Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (54 page)

Some time ago, on one of my visits to her apartment, Tonya, my grandfather’s first girlfriend in America, whispered to me that she’d heard Valy was an “angel” in the camps, a “Florence Nightingale” nursing the inmates. She was sure she’d heard that Valy had lived in Auschwitz for a very long time and tended to those who fell ill. I can’t possibly know if there’s even an inkling of truth to this, but it is fascinating. It speaks to what we want to believe as much as what we do believe; it speaks to the myth that built up around Valy in the wake of my grandfather’s love and guilt and anger that, occasionally, it seems, spilled out when he mentioned her. As much as I loved my grandmother, and, of course, without her I would not be here, the myth of Valy’s ghostly campside nursing skills seems a part of that vague sense all those who knew of her held on to—that something beautiful was lost when she was left behind.

Hans, unlike his wife, has a death certificate. It is dated February 15—just over two weeks after their arrival in Auschwitz. He was among the 140 men selected for work on January 30, but he died soon after. The cause of death recorded was
Pleuropneumonie
—pneumonia.

Ernest Fontheim, Hans’s best friend, believes that his quick death was of a broken heart, or a suicide, not illness. Ernest is sure that Hans wouldn’t have wanted to live without Valy, that he threw himself on an electrified fence, or got himself shot, out of sorrow. He is sure that Hans was too strong to die so fast, too quick-witted not to survive the camps. To die so soon of pneumonia seems unlikely to me, too—but then again, it was deep winter, and there was no means of recovery, no antibiotics, no one who would have tried to nurse him back to health.

I don’t know for sure that Hans’s death was as romantic as Ernest believes. The truth is stark: not a single person returned from the 27th transport to the east. Not one of the 1,004 ever found his or her way
back to Germany. So whether Hans was murdered immediately, by bullet or, later, by electrocution or deprivation, is less important than the very fact that Hans, like every other person on that train, was murdered, whatever the cause of death listed may claim.

Ernest still regrets Hans’s and Valy’s disappearance. “I have gone over the events of that day innumerable times,” he wrote Hans’s sister, Ilse, in 1999. “It was a monumental tragedy. There is no doubt in my mind that Hans had the intelligence, stamina, strength of character, and ability to adapt himself quickly to changed, unexpected circumstances, all of which were necessary for surviving underground.”

To me he said the same: in some ways he has never forgiven himself for not saving them. He spent that January day in 1943 trying to protect Valy, and in the end, he believes, Hans protected him. “I have gone over that day again and again since—in the last what is it? Almost seventy years. Sixty-seven years . . . I don’t know. [The Gestapo was] going through the entire street, they went door to door with the furniture van used to pick up Jews to take them to the transit camp on Grosse Hamburger Strasse. In many apartments there must have been someone missing: people were out at work like Hans was, or were out visiting someone, or God knows where else.”

Ernest fears that the Gestapo specifically placed an agent in that apartment to trap him, as much as to trap his friends; he worries that his efforts to save Valy actually endangered Hans, maybe endangered them both. In Ann Arbor, the afternoon I spent with Ernest, I was sure it couldn’t possibly be the case.

Months after my visit, I received a scan of Hans’s Siemens work card from the archivists at the International Tracing Service. The card was typed; listed first are his name, birth date, and address. A line gives his “entry date,” the day he started work, as April 29, 1941. At the next line, designated “exit date,” someone typed—or stamped— “__.2.43”; the font is heavier, the ink darker than for the other typeface on the card. A space was left for the date in February to be filled in. I can’t know with absolute certainty, but it appears that
Hans’s expected departure was February 1943. But then, by hand, “2.43” is carefully crossed out in red pen. Written alongside it, in the same red pen, is “1.18.43,” the last day he actually worked.

Hans, it seems, was
not meant to leave Siemens in January
. That his overseers assumed he’d be leaving in February indicates they may have anticipated him being swept up in the February
Fabrikaktion
, when so many workers were taken, en masse, from the factories themselves. I looked at the card dozens of times; I might be wrong, of course. They might have simply filled in all dates for Jewish workers in advance. They might have assumed all Jews would be taken in February. Yet it appears possible that Hans was captured before he was meant to be deported. But either way: that he was going to be taken was never in question.

Ernest partly blames himself, but surely Hans would have balked if Valy had been arrested first and he had been spared. After all, Hans had already saved her once. He had already given Valy a few extra weeks of life when he rescued her from Babelsberg by rushing to marry her. And, really, the idea of blame here has no meaning.

When the war ended, Ernest returned to Berlin. Newsreels of the end of the war show a city nearly razed to the ground, the population stumbling over the detritus of what was once the center of the Thousand Year Reich. All around were shells of buildings, the dead, and the haunted eyes of the survivors, perpetrator and victim side by side in search of their loved ones. Ernest spent hours upon hours walking in those early weeks, from one end of town to the other, searching for news. Of his group of friends, none who were deported to the east returned. Only he and those who had gone into hiding were left. Everyone else was missing.

“At the Jewish community, a running registry was kept of people who returned either from living underground,” like Ernest, “or from concentration camps,” Ernest told me when I visited him in Ann
Arbor. “And of course I was looking for Hans and Valy, as well as my parents and sister, and a few other relatives and friends. I went there at least once a month. The registry was kept initially in the Jewish Hospital in Iranische Strasse and I lived in Tempelhof, across Berlin, and the first few months after the end of the war there was no public transportation, so I had to walk from Tempelhof. It was a tremendously long walk, through streets strewn with rubble and, initially, with dead corpses and so on.

“But nobody of the people that I was looking for ever appeared.”

Ernest has sought, for decades, for a way to memorialize Hans and Valy—and his parents and his sister. His experience is, in some ways, the photonegative of my grandfather’s; he did not leave in time, and his time in the Reich has shaped his life, shaped his sense of guilt, or at least his sense of loss, in ways that my grandfather did not share—in part because Karl did not see the full extent of the horror, and in part because of their distinctly different personalities. Ernest watched almost everyone he’d ever loved taken from him. My grandfather, at least, had his sister, his mother, his brother-in-law, and his nephew. Eventually, too, he had three of his closest friends. And, of course, he had my grandmother. She wasn’t European born, but she was his intellectual match. It was not the world of his youth, or his father’s, but it was more than enough to begin life anew in America.

I don’t even know if my grandfather tried to memorialize those lost to him—but then, in 1990 when he died, such memorials were less common—and he had my grandmother to consider. Someone who might not have appreciated a grand gesture for the lover he’d left behind.

Valy’s story, and my grandfather’s, became a part of my blood and bones in the last few years. What once appeared to be a simple
legacy—a grandfather who escaped, who created a better life away from the European killing fields—became a story of a world upended, a life set aside, a narrative rerouted.

“My very dearest Bruno,”
my grandfather wrote on March 28, 1977. I was two years old.

I attended a UJA [United Jewish Appeal] meeting last night—film, narrator, Israeli songs and dances, Mauthausen, Tel Aviv, El Al, Jerusalem, many emotions, reflexes, pathos, pride and vows. In all this and in spite of all this, I can’t get rid of the feeling that for whatever reasons—and there are many and varied ones—America has indeed produced a homo novus, immensely attractive in his naivete, Unbefangenheit and Heiterkeit [impartiality and serenity], yet missing that emotional dimension which alone lends substance to a concept, to a feeling, to a commitment, indeed, to being. Somehow there is a hollow ring to the American pathos and an emotional ignorance of the identity of the Jew, the significance of Israel and the meaning of history.

There is something to this—the way the Holocaust has been thrown in, to lists, to our consciousness, we beat our breast and weep, we turn the channel. How much easier it will be going forward, to do so, with no survivors left to talk to us. Now those we can speak to were the very youngest survivors—the children—who themselves often lost all touchstones to their identity, who often were coached to forget.

I wish I could say I found Valy, that she was living in Brussels or Budapest or Brooklyn. I wish I could say that she had survived at all. I wish I could say that I know the truth about her life. But I can’t. But then again, what is the truth of someone’s life? As Aubrey Pomerance, the head of the archives at Berlin’s Jewish Museum, said to me, “There is no collection that documents a person’s life from moment of birth to moment of death. But you can cull a lot of information from one single document.” And cull I have tried. And talk.

Instead of Valy, I found dozens of other individuals whose lives were affected or imploded by the terror of the Nazi years. I found cousins of my grandfather, scattered from Venice to Melbourne to Queens. I found dozens of my counterparts, from my generation, whose lives were shaped by the past—these are the other grandchildren, those who, like me, remain drawn in by our grandparents’ stories, what they survived, what they lived through, that enabled us to be who we are, that enabled our very existence.

We aren’t alone in our desire to know more, to pass something on. I have looked for Valy through the birth of two children now; it is hard not to wonder at the privilege of that opportunity.

And yet—they are all dying, our eyewitnesses. Our connections.

We, the grandchildren, have these stories we have all collected. What will our own children know of these stories? What do we want them to know? It is not the same as hearing it from the witnesses themselves. But it will have to be something. It is important that we have one another. It’s not possible to remember alone.