Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (46 page)

The same anxiety held true for the restrictions on using public transport—it was only acceptable for those, like Hans and Ernest, traveling more than seven kilometers. But that permission had to be carried on their person at all times. And if the train or tram were used for any purpose other than an authorized work commute, and that person was discovered, he or she could be immediately listed to be sent away into the ether that seemed to mark the deportations. Special yellow cards were issued for those who worked for the Reichsvereinigung.

Hans and Ernest kept thinking of ways around the restrictions. He wrote to Ilse:

One month after the introduction of the star, the deportations to the east started. Initially all Jews who worked in defense plants were exempted from deportation. So we were protected. However any Jew who was discovered without a star was subject to deportation, regardless of a defense job. . . . Hans and I went to the movie theaters even though that was strictly forbidden for Jews and was therefore connected with a certain risk. Before the introduction of the yellow star, this risk was not very great provided we went to movie theaters in areas far away from our neighborhood. . . . With the introduction of the star, the situation changed drastically. Obviously it was suicidal to be seen without a star in one’s house, or street or even neighborhood, and we surely could not go to the movies with the yellow star. So Hans came up with a solution to this dilemma. He bought some little metal hooks and eyes [the kind used on blouses that close at the back], filed the hooks to a sharp point, sewed a hook on each of the six corners on the back of the Star of David, and then hooked the star on his outer coat or jacket. In this way the star became easily removable. He also made a set for me. So we could leave our building and neighborhood as good Jews and, after some safe distance, duck into a building entrance, remove the star, and emerge transformed as pure “Aryans” ready to go to the movies. On the way home we reversed this procedure.

The truth, Ernest explains later, in one of the long phone calls we start having after my visit (all of them beginning or ending with me reassuring him that such conversations aren’t to disrupt the integrity of his story, but to understand what it meant to be in Berlin at that time), was this: “Before the star, movies were also—and parks—
everything
was prohibited. But since there was no way really to recognize a Jew officially, at least other than by looks, maybe it was much easier to circumvent these prohibitions—we even went to the state opera house on Unter den Linden [the main drag of the eastern part of the city]! In 1940—that I remember—it was a one-week sort of guest performance of the Rome opera at the Berlin state opera and strangely I forgot which opera I saw there. It may have been
Rigoletto. . . .”

After the star was introduced, Hans’s star-removal system was only used for the movies, and only when the two could get as far from their apartments as possible. They had “a sort of sense of pride,” he explains. “I liked the fact that it was designed to suppress me,” says Ernest of the star. “I—initially at least—I felt sort of good about it. Now it sounds crazy to me but I definitely remember that’s how I felt.” But the star was a sort of ghetto in and of itself, a confining, a redistricting of the social map, by separating Jews from non-Jews with the medieval markings. They would walk for hours to skirt the streets they were forced to avoid, like the major shopping thoroughfare, Kurfürstendamm, and the parks they could not be seen in, like Tiergarten, the massive park that bisects a huge chunk of Berlin’s western half.

As he tells me this, Margot flutters in the background, putting trays of cookies and tea together for us, dropping lines like, “Hans never seemed young, so it was not strange he was with a woman who was not young.” I ask about Valy; she was always well put together,
Ernest says, almost fashionable, to the degree that was possible in 1942.

Ernest’s stories fill in the character of Hans. The man—the second love of Valy’s life?—who was not my grandfather, begins to take on definite shape. He was impossibly brave, and just as smart as Valy. I ask Ernest, again and again, what did it feel like to be living through this time? What did it feel like to have friends disappear, day after day? How aware was he of what was happening in the “east”? They didn’t know exactly what the east meant, he says now. But they knew they weren’t hearing word back. Ernest wrote:

There was a feeling of complete impotence in the Jewish population. Our lecture-and-music group decided that we should do something actively. One of the most unnerving aspects of the deportations was the fact that, with few exceptions, no mail or message of any kind was ever received from any deportee. So we decided that the first person from our circle to be deported should try by any means to get a message back about the conditions at the destination. Shortly thereafter a girl from our group was deported. Nothing was ever heard from her. After that, all of us agreed that everyone should try to go underground to avoid deportation and that the time to prepare such a step was now. The term “underground” meant a change in identity and residence to that of a fictitious “Aryan.”

For men the age of Hans and Ernest, though, it meant something else as well, something equally if not more dangerous: it meant running the risk of being seen as a deserter from the German army. All men of conscription age were serving by the winter of 1942. To take off the star and go “underground” for a woman was somewhat easier. For a man it meant a dual deception. It was something that gave all the men in their group pause. There was another problem as well—underground, they would have to be fed. They would lose their ration cards. They would need help.

It takes me ages to see Hans’s niece, Carol, again. I try to make arrangements, I travel again to Berlin, I try to stop in London, but Carol’s father, who she’d promised would be an essential interview, falls ill soon after Carol and I first meet. He is sick for many months. I don’t want to push her—or him. I wait. I interview, instead, Walter Laqueur, the historian, whom the family has known for many years. Laqueur and Hans had gone to school together in Breslau. He remembers Hans better than I might have hoped, but it is the broad outlines he recalls—Hans was short, he was sporty, he was secular. Laqueur is kind, yet skeptical. What can be said, he asks me gently, about young people who died in the war? “What is there to say about a twenty-one-year-old? What did they ever do? You’ll have to write around them,” he says, meaning write through their experience, using others to explain what Hans might have experienced.

I remain undeterred. Carol had mentioned she had letters from Hans. And I think—despite his youth, despite his truncated chance to really live—there is more still to know. I am determined to visit with her again and sort through Hans’s own words to see if there is more to be culled about the memory of the man Valy married. I want to see if he explained to his family his relationship to this girl, so much older. More: I hope to talk to Carol’s father about what Hans was like as a young man, before Carol’s parents were able to flee. But then, six months after she and I first meet, Carol’s father, Paul Yogi Mayer, dies in London. I have not had the chance to talk to him after all. There are dozens of obituaries published in all the major English papers; he was celebrated for his work helping reintegrate young survivors into the UK, lauded by personalities across the British spectrum. Selfishly I rue that another incredible person has been lost, lament that this generation is literally fading away before my eyes, dying as I race across the globe.

When I finally see Carol again, more than a year has passed. She
invites me to spend a night at her London townhouse at the edge of the city after a conference I attend in Cambridge. I take a train down to meet her and she picks me up in a sporty little black car with a child’s safety seat installed in back. She wears a kind of dark gray, striped, Moroccan caftan and a necklace of large smooth stones or seed-shells; she is enormously affable, endlessly hospitable. We eat cheese and vegetables, drink copious amounts of tea. Her home is the bottom floor of an early-twentieth-century two-family house, nestled in one of those London strips of Edwardian-era homes built between 1900 and 1910 that looks out of central casting, or the set of a BBC show: inside, a collection of antique china plates and saucers in varying pastels are perched in an antique sideboard; Persian rugs and brocade floral couches face an unused fireplace, topped by a lovely pen-and-watercolor from the early part of the last century, a portrait of a young woman, her hair in an elaborate upsweep, and a Tiffany lamp. An enormous, sprawling garden spills out the back, filled with her own plantings. And Carol, too, fits the scene, with her language peppered by words like “muddled” and “lost the plot,” which sound so perfectly British to my American ear.

Carol has a collection of artifacts and documents that rivals my own, the paper detritus of a world upended: her parents’ world, so similar to my grandfather’s. We spend twenty-four hours sitting crossed-legged on the floor of Carol’s living room surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of letters from family trapped in Germany—Hans, his parents (Carol’s grandparents), her uncles. One, named Walter Raschkow, was—like Victor Klemperer—married to a non-Jew, and so, protected, survived the entire war in Germany. As he learned his Jewish family members were being deported, he became a keeper of records, saving every scrap of paper about each nephew, sibling, cousin, knowing, by 1942 at least, that he was the last relative they could contact. He takes notes about each, reminders to himself. He seems aware that they may not return.

Some of this was preserved by Walter’s daughter, Ingeborg, who
never married, Carol explains, as we leaf through page after page. In her old age, Ingeborg had all of the family’s possessions still with her—everything Carol’s grandparents had managed to store with her protected father, as well as everything her own parents had managed not to give up. But at the end of her life, she was taken care of by a man who coerced her into leaving all of it to him. The family was allowed access only to the photos and the letters. The rest—Art Nouveau works; ceramics and glassware; hints of the haute-bourgeois life the family had once led—were swept into the swindler’s life and out of the Fabisch–Mayer family forever. It was a second, and final, stealing, and devastating to Carol’s mother, who had already lost so much.

There must have been a great deal he took: Carol’s collection includes a 1930s-era photo album Walter had kept, with family members looking sporty—and happy—at Alpine ski resorts; it is a glimpse at their life of wealthy comfort before the Reich. There is also an autograph book from Carol’s mother’s friends, dated 1929. Each girl writes her a note in a different language—Latin, German, Hebrew—they are so
literate
. And so modern: Carol’s own parents lived together before they were married; the wedding came only when her mother was pregnant with her first child. Soon after, the three emigrated together.

Carol’s father, Paul, also kept notes on each person. And now Carol has a growing scrapbook of material on everyone, each document encased in plastic sheets. There are dozens of pages on her parents, her mother’s last German passport—stamped with its large red
J
, good for one trip, in one direction; her mother’s class pictures from the 1930s, laughing gorgeous girls, some blurred, they are moving too fast for the photographer in their rush toward life, all with that question hanging over them, the one that presses down on every photo of every group of Jewish teens from the 1930s—it is hard not to look at these images without some dread: Who among these girls with braids or stylish wavy bobs, these casual embraces, survived the next years?

And then, finally, here are the materials from Hans; letters, endless, endless letters that begin the moment Ilse Charlotte Mayer
escaped: some requesting help in joining his sister in the United Kingdom; others attesting to his abilities and his studies; still more requests for help securing work in the UK—and then those that detail his struggles, like Valy, when he loses job after job in Berlin, as he works to keep his parents’ morale boosted, as he tries to keep his own head above the rapidly moving waters of Nazi regulations. Bits and pieces of his endless struggle—alongside his parents—to emigrate swim out at us from the morass. In July 1939, it all seems possible; he writes to Ilse and Yogi: