Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (55 page)

My grandfather would not have survived, sanity intact, let alone thrived, if he had spent the postwar decades of his life looking backward. And yet the past was never past, merely suppressed. There were always secrets, always stories, always rumors. There was always a sense of remove, a distance from the world he had adopted, that had adopted him, a sense that only those who had gone through it with him, who had known whom he’d known, had understood those differences, could really understand what the twentieth century had wrought.

Often in these last few years I have gone back many times to the one letter I have that he wrote to her: “
I believe that you once read a book that begins with the words: ‘I want to write of a generation that was destroyed by war, although it may have escaped its cannons.’”

But of course she did not escape its cannons—and that generation he describes was really himself, his own, his life. It was he who
escaped the cannons, turned his back on death, and embraced a version of life that, if not entirely truthful, became his truth. Sometimes I wonder if my grandfather hoped someone would find these letters, thus ensuring that he didn’t let Valy die twice. By doing so—purposefully or not—he enabled one woman not to be disappeared.

And yet, there are no happy endings to these stories—indeed, often, and most discomfortingly, there are often no endings at all. There are still mysteries in Valy’s story; mysteries I think my grandfather lived with his whole life. Surely after the war, he looked further, surely he at some point discovered—if not specifically that she went to Auschwitz—that she was gone. When I went back to look again at that photo album I found so many, many years ago, the one that prompted my grandmother’s devastating comment about true love, I was bowled over by the number of her photos it contains. He kept them out of love, I imagine, but also out of guilt, and out of sorrow—for her, for his childhood, for everything that was lost.

June 30, 1986

My dear Bruno,

. . . My question remains—does unlimited freedom to come and go, to stay or leave, to attend or ignore, to eat or starve, to read or dream, create a vacuum or is it paradise at last?

It seems to me we have to remember the dreams of yesteryear. We have to reach back about 60 years to sense again our appetites, to feel again our budding egos, to define again our identities. . . .

Yesterday I went out in a canoe . . . by myself along the shoreline and across the Lake. I had an Erlebnis [experience] which I hadn’t had for 50 years. For half a century I was racing by in a speed-boat or water skiing. In this half a century I saw the shoreline 1000 times but I had no concomitant inner experience. It was meaningless, empty adventure.

Yesterday’s Erlebnis connected so wonderfully with the water, the shoreline the little houses I had known as a young man. There was meaning, there was an echo—strange people greeted me. There
was an exhilarating sense of self in this wide world, a self I used to know—a marvelous antidote to deadening routine.

We have to stop racing and all that it implies: that there is a future, that tomorrow is more important than today. . . . We have to assign overwhelming importance to the day and to our act, our performance on this day. We have to summon our accumulated experience and our accumulated resources to fashion a day that we can live with Entzücken [delight]. Please Try!

Once when I was six years old, I went out on that canoe with my grandfather. My grandparents lived on Pontoosuc Lake in summer, strangely only about five miles from their “town” house, in the Berkshires, so close because my grandmother’s father had bought the land years before the war. It was the first time I was in a canoe alone with my grandfather. I wore a life vest, but I couldn’t help paddle, and at some point, along the way, he grew tired. We were stuck, pushed into a cove by the wind, or lack of wind, I can’t remember exactly, and he stood and waved to a passing motorboat to tow us in. As he did so, he tipped our canoe and I was trapped underneath. I remember the light of the water and gasping for air, though there was plenty of air trapped with me. I was already a decent swimmer, but I did not know—or know how—to take off my life vest and so I bobbed there, terrified and trapped, until I felt him, powerful, pull me out from under the boat in one fell swoop, through the water. “I was always there,” he said. And he laughed. We were brought back to my grandparents’ house by motorboat, me shivering in my wet clothes, my mother angry, upset.
But we are fine,
he assured her.
It was nothing
. And I was wrapped up in the towels printed with butterflies that were kept near the guest room in the basement, past the sketches that my grandparents had brought back from Haiti, and brought up to sit on the porch, overlooking the water, and I saw he was right. It was fine. After a time
I went down to the hammock strung between a massive oak and a solid wood pillar, just over the water. I lay there, dozing, listening to the murmur of adult conversation on the hillside above me, and feeling safe. It is still one of my most favorite, most calming spots, to be today.

It was Ernest who purchased the
Stolpersteine
, the brass memorial stumbling blocks, that are now nestled into the sidewalk at 43
Brandenburgische Strasse. I have gone now, twice, to see them there, glittering underfoot.

Here lived Valerie Fabisch née Scheftel,
says one.
Born 1911. Deported on 29 January 1943 to Auschwitz. Murdered.
Alongside hers is one for Hans Fabisch. The other fifty-two Jews deported from the building, thus far, have no marker.

Acknowledgments

I have worked to make this book as factually accurate as possible. In the interest of readability, my own timeline has been compressed—for example, multiple visits to cities have sometimes been condensed, in the narrative, into a single trip—but this has no impact on the veracity of the story or the events of Karl’s or Valy’s life. I have changed only one name for privacy reasons, that of my roommate in Vienna.

I have been able to tell Valy’s story with the help of a small army of supporters.

My agent, Sydelle Kramer, pushed me (and pushed me) to get this story into the world; she shepherded it, nurtured it in ways above and beyond all reasonable expectation, and deflected my (not-inconsiderable) neurosis. Sarah Stein, my editor at Riverhead, fell in love with Valy back when she was a few pixels in a
Slate
story. Sarah stayed with Valy, and me, from idea to proposal through manuscript, gently guiding me along the path of the best story we could tell. She carefully midwifed this process, and I’m forever in her debt for believing in Valy—and me. Jean-Marc Dreyfus has been a confidant, mentor, and, above all, friend, for more than a decade now. Without his insistence, this story would never have made it to the page.
Without his eleventh-hour readings, I would have made dreadful mistakes in the text. I am so lucky to have met him, on a sunny Paris day, so many years ago.

The Milena Jesenská Fellowship at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna provided essential time to learn to love that city, as my grandfather once did. The Arthur F. Burns Fellowship (and the Holbrooke Research alumni grant), as well as the ACG Journalism Grant from the American Council on Germany, gave me essential opportunities to live and work in Berlin, and, later, the chance to travel to the Czech Republic. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting funded my time in Israel. The German Marshall Fund of the United States awarded my original work on Valy with the Peter R. Weitz Prize for reporting in Europe, an acknowledgment that gave me a much-needed confidence boost. The International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies sponsored my first six weeks of reporting abroad and then, nearly a decade later, became my home while I wrote this book as a Visiting Scholar there. IRP’s John Schidlovsky has been a supporter and friend from the beginning.

Valy’s letters would not have been accessible to me without the help of Ulrike Wiesner, who first translated—gorgeously—Valy’s words and the words of many of the other people who wrote to my grandfather. Ulli brought Valy to life, explained her cultural references, and brought out how very literate she was; Ulli was a generous giver of time, consultation, and expertise. Kathleen Luft stepped in as a translator late in the game and was always available, even in the wee hours, with the smallest of questions about everything from individual sentences in a letter to skimming official documents written with 1930s-era German legal vocabulary. Her work was crucial to getting this story right. Radovan Pletka helped with the Czech aryanization papers. Karin Isbell came in to help with the Sütterlin script.

Dozens upon dozens of academics and others whose life work
centers on this period were incredibly generous to me with their time, opinions, and research. At the risk of leaving someone out, I must thank: Konrad Kwiet, Richard Breitman, Marion Kaplan, Beate Meyer, Barbara Schieb, Beate Kosmala, Aubrey Pomerance, Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Simon, Laurel Leff, Gudrun Maierhof, Ingo Zechner, Doron Rabinovici, Tina Walzer, and Walter Laqueur. Jeremy Zwelling of Wesleyan University invited me to speak there after the original series ran. For nearly twenty years now, I’ve had the privilege to call upon him for advice.

Daniel Silver opened his home and personal archives to me. Daniel Necas, at the University of Minnesota Immigration History Research Center, provided essential files on my grandfather. Herbert Posch, at the University of Vienna, unearthed my grandfather’s and Valy’s school records, fielded my calls, met me more times than he needed to, and took me around the university, all in an effort to help me understand better their experience on campus. The archivists at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen have been endlessly available and helpful, submitting to my requests on numerous occasions.

At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum I have been fortunate to often consult with and be advised by Jürgen Matthäus, Radu Ioanid, Paul Shapiro, and Anatol Steck, each of whom always cheerfully accepts my calls, e-mails, and visits. The library and archives at the museum were infinitely more accessible with the help of Michlean Amir, Vincent Slatt, Ronald Coleman, and Peter Lande.

Linda Kinstler and Mimi Dwyer made sure that every piece of this story was as factually correct as possible. Claire Winecoff went through the galleys with a fine-tooth comb. All errors introduced are therefore entirely my own.

Spending time away would have been a lonely project had it not been for the friends I have in these cities. In Vienna, I am so very lucky that IWM introduced me to Georg Maißer, Sophie Loidolt, Herwig Czech, Andrea Roedig, and Thomas Szanto—a group I now count
among my closest friends anywhere in the world. I’m always happy to return to Berlin to see Ralf Neukirch, whose friendship draws me firmly into the present. Also in Berlin, Carolyn Mimram rescued me when I was extremely pregnant, got me packed and on a plane and has been my hero ever since. In Kassel, Ulrich Brinkmann and Urte Helduser offered me housing and camaraderie. In the Czech Republic, Kate Treveloni was a much-needed friendly face.