Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (25 page)

The girls in the Kindergartenseminar—many on their own for the first time—felt liberated, emboldened, thrilled to have briefly slipped away from their parents, to be studying with the best Jewish teachers left in the Reich from across the German-speaking world. The population they worked with, however, was miserable, babies born from and in terrible situations—made worse by the growing number of harsh covenants against Jews. Already in 1938, Jews had been banned from soup kitchens; throughout that year and into 1939, all remaining social services were, one by one, stripped away. They would be banned that winter from “warming rooms” for those who couldn’t afford heat. Jews found themselves running afoul of the law as well—traffic stings had been set up to charge Jews with jaywalking, giving them fines of fifty Reichsmark (Valy’s monthly salary!) for what would normally be a five RM fine.

At the same time, the population of young German Jews was diminishing rapidly: Marion Kaplan’s excellent account of life in
Germany under the Reich,
Between Dignity and Despair
, notes that between June 1933 and September 1939,
the population of Jews under age thirty-nine decreased by nearly eighty percent. It was a stark contrast to the still-rich world of the Kindergartenseminar, the bubble Valy lived in, in which, Marianne Strauss told Roseman, “you forgot really what was going on outside,” as there was “always something interesting going on. There were lots of interesting people still living ordinary lives in Berlin—very public well-known figures. . . . Musicians would come and give concerts; we’d have get-togethers . . . folk singing, lectures . . . wonderful social things going on all the time.”

So despite the increasingly difficult life outside the walls of Wangenheimstrasse 36, despite her mother’s rapid and bewildering, race-based impoverishment at home in Troppau, Valy’s time in Grunewald was, intellectually at least, peculiarly, and temporarily, not unlike her life in Vienna—and far, far better than it had been in her claustrophobic hometown.

On the other side of Berlin, near touristy Checkpoint Charlie, I stop at the Topography of Terror, an indoor-outdoor permanent exhibition situated on the land where the Gestapo and SS headquarters were located during the Reich. The museum narrates the Gestapo’s work over dozens of architecturally lovely panels; it is all Plexiglas and chrome, like an architect’s loft, incongruously pleasant to wander through. It’s an excellent exhibition, if a bit wordy, but I find myself inordinately annoyed that out of some, say, fifty panels, two are devoted to the “Jew catchers,” those Jews whom the Gestapo used as their sniffer dogs to ferret out other Jews in hiding. Granted, these
Greifer
, as they were called in German, did horrific work, but there were so few, in comparison to the minions of the Gestapo. There was debate, after the war, about the role of the Jewish councils, and Jewish organizations like the Reichsvereinigung—but the
Greifer
were in a whole other category of moral turpitude. They were tasked specifically with flushing out their co-religionists. To put so much emphasis on such an aberration here seems peculiar, as though there is a
spreading of guilt in a way that seems, at least to me, grossly imbalanced.

In the small shop at the front of the museum,
I pick up historian Wolf Gruner’s book
Judenverfolgung [Jewish Persecution] in Berlin, 1933–1945
, which lists the restrictions on Jews, day by day, for Berlin alone. Here I can match the dates of Valy’s private letters to what her public life was like. Every month—nearly every day—comes degradation, making her time in the Kindergartenseminar that much more precious. The restrictions range from the onerous and burdensome (throughout January 1939, for example, children were continuously deprived: first of the right to foster care, then to special-needs schools) to the humiliating (in March, Jews were denied access to city libraries, a blow to those like Valy who no longer had money to buy books). The children’s reading rooms were now barred to Jews as well, making those who cared for children stuck with trying to creatively entertain and educate kids in a world that seemed to contract, daily, around them.

Yet despite the intensity of the deprivation, despite the cruelty and randomness of the things barred to her, in August 1939, Valy still has a heartbreaking amount of hope that she, too, can leave. She’s sure of it, and so is everyone else around her.

I’m the acknowledged favorite of the director [a woman], and I’m addressed as “golden child” (people easily and often forget my [academic] title here). I am quite evidently being protected and favored by a female senior official . . . of the Reichsvertretung.

The director was Margarethe Fraenkel, a forty-year-old “Aryan” woman and mother of five who was married to a Jewish man. Fraenkel eventually joined the anti-Nazi resistance. Her extended family was able to emigrate, while she tried to “overcome her great loneliness by helping others,” as her colleagues described her. But it is Valy’s loneliness that engulfs, and propels, her to promise—herself, my grandfather—continuously, that she will leave soon:

These two women—they are quite extraordinarily smart and good (not only because they are nice to me)—shudder at the thought of the moment when I receive a Permit and leave. It defies all explanation, I think, because I never do anything at all exceptional, of course, and I am totally replaceable. But as far as I’m concerned, of course, they can just continue to “shudder.” I am so terribly busy here; my day starts at 6 a.m. and ends at 8 p.m. (theoretically, a few days off are envisaged, but there aren’t enough suitable supervisors . . . on the “theoretical” days off). In the evenings I’m very tired and in no way able to do anything for myself or to write. My mother is still in Troppau and busy shutting down the household, and after that she too is supposed to come here for the time being, and I hope she surely will find someplace to stay.

My prospects for England were quite good until recently, but the day before yesterday I received a letter informing me that my Permit can’t be granted for the present; I’m afraid that physicians aren’t getting [necessary] Permits. . . . Lonka Schlüssel had a very nice job for me as a lady’s companion, but I would have to be there soon, and with these new complications that is hardly possible. I’m really quite worn out, but that’s really not what I want to write you about!

Valy’s loss—the permit problem—is enormous. In fact, my grandfather already knew about her England prospects; Lonka had written him earlier that month, assuring him—he seems to have asked—that she had found a place for Valy. August 1939 was early enough that in Lonka’s letter, written in English, she worries more for herself than for Valy, even though Lonka is already safe in London. In her letter Lonka explains she had just been told her quota number had come up, she could meet her family in America, and then, just as quickly, she learned the consulate had made a mistake—her number was a ways off. “I fainted in the street,” she tells him, “and two people had to carry me into a shop nearby.” Later she gets to the subject of Valy. “Yes, I hear
from Valy,” she says, and “I managed a post for her as a companion.” She, too, tells him about the Kindergartenseminar.

But permits to England would not get easier to receive. Valy’s lost window, in a few weeks, will be cemented over into a fully sealed wall. But even as she worries about her prospects for emigration, Valy is still racked by the feeling of loss from the forced end of their affair:

I was so delighted to get your letter; so very, very delighted! About everything. And it is just impossible to describe how much I miss you! I really didn’t mean to write you about this subject either, because it is scarcely possible to describe to you this feeling of emptiness, this dismal feeling of not being able to be with you, the catastrophic feeling of having lost something irreplaceable, and this out-and-out longing for you. It is indeed possible that someday I can come to you again, but the 3 or 4 years it will take until then seem hardly bearable to me, and very often I lack the courage to believe in this possible Later on . . .

Goodbye, Darling! I would be happy to hear from you again soon. Please don’t forget to write! There is so little that brings me joy.

Lots of love and all imaginable good wishes to you, and thousands and thousands of kisses,

Yours,
Valy

The letter was written in installments. I was very frequently interrupted while writing.

“There is so little that brings me joy.”
Such a small line, but so much—and it is only summer 1939, the world has not yet completely narrowed, it still seems possible to leave; the distances are still merely about time, not life and death.

To understand Valy’s experiences better, I seek out authorities on the Reichsvereinigung. I meet Gudrun Maierhof, a professor of
politics and social science at the University of Applied Sciences in Erfurt, at a small café in front of the Charlottenburg S-Bahn station. She looks Israeli, Gudrun, from her dyed red-purple hair to the Hebrew
chai
(life) and
ahava
(love) necklaces she wears, a small nod to her immersion in Jewish history, or a flag of affiliation with Jews. She skims one or two of the letters I have brought along and then gives out a little yelp when she sees Valy worked for most of 1939 and part of 1940 in the Kindergartenseminar. Part of her dissertation was on the seminar, so she sends me a section of that (unpublished) text, to help me better understand the opportunity, the optimism the school represented. From 1938, she explains, one-year and six-month intro courses in child care and kindergarten teaching were offered. The hope was the girls enrolled would move on to exactly the kind of position Valy sought in the United Kingdom. In the end, though, dozens of the girls would be called to service in Berlin itself as more and more parents—and mothers of small children—would be pulled into forced labor by 1941, leaving thousands of unschooled kids in need of care, instruction, and supervision. It was a well-educated, if temporary, workforce, a high-end finishing school in the anteroom to hell.

Maierhof also tells me, with huge excitement, she knows someone in Berlin who studied at the Kindergartenseminar—perhaps, she wonders, with some awe, she was even Valy’s student: her name is Inge Deutschkron, and she’s a local celebrity in the world of survivor-speakers. She was the Israeli daily
Ma’ariv
correspondent in Frankfurt during the Auschwitz trials and
she later wrote a book—called
Outcast
in English—about her experiences under the Nazis; the book was made into a play that is still regularly performed by school groups in Germany. She speaks often to children’s and women’s groups.

Deutschkron, Maierhof says, was saved by a man named Otto Weidt, a kind of small-time Oskar Schindler. Weidt, who was himself legally blind, ran a small broom and brush factory that employed blind and deaf Jews, alongside a handful of sighted ones—like Deutschkron. He insisted, for years, that his staff was essential and couldn’t be
deported; he rescued them from roundups again and again. Eventually, his efforts to keep them aboveground exhausted, he helped some, including Deutschkron, secure new identities. Once, Weidt traveled from Berlin to Auschwitz itself to rescue one woman, a former worker and—it was rumored—his lover. She survived, but not all his workers were so lucky: he kept a family of four, stashed behind the wall of an armoire, all hiding from the Gestapo until they were denounced by one of the
Greifer
, the Jew-catchers.

The week I meet Gudrun, my friend Baruc Corazón is visiting from Madrid. I tell him these stories and he parries with an anecdote he had recently heard of similar reverberations, into our generation, in Spain. A contemporary of his was in the process of researching her grandfather’s death, he says, a killing that took place decades before her birth at the end of the Spanish Civil War. The grandfather had been exposed—and then, in the final moments of the war, was summarily shot, without trial, for being a Republican. Baruc’s friend looked up the grandfather’s records and discovered the name of his denouncer; all involved lived in a small town on the Costa Brava, the beautiful swath of coastal Catalonia just above Barcelona. The granddaughter called the house, and a family member told her the denouncer had died the week before. The man on the phone said, tearily, “He was a wonderful man, he just died.” And Baruc’s friend said, “He may have been a wonderful person, but he denounced my grandfather, and ruined my family.” We sit with that for a moment, stunned even in the retelling.

Weidt’s former factory is now the Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt; it is at Rosenthaler Strasse 39, down a graffitied alleyway in Hackescher Markt, the heart of the old East. These days, there is a Starbucks just in front of the alley, and, next door, an art-house cinema; dozens upon dozens of bikes are always parked there—the area has become known for boutiques and eateries. The museum itself is up a small flight of stairs, easily missed unless you’re searching for it.

Deutschkron’s and Otto Weidt’s stories are marvelous, even
cinematic, but when I meet her, Deutschkron is unsentimental to the point of caustic. She is a compact woman, with short-cropped hair, a similar color to Gudrun’s, that unnaturally red-purple; her eyes are lined in kohl and she looks younger than her near century of living. When we meet, she is dressed in a way that reminds me of my grandparents—put-together: a leaf-green sweater and a bouclé tweed skirt, pearls, stockings, and orthopedic shoes. She has the brusque deportment of someone who has relied on herself for her entire life; she makes it clear before I come that, at nearly ninety, she hasn’t time for small talk, long interviews, or second visits. (This is nonnegotiable, I find. Upon arrival, I see I have forgotten my camera, and she insists she will absolutely not allow me to return for a portrait. I show up, instead, some days later at the Blindenwerkstatt, where Deutschkron is lecturing to a group of immigrant women. She grumbles, “None will have heard of me there,” meaning America, but then submits to my camera.)