Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (52 page)

Reuven faithfully recorded everything that he saw, everything he experienced, in a diary. “
The dead are naked,” he wrote
.
“When someone had just starved, they cover him in wrapping paper and lay him down on the sidewalk, and at night his friends, or just beggars, walk out, and undress him completely, and leave him all naked with no shoes, no dress or even underwear.”
Josima, Kami’s half sister, was smuggled to the Aryan side just before the Warsaw Ghetto uprising took the German army by surprise. Her father had feared for her safety during all his months in the ghetto.

January 1942. There’s talk recently of the vandals murdering the children and the blood of all the fathers hardens in their veins as they listen to such whispers. . . . I returned home and I am all shaken. My child is sleeping, I am looking at her. My eye deceives me and I don’t see her. She disappears, the bed grows empty. I was frightened. I bent over and held her so forcefully that she woke up, quizzical and afraid. She calmed down as she saw me, and her face radiated with a lovely smile. She sent me a kiss by air, turned over to her side, and fell asleep. Inside me fritters a demon of fear.

This prescient parental anxiety jolts me. We all sit and watch our children sleep, I think, reading this. We watch them and wonder how to protect them from the outside world, and our world is so much less imminently dangerous, there is no comparison.

And Reuven’s anxiety was borne out: Josima died of tuberculosis some weeks after she went into hiding; soon after, her mother, Pnina, took her own life. Only Reuven survived. After the war, Reuven never spoke of Josima, but her framed photo hung like a ghostly mezuzah in the doorway to his home, so each member of Ben-Shem’s new postwar family would see her as they came in and as they went out.

We, the American cousins, knew little to nothing of Josima—although we vaguely knew Reuven had lost everyone, and that he had named his postwar son Nekamiah, “Revenge of God” or “Revenge! God!” His second marriage was to another survivor, with an equally harrowing tale—this was Ruth, who saw her own sister be murdered before her eyes; she herself jumped from the train to Treblinka, leaving behind a half-dozen siblings.

My grandfather’s Viennese world was so embittered, so angry—at their fate, but also at him for having missed the worst of it. He got off easy; it is the subtext of their letters. It was a bitterness that transcended generations, seeped through to our modern, easier lives.

I spent a weekend with Kami, as Nekamiah is known, his wife, Shely, and their daughter, Sharon, in Ramat Gan, when I was twenty and Sharon nineteen, she and I lying on thin twin mattresses, plotting ways to meet soldiers and then slipping out to go dancing to American music in Israeli clubs. But then I returned, some weeks later, during Pesach, and I felt the family mocked me, assumed I had no history, no knowledge of Jewish life, because of growing up in America. “Do you know what anti-Semitism is?” Kami asked during the Seder, in front of his guests; then he asked if I understood the Seder plate, if I had been to a Seder before. I didn’t understand, then, that it wasn’t a mocking so much as a real question. I didn’t understand at all—the Israelis were chiding me in a similar way to how Karl’s cohort chided
him. They thought we were so smug and secure in America, while they suffered in Europe or in Israel. That we didn’t help, that we had no idea how it all really happened then, what the Israelis had lived through, now, what we benefited from by their very presence in the Jewish state. They pushed me to agree to move to Israel for good, I couldn’t possibly be happy, or safe, in America, as a Jew. It was too much. I went in another room and burst into tears.

Our family was
destroyed
, they said. We have
no one but each other
. But I didn’t hear that; instead, I heard them mocking my Hebrew, I heard their intimations that I didn’t know anything about Judaism, let alone Israel. I felt unwelcome. In my journal I write of my tears, and that I did not spend the night that night, nor would I on any subsequent night. I didn’t want any part of their Israel, the Israel that seemed to look only backward, toward the persecution that had ejected us from Europe. I stopped contacting them.

But when I meet them now, a decade and a half later, I am chagrined. They are all older, the parents, the children. Sharon now has two girls of her own. It is Shely, her mother, I see first. “I remember you cried,” Shely says upon greeting me, recalling that I fled the table, recalling my tears. “You were homesick I think?” And they all feel so much less threatening, and so much more important, than I had realized so long ago. “Your grandfather was so warm,” Kami says to me, over dinner. “He was such a presence in my childhood.” He says my grandfather came to see them, again and again, throughout the years. I was wrong in my youthful assessment of him. Kami, like me, cannot fully grasp what these men went through. We have all lived easier lives.

Sharon is chagrined that my experience with them, at twenty, was so raw. “Maybe this can be a bit of a
tikkun
, a reparation, a balm,” she says of our meeting now, reconciling over the achievements of her grandfather—we meet so I can write a story about this amazing diary, this unknown document that he smuggled with him from Warsaw to Tel Aviv—and the stories of our past. We are walking on the
boardwalk at Namal Tel Aviv, the Tel Aviv port. It is sunny and lovely and the sea stretches out before us. Children are everywhere, running and screaming. I am pregnant, again; it seems every other woman around me is as well. There are balloon-blowing clowns and bicyclists, and dozens of restaurants. We get pomegranate juice squeezed for us, and sit. I tell them about my search for Valy, about the photos and letters that were kept for decades, reminders, painful pressure points. And I ask Kami—
was Reuven happy?
And Kami takes a breath and looks at his wife and then at the table. He is a big man—I remember this from when I first met him—tall with a mass of curls that have grayed in the years since we last met. But the question seems to cause him to shrink. He smiles slightly when he looks back at me, and says he is not sure that his father—if any of them—was ever happy, that any of them ever could truly be.

I’m not sure. My grandfather, I think, really did live a happy life. He insisted upon happiness, almost, perhaps, as his own revenge. Nevertheless: he kept the letters that reminded him of when he was powerless. Of when there was nothing to be done.

As I sit in an open-air restaurant with Kami and Sharon and Shely, I look out over the sea. And I realize one thing is glaringly absent from these later letters, from when the 1940s turn into a new, more peaceful decade and the requests for money and for visits are met with affirmations—
Yes, I can help,
Karl writes again and again,
Yes, I will send money, Yes, I will come
to Tel Aviv, to Switzerland, to France. He hears from many, many people. But the name of Valy Scheftel is no longer mentioned anywhere. She simply disappears from the
correspondence.

Thirteen

V
IENNA
I
NTERLUDE

I
am back in Vienna. It’s the summer of 2012 and I have an assignment from
Travel & Leisure
that fills up my days with tours of restaurants and shops, neighborhoods and activities, but in the spaces in between, it also gives me the latitude to search—and think—a bit more, about the city of Valy and Karl. I set out early each morning, to walk. Crossing the plaza in front of the Rathaus, the City Hall, one day, I am overwhelmed by a tremendous feeling of good fortune: it is a privilege to know this city well, to have close friends here, to feel I—if not belong, exactly, that I feel at ease here, despite everything.

In the second district, I pause and look out across the Donaukanal toward the U-Bahn station Rossauer Lände; I have photographs of Valy and Karl at this very spot; she is pushing her hair back and smiling into the wind, he is contemplative, their faces smooth, unworried and young.

I walk once more to the places she mentions in her letters—Heinestrasse, the Augarten. A Saturday farmers’ market bustles in suddenly hip Karmelitermarkt, and I wander through, sampling produce from vendors. I sip coffee in one of the newer cafés, and then head toward my grandfather’s old block on Rueppgasse. For the
first time I notice a name next to his apartment number. I debate ringing the bell, then don’t.

I have a strange relationship to Vienna; I’ve been many, many times now and, somehow, I love it. I love the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings set against the sky when the weather is fresh and clear. I love the endless number of
Kinos
, the 1960s-era cinemas, and the old coffeehouses. I love wandering the city alone at night, from the glass Palmenhaus outside the Albertina Museum through the first district, by foot or taking one of the rent-a-bikes with my friend Georg, together careening past the Museumsquartier in the seventh district. I love the ridiculous surfeit of cultural venues, the Volksoper, the Staatsoper, the Burgtheater. I have a memory connected to each—this is where I saw the Nederlands Dans Theater with Alice and Ingvild; this is where I saw some strange, avant-garde dance with Karin; this is where I stood in back for the first time, mimicking my grandfather and his friends, at the Musikverein; this is where I went to learn to waltz; this is where I sat until far into the night, over wine and cigarettes, with Sophie; this is where I danced with Andrea. And at the same time my relationship to the city remains, inevitably, fraught. I am constantly swept back up into the drama of this lost love, these lives cut short, and this unresolved pain.

In Washington, this summer, Anatol Steck, at the Holocaust Museum, the purveyor and translator of the long-lost Jewish community files, connected me to a half-dozen Viennese academics I’d never met before this trip. So, with Anatol’s introductions in hand, I race across Heldenplatz, where Hitler first announced the Anschluss to adoring
Austrians. This day it is packed with a beer festival; dozens upon dozens of women are in dirndls, their breasts pushed up high, their Austrian nationalism unabashedly forthright, their hair in braids, their men in lederhosen. I am late to see Doron Rabinovici, whose book
Eichmann’s Jews
, about the role Jews played, their complicity, or their lack of agency, in their own destruction in this city, has just been translated into English. He tells me about how dour he found it to move to Vienna, in the 1960s, from Israel, where he was born, a bit like going from the Technicolor scenes of
The Wizard of Oz
into the black-and-white. Then, as we talk about dead Jews, and live Jews, and Jewish life—suddenly, as though we ourselves are in a film about Jewish Vienna—up comes Ruth Beckermann, the best-known living Viennese Jewish filmmaker, to say hello to him. There is a very, very small cast of characters in the active Jewish world of Vienna.

But it is a young academic whom Steck insists I meet, named Tina Walzer, who leaves the deepest impression. Walzer asks me to meet her at the Währinger Jewish cemetery just past Nussdorfer Strasse, on the other side of the Gürtel, the belt that rings the periphery of the city. It takes me some time to find the cemetery entrance, but when I do I am overwhelmed. I walk in alone—I am early, or she is late—and Währinger is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in person. It has been nearly entirely reclaimed by nature. There are branches and bushes and trees and brambles and a path—is that even a path?—packed with
gray mud, cracked and dusty. Things seem to crawl up my bare legs, get inside my sandals—I need boots to be in here. But it is not the overgrowth that gets me: the graves themselves are in various stages of decay and disarray and vandalism, they are broken in two, in twelve, in hundreds of shards of clay.

There are pieces of bone on the ground—a femur, a bit of skull. There are fully open graves crawling with ivy. There are smashed headstones. Our history is often served to us so sanitized, so clean. This is decidedly unvarnished. This reminds me of a story that sent me with archaelogists in Spain to uncover Spanish civil war mass graves. It is an open wound.