Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (43 page)

Ten

L
ONDON
I
NTERLUDE

I’m looking for descendants of Ilse Charlotte Mayer, née Fabisch, born in Breslau September 12, 1915. Immigrated to London. In the 1960s she lived at 181 Goldhurst Terrace, London NW6. She had three children, one born in 1939, one born in 1944, and one born in 1946. Frau Mayer had a brother murdered in Auschwitz, Hans Fabisch, and in the 1960s she searched for him and his wife, Valerie Fabisch (born Scheftel). Any news about any member of this family would be most welcome! Thank you!

I
find no record of Ilse, in all the ways we normally search these days, so I do something terribly old-fashioned: I take out an ad in a British publication, the
Journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees
. The immediate goal of the Association of Jewish Refugees, founded by and for the German and Austrian Jews who took refuge in Britain, was to reestablish these traumatized lives and collect—as well as reconnect—lost family and friends; its journal is still published. More important: there is still a section of the AJR, just as there was after the war, devoted to searches for lost loved ones.

In the immediate postwar period, a number of journals were established by and for Jewish refugees. Lists upon lists of survivors
were published, announcements that family or friends had survived.
Searches placed in the
Aufbau
(Reconstruction), the journal published in the United States, were legendary. They were classified ads, basically, but instead of looking for a car or a spouse, the ads were searching for family, for children, for friends. For years they ran, in the pre-pre-Internet era, at a time when we were, globally, remarkably unconnected, when it was possible that siblings could live across the country, or a city, from each other and never know it, and certainly could live on separate continents and never be sure the other had survived. Given the devastating impact of the Holocaust on just my grandfather’s friends, such advertisements made a great deal of sense. How would one know, for example, a cousin had arrived in Lyon, or survived in hiding in Budapest? How would one know, if you’d survived the war in Shanghai, as did a number of my grandfather’s friends, if your sister had made it to New York? What would her address be? The
Aufbau—
which began publishing in 1934—provided some of the first indications of deportations; it also listed the dead, in increasing numbers, as the war ended. Some of those advertisements were themselves half informed, listing family members with “location unknown” who would later turn out to be among the murdered. The circulation in the mid-1940s reached as high as a hundred thousand. My father remembers it coming to his childhood home—the
Aufbau
and
The New England Journal of Medicine
were essential reading.

In 1959,
Time
magazine ran a feature on the
Aufbau
, saying it had been “
the voice of help and hope for thousands of Jewish refugees” and one of the “most influential foreign language papers in the United States.” At the time, its circulation had dropped to a still-respectable thirty thousand–plus subscribers. The
Aufbau
had scooped other major papers on the announced decision of the West German government to pay out monies to victims of the Holocaust. The weekly newspaper (which went biweekly and eventually turned into a monthly magazine) remained influential for many years. In 1997, the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum used the
Aufbau
as researchers set about trying to track down the fate of the nearly one thousand passengers of the
St. Louis
, the doomed ship filled with refugees (mostly German Jewish citizens) that set sail for Havana from Hamburg on May 13, 1939. A small group of passengers were allowed to disembark in Havana, but Cuba refused entry to the rest, and the United States (despite pleas from those on board, despite the begging of the Joint Distribution Committee) also refused to issue visas to allow the hapless Jews on board to disembark in Miami. The boat was sent back to Europe, and the passengers went on to be distributed among the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France; some 254 of the original group would die in the Holocaust. The rejection of these refugees came, especially after the war, to symbolize the miserable plight of the Jewish unwanted.

The
Journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees
is a bit like a smaller, more focused
Aufbau
. Ten thousand children arrived in the UK on the
Kindertransport before the outbreak of war, in a relaxing of quota restrictions that allowed some under age sixteen to flee to safety; about sixty percent of these children never saw their parents again. Around seventy thousand adult refugees came to the UK as well, before the war; more came after. Each needed services; each needed help integrating into their new life. In the aftermath of the war, the AJR took on different roles, everything from connecting families to long-lost siblings or spouses or parents, to helping victims file claims against the German state. The journal of the AJR served in that capacity as well.

AJR still publishes, though, of course, it is now online as well as a glossy newsletter. Members now publish their recollections of major events—Kristallnacht, for example—as well as place obituaries, honor anniversaries, and offer services to help with the aging, and the indigent; the population is growing very old; it is disappearing. Holocaust survivors are entitled to money for elder care from the Conference on
Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which gives such funds to survivors. Though there remains, in the AJR, a small section devoted to searching for information about survivors or victims, not surprisingly, such searchers have taken a distant third (or fourth or fifth) place to the other activities of the magazine.

To that end, though I thought it probably a futile exercise, it was here I decided to place my ad.

Two months later, I flew to London for a two-day conference on Islam in the West. It is my first time away from Orli, and my breasts are still heavy with milk. I carry a pump, feel guilty, and yet am relieved to be gone. I don’t exactly know who I am anymore. Immersed as I am in my own work and stress, I give no thought at all to Ilse, or her descendants.

On my third night, the conference finished, I meet Jean-Marc Dreyfus, whose work had led me to Bad Arolsen in the first place. He now teaches Holocaust studies at the University of Manchester. We arrange to go to the blockbuster Gauguin exhibit at the Tate Modern because Jean-Marc is, among many other things, an excellent museumgoer. He mostly wanders off alone, but pops up every now and again to give an insight I wouldn’t have gleaned otherwise. (“Gauguin went to Bretagne when it was still seen as wild and primitive,” he says at one point, as we looked at work from the 1880s. He points out the costumes, the landscape, and the hints of Post-Impressionism in the blue trees on the horizon.) When we take a break for tea, Jean-Marc berates me. He tells me that I should start writing already, that I am failing Valy once again. Valy’s story, he says, his voice rising, cannot remain a collection of letters on my desk, in a box. It will do her no good.
But I still don’t know what happened,
I protest. He sighs. He is not sure what it is I hope to find. “You have so much!” he insists. And then he takes a step back. “You aren’t my student,” he says. “I’m sorry.” But no, I say, miserably. You’re right. I’m failing her.

Between the museum and dinner, we stop at my hotel and I check my e-mail.

And there it is:

Dear Ms Wildman,

I have just looked through the AJR Journal and am feeling very unsettled & tearful!

I am Ilse Mayer’s youngest daughter Carol, born in 1946. I am understandably extremely curious and excited to find out what information you have or what I can help you with.

Sadly my mother died 4 years ago after several years decline. My father Paul Yogi Mayer has survived her. I cannot wait to hear back from you. Please get in touch.

My daughter has googled you on slate.com and discovered your interest is about Valy, Ilse’s brother Hans’s wife. I look forward to the opportunity to exchange information and learn a little more about what happened.

Looking forward to your reply is a massive understatement!

Carol Levene (née Mayer)

I come back downstairs, overwhelmed. “You must e-mail her immediately,” Jean-Marc says. “Maybe she lives in London?” So I reply to Carol—
I’m in London!
I tell her, and then explain I have a four p.m. flight the next day. Is there any chance you live here, I ask, and would be willing to meet? A few hours later, she calls. “Sarah, you can’t imagine how emotional I am,” she says. “I’ll come find you wherever you are.”

And so, the next morning, I am in the lobby of the Chesterfield Mayfair Hotel, greeting Carol Levene, née Mayer, the youngest child of Ilse Charlotte Mayer and Hans’s niece. We embrace, and then marvel at the surreality of the moment, the sheer wonder of our meeting. She is simultaneously an apparition and an intimate. We leave the hotel and walk around the corner to Shepherd Market for a coffee. She talks the whole way, filling me in, at first, on her mother’s story.

Ilse and Paul, Carol’s parents, emigrated from Germany in April 1939 with Carol’s brother, then only a few months old. A sister, and then Carol, were born in London. After the war, Ilse searched endlessly for Hans and for her father and mother, Rudolf and Doris, after letters stopped coming. She never forgave herself for leaving without her younger brother, or her parents.

“She could never talk about Germany or her family; she couldn’t discuss it with us,” Carol says, wiping tears. “It was too hard for her. In fact, we never knew enough about what happened and my father felt we shouldn’t explore more if she doesn’t want us to. But since she’s died, I want to, I feel I have a responsibility to.”

Carol is a petite woman with rosy round cheeks and straight bobbed chestnut-colored hair; she is wearing a soft oatmeal-colored V-neck sweater with black palazzo pants. She is unadorned, but well put together. Other than her melodious accent, she could be any one of my parents’ friends, Jews of the baby boomer generation.

Carol tells me her mother could never hear about the war or its aftermath: if a program came on television, if ever the word “Nazi” was uttered, she simply shut down. No one asked her questions. Carol’s father, Paul, encouraged the silence, feeling his wife couldn’t handle the tension. “She couldn’t stomach the search for restitution,” Carol says, though I knew she had, in fact, pursued the case. Despite her endless sadness, and pain, “she was an unfailingly polite woman,” says Carol, explaining that even in her final days of dementia, as the nurses in her home for the aged came to bathe her, Ilse would say, “Thank you very much, you’re so kind. Thank you so much.” Ilse had gone to a Jewish women’s college in Berlin, Carol tells me; she was older than Hans, by some years. I wonder immediately if she might have known Valy herself.

Promising to introduce me to her father, now ninety-eight, on my next visit to London, Carol announces she has two things to show me. At this, wizardlike, she produces a black cloth bag.

Out first comes a page printed from a Berlin city website: two
small brass cobblestones bearing the names of Hans and Valy embedded into a block of sidewalk.
Stolpersteine.
The address listed on the top of the page is Brandenburgische Strasse 43. Surprising myself, I begin to cry; the stones hadn’t existed when I last visited the building; indeed, the page indicated they had been put in six weeks before my London visit. I wonder aloud who might have placed them. Carol seems shocked as well—it was not she, she assures me. She assumed, she says, that it was me.

And then, out of Carol’s bag comes a letter. It is dated 1999 and it is written, in English, by a man named Ernest Fontheim.

Carol hands me the letter, and I begin to read:

Dear Mrs. Mayer,

I recently received your address from Mr. Walter Laqueur who told me that you are the sister of Hans Fabisch. As Walter probably told you, Hans and I were very good friends in a crucial period of our lives.
I thought that you may be interested in my recollections of your brother and the general circumstances of his life at a time when there was no longer any postal connection between the two of you. To begin with, Hans was my best friend during the 21 months when we knew each other; in fact he was my last best (male) friend. I never had such a close (male) friend again.

It is seven typed pages, and, unbelievably, it appears, at first glance, to be a guide to Valy and Hans’s attempt to go into hiding in Berlin, and their final days before deportation. It is my key to understanding everything that happened after my letters end. Ernest knew them both well. It is a detailing of Hans’s life in Berlin, his work, his hopes, his adventurousness—and his relationship to Valy.