Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (30 page)

France falls in June, and in Berlin, Jews are banned from the major parks; the Nazis have stolen their homes, their clothing, their livelihoods, and now, it seems, they are stealing the very air around them, their ability to breathe, to walk, to be outdoors. By autumn, London will not fall, but be pummeled with bombs.

For Valy, her losses—freedom and love—compound each other. We have all had this yearning, I think, as I read and reread her letters. We have all been desperate for love, felt love was lost before we were ready to let it go. We have all felt that sense of—stupidity and childishness, rage and hopelessness—around love. But for Valy it becomes the only thing left, so she draws it carefully, underscores it, writes around it, highlights it, again and again. She still loves him, but she is uncertain of him, she wants him to know what she is going through, but more than anything, she wants to know she has something to look forward to, to live for—with everything in her world upended, she needs him to remain a constant.

08-08-40

My darling,

It is 3.00 am and I am unable to go to sleep. I keep thinking why it is that you do not write to me.

Dearest one, I must ask you something and you will respond, won’t you? You do know that I consider myself as belonging to you wholly and entirely and that I feel that I am bound to you. But please, do tell me if you want it to be so. I am really not sure when I am reflecting on our talks during our last days together and on your first letters from New York and now on your lengthy silence.

And yet, your last letters—admittedly written a long, long time ago—were different.

I don’t know how to go on, darling, you must write to me and tell me what you have to say about this. I must have support and some kind of a fixed point of reference for all my thoughts and feelings. In order to endure all this confusion and not to be swallowed up by it I would need something incontrovertible.

You will make me happy if you will write to me that your last letters are the ones that count,—and not your first ones. If you only would finally write to me!

I do love you very much! Good night.

Your Valy

It’s devastating, her need for him. And surely his lack of response is a mix of things—his insecurity about his professional position in America, his love affairs, his uncertainty about his connection to a girl he hasn’t seen now in two years. And yet something draws him back time and again, he never quite lets her go, never wants her to give up hope in him, never can quite sever that relationship—for himself, I suspect, as much as for her own sense of security. So each time she starts to pull away, to question him, he writes again, so that each time she hears from him it is proof, in some way, that he still loves her, and she extrapolates that to mean that there is still something good in the world.

He writes to her that he has opened his practice. It is so fresh, it is so shaky, his establishment on these shores, but he tells her, immediately, that he has begun—finally—to really live here.

Berlin, 11-08-1940

My beloved boy

You can’t imagine how happy your picture and your letter made me. The picture is so wonderful, so good, so beautiful the likes of which I never saw before. I can’t possibly describe to you how much you have pleased me by sending it. And then there is the news that you have opened your practice! I am all puffed up with pride! O my darling, I wish from the bottom of my heart that everything is going to work out beautifully for you. I am so happy for you and for your dear mama that you can have her with you. Are you spending your mornings at the hospital? How are you living? Do you have a nice room? What does it look like? O darling, I am so curious and would so love to experience all these new and exciting things with you. What did I do to deserve that I cannot be with you?!? But, before I start to bawl, let me write about other things: My birthday was very nice. Everyone in my station was delightful. The children had small presents for me. They were all excited to give them to me. Everyone, including my boss, got to see your picture. It is standing on a small table, right next to my bed, surrounded by flowers. All I have to do is to look at it in order not to feel so terribly lonesome. I have to write about your picture, again and again. It makes me so indescribably happy. Thanks a million, my beloved.

But now you surely will want to know something about me. You do know that I am working as a trainee in the children’s ward, thanks to a stipend I was granted by the “Reichsvereinigung.” Moreover, I have in the meanwhile passed the federal exam as Registered Nurse. Now they want to take away the stipend unless I agree to work for two months as a nursing trainee and then to take on medical care. Since I have my RN exam, the people there think that I do not need any further specialized training to become a physician. Lots of problems, but I don’t want to trouble you with that stuff. The upshot of all of this is that my boss, who earlier on was one of Berlin’s leading pediatricians, with whom I am on very good terms and whose family has visited us often—advised me to work for two months, but not as general nurse, but rather as nurse for infants in the children’s ward, which I have been doing since the beginning of this week. He considers this type of practical work very important for a pediatrician and did it himself during his time as a young assistant physician. Now I spend the time between 7.00 AM and 7.00 PM, and sometimes 8.00 PM, at the infant nursing ward, examine the stools of the little darlings, keep popping food into their little mouths, which they sometimes spit out again. Meanwhile, I am developing something of a “nurse’s soul,” with all the customary meal breaks etc. In the evenings, I am totally exhausted. While I think all of this is quite useful from a practical standpoint, I also feel it is overly taxing and I hope sincerely that the two months will pass quickly. I don’t know what will follow. It is possible that my boss will be appointed the director of a large infants’ hospital. If that happens, he may try to hire me as assistant pediatrician. However, this is a purely speculative matter at this point.

My mother is much beloved and appreciated in her nursing home. She is really doing a fantastic job. I believe that her nursing home is the best managed institution, and most definitely has the best kitchen. I am so very glad to have her nearby and that she has found a relatively good position. Nevertheless, I am constantly thinking about emigration. My mother would dearly love to go to Palestine, but that is particularly difficult at the moment. I, on the other hand, cannot make up my mind to go there, because I feel that this would remove me even further from you and from the possibility to see you again. No emigration in the world would be worth that sacrifice.

My darling, please forgive my terrible scribbles. Most of this letter was written in bed, because I am so tired at the end of the day that I find it hard to sit upright at the table. . . .

You cannot possibly imagine how very important your letters are to me!! My beloved, I beg you—don’t let me wait so long again!!!!!!

I love you and I am forever

Your Valy

Such a long letter in which she gives him nothing, no indication of what she knows. And yet there is this chilling line:
“No emigration in the world would be worth that sacrifice.”
It makes me wonder: Did she pass up an opportunity to go to Palestine, her mother’s first choice?
Earlier that spring, I read in one survivor’s testimony, it seems thirty
thousand people had applied for “illegal” ship passage to Palestine—illegal only to the British, who were not thrilled to have more Jews trying to upset the balance in Palestine; the Gestapo knew everything. Five hundred were chosen. An astronomical twenty thousand dollars was contributed by the passengers to cover the cost of the passage; among those on board were known active Zionists. In the end, three hundred fifty “young people” under the age of thirty were chosen, a hundred fifty older people. The ship sailed in August 1940. Valy and her mother were not on it.

Later that fall Valy wrote again—this was, I realize as I begin to stack them chronologically for myself, one of the first letters I had read, when I discovered the collection. The idea of her alone, with her flute, dreaming of her time with him in summers, on mountains, in their city, haunts me.

Babelsberg, 11-18-40

My Darling!

I’ve come up here to see my mother for a couple of days. I am waiting out an infection. . . . In any case, I finagled to get myself a couple of days off, which I love. Despite all my sense of duty etc. I was able to pull a fast one on my superiors. I am in a splendid mood! Now I’m just curious whom the poor babes will make wet when they’re being fed. They used to do that exclusively when I had them in my lap! The poor things will have to wean themselves from doing any of this (pooping and wetting) entirely. And tons of dirty diapers surely will await my return. And here I am sniffling, using up oodles of handkerchiefs, resting on my mother’s couch. I am catching up on my serious sleep deficits and am playing the flute, much to the disgruntlement of the home’s denizens.

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!

And thus I constantly dream of how things will be when I am with you again, my darling, and how incredibly happy I shall be. In such moments I let our entire past life together pass in front of my inner eyes and live through all the different phases of our times together. There was the era of Mrs. Mandl, the “Medizinerredoute” [the Viennese medical students’ ball], Dr. Krügerheim, the chemical laboratory, the clinic, the exams, and the unspeakably beautiful summer at the Wörthersee, Dalmatia, Prein, the Rax mountain, Karlsthal, Professor Morino, Italy; and then there was a summer’s day in the Augarten park when you told me that I should get married, and other things that I absolutely did not understand; the evenings at Frau Hirschfeld’s, when you kept repeating these things to me; the night after my graduation when you, on the Ringstraße, between the Parliament and the Rathaus spoke of my future. Do you remember? . . . Friday evenings at your mama’s, the other evenings at your place; your undertakings/courier of pleasure . . . ski courses . . . Heinestraße etc. etc. A whole array of different relationships to one another which we lived and experienced together; this time simply cannot have passed, darling, I beseech you, that cannot be! My beloved, isn’t it true that it cannot be so?! I am thinking of all these things and I ask myself what phase you find yourself in at this point. Dr. Krügerheim? Or the Rax? Or the Augarten? Or Karlsthal?

My darling, I shall again write a letter to you every week as far as I am able to. Karl, please give your mama my most cordial regards; I think of her so often with great love.

Farewell for today, my darling. Please, please write soon and about the many things that keep you occupied. A thousand kisses,

Your Valy

She is living only in the past. She has no present and no clear picture of the future. She is so terribly lonely, she is hungry, she is sad. His present isn’t one she can remotely imagine. And thus, between the notes from those who urge him to get her to safety, from her own commentary on the chaos that has engulfed her life, my grandfather would have known as well that there was nothing to return to. And this is without him knowing the minor indignities that eat away at her, that she is not even allowed to be called a doctor—even if her training is complete. She is a
Krankenbehandler—
a Nazi term for Jews with medical degrees, “a caretaker for the sick.”

She is, sometimes at least, at the Jüdisches Krankenhaus, a strange oasis of normalcy at the corner of the Wedding district in northern Berlin. It is the only place that Jewish and half-Jewish patients can be treated, and it continues—throughout the entire war—to function as a hospital. I decide to go up there and see if there is anything to be found. And then I also turn to the last year of the letters, 1941. If 1940 was depressing and urgent, then 1941 was sheer
desperation.

Seven

T
HE
V
ISE

I
am six months pregnant and round. I have started to wear stockings that compress my legs to better their circulation. I am conscious of what I eat, and more conscious still of the rations—or lack of rations—that restricted how women and children ate and dressed during Valy’s time in this city.

In January 1941, Jews are denied the right to repair their shoes, to keep their typewriters; by February, milk is all but unavailable. As the year progresses, the restrictions become legion: No longer can Jews have telephones, bicycles, fish, coffee, fruit, chocolate, alcohol, or jam. Jews are limited to one hour a day to shop; if they reach the top of the long queue when the time is up, they have lost their chance to purchase anything at all. On public transport, Jews are forbidden to sit. By 1942, they will be denied access to trams and trains entirely, unless they have a seven-kilometer commute to their labor assignment. Special rail permits will be issued for this “privilege.” Meat and butter and eggs will be gone by then as well.