switch: Valy, and pretty much everyone else in the city, spoke, dreamt, and wrote in German; it was only in the villages surrounding this little city that Czech was spoken.

And with or without the Hapsburgs, life was steadily improving, for Jews at least. With the emancipation of the Jews of the empire in 1867, centuries-long legal barriers crumbled; the Czech lands allowed the Jews out of the ghettos, and suddenly professions that had been barred—and areas to live that had been forbidden—opened to the Jewish community. In 1905, a gorgeous domed Moorish revival–style synagogue was inaugurated in the heart of town. It was an arrival announcement, made with a building so pretty that local postcards used it to promote the city.
“Hugs from Troppau!”
the cards read cheerily. Toni and Valy lived upstairs in one of the buildings on the grand main square, facing the opera house.

Toni herself wasn’t a Troppau native; she was born in Borszczow, in 1885, which is now in Ukraine but had once been Polish, and at her birth was Austrian (what wasn’t then?). More than a quarter of her birthplace was Jewish at the time. Borszczow—now called Borschiv—was one of those towns decimated by German occupation after 1941. Jews were murdered in batches of several hundred, or sent to the concentration camp Belzec; only a handful would survive; none would return to live in the town after the war. But all that was decades after Toni left.

Troppau was country, but it was cosmopolitan—it was the seat of the regional Silesian government, with a small representative parliament, and a strong bourgeois core of merchants and a sort of rural high society. It was—it still is—lovely. There is a meandering park that winds its way around the center of the old inner city, with a pagoda up on a hill that once boasted musicians each Sunday, and plenty of flowers and trees, perfect for walks for women in their
grands chapeaux
and their dresses, modeled like Zita’s at her wedding, slim and long, with a small train. The buildings are Beaux-Arts and eclectic, grand on a small scale—an Epcot Center version of Vienna, with wide-open piazzas.

As if to cement its status as a worldly city, and its link to Vienna, there was also the theater and opera house, built in 1805 in the model favored by Emanuel Schikaneder (librettist for
The Magic Flute
and founder of Vienna’s lavish Theater an der Wien) and renovated, after a fire, just before Valy’s birth, in the style of Louis XIV by Viennese theater artist Ferdinand Maser. It is as plush and as ornate as any opera house of Europe, decorated with gold leaf and red velvet and carved-marble mythological figures. Briefly, after the war, the Communists encased the opera house in a concrete block, temporarily obscuring the ornate exterior that so reminded them of the dominating Germans. By the time I saw the opera house, it had been turned back in time; the grudge against capitalism had subsided, its original majesty restored. The night I sneaked in, there was a premiere. Everyone
else was in black-tie finery; I was in jeans and carrying a backpack. The performance was
Nabucco
, which seemed oddly appropriate—Verdi’s interpretation of the expulsion of Babylonian Jews from Jerusalem. An incongruously nice usher allowed me to stand in the back of the uppermost tier. She spoke to me in broken German, knowing no English, and me no Czech. “Only stand,” she said, awkwardly, “no sit.” So I did, closing my eyes, listening to Abigaille’s aria, and feeling, for a moment, I could picture Valy and my grandfather there, across the street from her apartment, caught up in the music they had adored, and I started to well up with tears despite myself.

It is also, perhaps, hormones that make my emotions rise so quickly to the surface. The faintly fluish feeling of the beginning of pregnancy will infuse my entire Czech experience, which is made even more peculiar by my choice of guide, a young Czech from Krnov, one of the industrial towns nearby. His name is Pavel, and on paper he is perfect: he is obsessed with the Jewish history of his region, he is a registered tour guide in Prague, he is in his thirties. And he is thrilled to help me—a Jew! with a genuine connection to the region! But, over the course of five days, we spar over our generation’s role in this history, to whom this history belongs, who has more at stake in what I find.

I come looking for Valy, but instead, I find a population of young Czechs who are either grappling with the history—some with a better grasp than others—or who have turned their backs on it completely, if they ever considered it at all.

Krnov is one of the few towns in Czech Silesia that still has an original synagogue—it was saved, Pavel tells me, by an entrepreneurial mayor who promised the Germans he would destroy the building on Kristallnacht, but instead burned down a funeral hall alongside the cemetery. He later used the synagogue as a market, so perhaps his salvation was for his own economic gain, but no matter: it preserved the shell. Because it is Pavel’s town, and because the synagogue, or at
least its frame, still stands, he convinces me that sleeping in Krnov is the right choice, rather than Troppau. We will travel the area from here, he tells me, by e-mails and dropped Skype calls, and so I, not really understanding the distances, nor how I will get around in this region, agree.

At one time, these towns were bustling with industry—it was once known as the “Silesian Manchester,” with dozens of factories for textiles (Krnov) and sugar beets (Troppau) and plenty of work, and plenty of money. Later, in Prague, a British historian will tell me that the “sugar beet barons” were Jews, mostly, but this I don’t know when I’m in the area. I just see those plants, still belching smoke. And I’ll see the former textile factories, a booming industry from the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth—most of which are now shuttered, a product of post-Communism, or, as Pavel says each time we pass a boarded-up factory, “There’s your capitalism at work.” They are closed partly because of globalization, and they are closed partly because they were terribly polluting and unsafe. Strangely, the region is akin to the now-defunct textile-mill towns near my grandparents’ home in Massachusetts. The similarity extends further: the countryside, too, is all rolling green hills, low and inviting, not unlike the Berkshires or southern Vermont. Work here is scarce now. There is a large factory run by Teva, the Israeli pharmaceutical giant, but unemployment in the area is at least twice that of the rest of the country, and has been since the end of the 1980s. Krnov is particularly bad. Pavel’s mother is a pediatrician in town and there are fewer and fewer children to see—locals either aren’t having them, or they’re moving away.

The night we arrive in town it is terribly late, rainy and freezing. Pavel had insisted we spend the day in Třebíč, a town about three hours from Krnov, in the shadow of a nuclear power plant, reachable by three local Communist-era trains, and about two and a half hours from Prague. It is one of the most well-preserved Jewish ghettos in the world, Pavel tells me proudly—a UNESCO heritage site. Mostly it
feels like an open-air museum to the dead. At the one hotel, the front-desk clerk eagerly explains, “It used to be Jews who lived here, and, then, normal people.” The synagogue, lovingly restored, with gorgeous frescoes detailing prayers from the daily service, serves no one. There is a small house, kitted out for a Jewish mercantile family (antique cash register, dry goods) who never returns, circa 1930: a hardened challah on the table, hamantaschen on the counter, matzah in the pantry; a menorah in the bedroom. It is Colonial Williamsburg for Jews. The tiny homes, in these crooked streets, are now filled with artists who hawk tiny ceramic golem and take pride in the history. But there aren’t any Jews. “You need to see this,” Pavel had assured me, in Prague, “these are your
roots
. This is what your family was
from
.”

What he meant was the shtetl, but really, even though there’s truth to that, no one in my family would ever have admitted to—or celebrated—a time before Vienna, and if they did, it wasn’t here, it wasn’t Czech, it was deeper into the past; it was Galicia. So many of the Jews of Vienna—and so many of my grandfather’s friends—were, by origin, what the German Jews called
Ostjuden—
Eastern Jews from the shtetls scattered across what is now Ukraine and Romania and Poland, small-town Jews whose manner of dress, work, and way of life seemed backward to the big-city
Yekken
, or German Jews.