Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (26 page)

Deutschkron’s tenure with Otto Weidt came well after her experience at the Kindergartenseminar—she was in the school only for a year, and then was pressed into forced labor, standing for some twelve hours a day in a factory. Eventually, she got herself the (relatively) easier job as secretary in Weidt’s factory by purposely screwing up her right knee; it never properly healed.

I show her a photo of Valy; she barely looks at it, and scoffs when I say, quietly, perhaps she might have known her. It is uncomfortably warm in her apartment; we are sitting in a small, sunny, enclosed porch that amplifies the effects of the sun. Then I make the mistake of saying that Valy might have survived, being young; that I am hoping I might discover she outlived the war. “Why should she have survived?” she nearly shouts at me. I start to cry. I want Valy to have survived, I say, aware, immediately, how ridiculous, how childish, it sounds. I’m so close to the idea—the fantasy?—of Valy, I almost want to will her into being, into finding her.

Deutschkron sighs heavily at this. She is unimpressed by Americans. She is unimpressed, particularly, by young American Jews who
come to weep with her, or who weep at all. She feels Jews in the States did nothing and come back now, seventy years on, to express their sadness. She doesn’t want it. “The Germans forbid immigration in October 1941, so, until then, everyone knew in the world—if they wanted to know—what was happening to us. And the Americans could have helped us! They could have helped us to get affidavits!
Ach
,” she practically spits the words. “Disgusting! I think this is really disgusting and they are the ones to shout at the Germans
ahahahaha
!” She jabs a finger in the air, accusatorily. “You know what happened to me in the States? I had two lectures there, in both of them [people said], ‘What you are telling us can’t be true! Germans didn’t help Jews!’ in that fashion. Thank you very much!
They
didn’t help us! Ach! I could tell you after the war how many American soldiers opened parcels that we got, and took out coffee and things like that, but that’s perhaps human, but it was unbelievable.

Inge Deutschkron lecturing at Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt. Behind her is a photo of her from the early 1940s.

“What do you mean, ‘should have survived?” she asks, switching back to Valy. “Were they not masters over lives and deaths, these people, these Nazis? Why would she have survived? Just she?” She laughs, bitterly. “There is no ‘should.’ You see what I mean. I was helped by
twenty
Berlin families who helped us to survive. This was a dictatorship of the worst sort and whoever was found helping Jews was taken to a concentration camp. The Americans! Their immigration quotas were from 1918 or something. They didn’t change these quotas. I
think they allowed a certain number of people in.” I tell her Valy writes to my grandfather that, at best, her number on the quota list was two years off. “Exactly!” she says. “Disgusting! Honestly. That’s how I feel about it. Especially when Jews from America come along and tell me,
Oh, how hard
. The Americans didn’t help us!”

Deutschkron is also unimpressed with me because I have not yet read her book (I will, upon returning to the States, but that is some months away, and I hadn’t heard of her before meeting Gudrun). And she is busy. “I have so much work to do! I’m eighty-six, you see. And I don’t have much time! . . . Incidentally, what you should see is the play,” she adds, meaning the play that was made from her book. She tells me it has been performed more than three hundred times in Berlin alone, but no one in America has interest in it. “I have an agent who says it is hopeless. They are interested in Jewish victims but not in those who survived with the help of Germans.”

I disagree, but I don’t want to fight with her. I can’t say exactly why one story is picked up over another. And, to her greater point, I think there, too, she is mistaken: Americans are obsessed with the exceptions, the defiance, to the detriment of the bigger picture, the bigger loss, the norm of death. We are always looking for the happy Holocaust story. Even me, here, I realize. Though I am busily breaking down the myth perpetuated by my grandfather—his own defiance, his own happy story—I am clinging to the hope that, somehow, Valy could have survived the trauma, the vicissitudes, the cruelty, of Nazi Berlin, until the end.

We sit, for a moment, in miserable silence. Hoping to make the most of a visit that has been, at best, uncomfortable, and at worst a waste of her time, I ask Deutschkron if she wouldn’t mind telling me her story anyway. So, after some grumbling, she does, in great detail, over the course of the next two hours. And of course, as with all such stories, it is shocking, and it is amazing. She lived in hiding spots that ranged from the temporary and uncomfortable to the distinctly miserable—including a wet and cold goat shed whose only benefit was
its relative safety. She pretended to be a refugee from bombing raids—first in the east, then in Berlin itself—lying directly to Hitler youth, using false identities and claiming her papers had been destroyed, along with her possessions, by British bombers. And yet hearing her tale gets me no closer to knowing more of what happened to Valy—other than to know that Deutschkron and her mother, both of whom survived in hiding, did so with the help of many, many friends and acquaintances who had known them before the war. In listening, I am reminded that Valy had no such network. She was foreign in Berlin, alone, save her mother.

“We couldn’t get an entry permit into Great Britain,” Deutschkron says. Immediately after the November pogrom, Deutschkron’s father fled to England at a time when many believed men were at greater risk than women. And she—like Valy—had missed a chance to serve as a maid in the United Kingdom.

“Immigration wasn’t easy, because countries didn’t want us. It was the same with Great Britain [as America]: they asked for bank guarantees or rich relatives who would take us in. Well, my father had a cousin in England who was really British, and though we didn’t know her very well, she offered to help, to provide a . . . bank guarantee. For one person. She couldn’t provide three. So we thought it was best for my father to go. Men were going to concentration camps, and besides, my father was an active Social Democrat and he was dismissed from service, not because he was Jewish but because he was a politician. We thought it would be easier, once he was there, to get us out, and he looked into us being [maids]. And indeed he found a family that would take [my mother and me] as a cook and an assistant. But this didn’t work because we had to fulfill so many things—like paying
Reichsfluchtsteuer [the tax charged by the Reich to leave; it was twenty percent in 1933, and by the end of the 1930s it would fleece a family of all they had] and all the strange boxes Jews had to check off in order to leave! We had to list all the things we wanted to take with us, like handkerchiefs and underwear and so on. Someone came from the [tax
office] and the finance office, and they checked whether it was all correct and so on, and it took a lot of time and then the war broke out.” And so they were stuck, much like Valy.

By October 1939, the world tipping into war, Valy toggles between hope—that she may yet be rescued—and despair—her chances, she fears, are already lost. To get to America, she has applied too late, she is thousands of names down the list and the quota system is capped and truncated, it is keeping not just her but thousands of her compatriots, and her co-religionists, out of the United States. By the following spring, even those most reluctant to leave had applied to place their names on these lists. “
My registration number is very high; I applied too late. I am number 77,454 under the German quota, which means I will have to wait at least five to six years,”
teacher Hertha Feiner wrote her half-Jewish daughters, who were already safe in Switzerland.

But those who had applied—like Valy—earlier still held out hope a window would open for them. Even as Valy struggles for a way around these emigration problems, life in Germany itself is getting more and more surreal—on September 6, a curfew is imposed on Jews, making it illegal for them to be out past eight p.m; they are also no longer allowed radios and other such small comforts. Her mother, at last, has made it from Troppau. She has work, food. The Seminar girls were even given gas masks, as the Reich was still protecting Jews in the event of chemical warfare. She can see the deprivation all around her, she knows her position is fortunate—for now. But Valy is so very, very lonely. And so very, very sad.

Berlin, October 12, 1939

My dearest, very dearest boy,

Today, finally, after an interminably long time, a letter from you arrived. How I waited for it, how I yearned for it, how I rejoiced . . . and how much I would love to be with you again. And since it seems to be absolutely impossible that we will see each other soon again, so hopelessly long, that I am sometimes completely desperate and feel that I cannot take it, although, speaking from a purely external viewpoint, I am, relatively speaking, well off: I continue to be in the seminar and I am making money, and I am able to have my mother with me; together we live in this, the most beautiful room of the villa; mother has been a “guest” of the Reichsvereinigung for the past three weeks; over the next few days, she will begin a “retraining” course /housekeeping, and we hope that she will obtain a relatively good position here. They like me here and they are fantastically nice to my mama; most of the people here are nice and good to me, the children adore me, and there are surely many who are deeply envious of me. . . . Still and all, I am absolutely not happy with this life I am forced to lead, devoid of intellect, friends and love. I work a lot,—15 hours a day; every third day I have nightshift; that does not leave a lot of time for intellect, joy . . . [or] love . . . and I long so much to do something other than wiping children’s derrieres and struggling with unruly kids and tidying up children’s rooms—that, however, hardly ever are really tidy, and that, just like today, time and again cause interminable fights. But I must be quiet and seemingly content because I must earn money, and, as I said before, I am really, relatively speaking, rather well off.

Isiu got a summons to the Consul for November 6th, and hopes to be able to travel soon thereafter. Hermann is in Trieste on his way to Shanghai. My grandparents and Berta are in the interior, and we worry a lot about their livelihoods.

Oh my darling, how much I would like to hear your supposedly poor German—something I really cannot imagine and how terribly sad it is that even you consider it questionable if and when this may be possible—although you always were such an optimist in these matters. But let us not give ourselves headaches over this now; somehow or other it will work out, and it is impossible to make plans since all decisions are being taken away from one. Unfortunately, however, one can’t help but feel miserable at times, but that, too, shall pass.

Darling, are you now the “top banana” or close to it, at the St. Luke’s Hospital? Do you like it, and do you feel good about things, everything told. Lonka was wonderfully kind and nice. And it almost did work out. Unfortunately, I no longer can write to her now. Please give her my very best regards!

I want to write to you very soon again, my darling. But, please, you must do so as well. I do not know how much longer I will stay here; maybe my own disorderliness is my undoing. Now you see—that’s what you get for always calling my sloppiness largesse and geniality (but only when you were in a good mood). But, surely, there is much positive about my work here, and the people do like me. Maybe I will even stay.

Goodbye, my beloved boy. Give my regards to Mama, Cilli and Karl (what are they doing???) and countless kisses (if I still master this technique) from your

Valy

Lonka remained Valy’s contact in London.
“Unfortunately, I can no longer write to her now”
—Germany has invaded Poland. Another route to salvation has closed. Karl and Lonka continued to write back and forth about Valy, until Lonka could no longer offer much hope at all. Lonka writes to this effect in September:

17.9.1939

My Dear,

How very nice of you to think of me in your prayers. What is a pity is that they’ve not had the effect you wanted for though your intentions were good, things don’t look too cheerful just now. . . . The American consulate is closed for emigration for an indefinite period as they have got too much to do with repatriating their own people. So only God knows when we shall be there, provided we shall be able to go at all. Have you been in New York for the high festivals [Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur] and have you, by any chance, seen my sisters? It really seems absence makes the heart grow fonder for the last two weeks I have been longing for my sisters and brother more than I ever did before. Talking about high festivals, I forgot: a very happy new year to you.