by Julie Klam
Ann said, “I bet they met at a café!”
I was Google-Mapping the locations when Ann said, “Wait! What date did they get married?”
“September 30, 1942,” I said.
“He enlisted in October. October 1942 until October 1945.”
“What? That was less than a month after they were married!” I said as I located the document Ann was looking at.
“Maybe she was a war bride!” Ann said dramatically. “And I bet Paul was a spy!” She told me about how the US Army used native-speaking Germans as spies. Apparently Henry Kissinger did this.
We moved over to Fold3, a military records site. There we learned that Paul had enlisted at Fort Jay on Governors Island as a private.
More searching and we found that Paul was in the army from October 20, 1942, until October 27, 1945. But he hadn’t been sent back to Europe to spy. It looked as if he was stationed in the Admiralty Islands in New Guinea in 1944 and became a naturalized US citizen there.
I was squinting at the tiny type on the ancient forms when Ann said, “Ohmigod.”
“What? What?”
“Hold on, I’m emailing you something.”
“What?”
“Paul’s mother is famous!”
A few seconds later an email from Ann appeared. I opened it and clicked on a link to a New York Times piece from 2018 with the headline “The Nazi Downstairs: A Jewish Woman’s Tale of Hiding in Her Home.”
The story was amazing. Elsa Koditschek had lived in her home in a prosperous area of Vienna near the foothills of the Alps when her house was confiscated by the Nazis and an SS squad leader moved in. At first Elsa—who was Jewish—was permitted to stay, but it wasn’t long before she received a deportation edict from the Nazis, ordering her to move to a Jewish ghetto in Poland. Instead of obeying the order, she snuck away and hid in the homes of some of her non-Jewish friends until she managed to sneak back into her own house and hid there until 1944 when the Allies bombed Vienna. She finally escaped to Bern, Switzerland, where she lived for the remainder of her life.
The point of the article was that before World War II, she had bought a painting called City in Twilight by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele and it was lost to the Nazis. Sotheby’s got involved in getting the painting back to the Koditschek family, and in the process discovered that there were boxes of letters from Elsa to her son, Paul, written throughout the war. The letters proved the provenance of the important Schiele painting, which was great. But what about the provenance of Ruth’s husband?
Elsa at age forty-three had decided to purchase the remarkable Schiele landscape. She was the widow of a banker, who in early 1939 saw the Nazis approaching and sent her son and daughter away to safety. It was both brave and farsighted, and I bet Ruth thought so, too. This extraordinary, heroic woman had briefly been her mother-in-law.
* * *
• • •
The article mentioned Paul’s granddaughter, Sarah, and I managed to track her down. I contacted her and told her who I was and that my relative had been married to Paul Koditschek from 1942 to maybe 1946 (I never could find a divorce record). I believed he was her grandfather and wondered if she knew anything about his first marriage.
She replied right away: “Oh, interesting. I did research on my grandfather, so it’s funny you ask. That marriage was kind of a mystery to me, so you might know more than I do. Want to talk and see if we can piece anything together?”
I called her and we chatted for about forty minutes. When we spoke she was a reporter living in Little Rock, Arkansas. I filled her in on all that I knew about Ruth, and she told me her grandfather had had a girlfriend in Vienna who became a famous photographer, which led us to think that he must have been attracted to artsy girls. She told me that she would talk to her father and uncle and asked me what I wanted to know from them. I told her I would like to know what Paul did in World War II, where he was stationed, what jobs he’d had over the course of his life, and if they knew anything about his marriage to Ruth. And if there were any photos, I would love to see them. And I wanted to know what he had been like when he was a young man. I knew that would be the hardest question of all to answer.
Sarah told me she would see what she could find out and would get back to me.
That night I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept thinking that Ruth had sent me this information, and in a very dramatic way. I thought of how many times I’d asked for this information from the Morris sisters, be they angels or ghosts.
The next morning, I heard back from Sarah.
1) What did Paul do in the army?
He was in the artillery, in the Pacific Theater, since the army wouldn’t allow recent immigrants like him from German speaking areas to fight in the European Theater, even though they presumably knew he was Jewish.
2) What job did he hold after the war?
After the war, he was a statistician, holding various insecure jobs until he found a position as an inventory control analyst at Avon Products in the mid 1950s—a job he held until his death in 1974.
3) Did you know anything about his marriage to Ruth?
We knew nothing of his marriage during his lifetime. Ted, his son, discovered it after his death and tried to talk to his mother about it. She was certainly aware of it but knew little about it, or chose not to be forthcoming.
As far as we know, there are no photographs of her, or of them together.
4) What was he like?
Paul was a left-progressive in political terms. At the time he was an Austrian émigré who was involved in the Resistance against the Nazi Regime. He was also interested in art and avant-garde ideas of the kind that were circulating around Greenwich Village in those days.
* * *
• • •
So there it was. Answers—which always brought more questions. How did they meet? Why did they get married right before he enlisted? Why were they married for such a short time?
Since my knowledge of Ruth and Paul as a couple was so limited, I decided that they had been wildly in love and that the marriage was an act of passion. Paul was a handsome refugee who had fled the Nazis and was interested in the arts. Ruth was a pretty, free-love-espousing, bohemian socialist and playwright.
Paul Koditschek
Though Claire had thought Paul died right after he and Ruth had split up, that might have been more metaphorical than accurate. She did remember him as a sweet guy, and I’m sure that she was right when she said that the sisters meddled in Ruth’s marriage. But it appeared that Paul had been stationed abroad for most of their marriage.
No one really knew what happened, but I was glad to learn that Paul had gone on to live a happy life and that he didn’t die of a broken heart without getting his new car.
Sarah and I communicated a bit more, reiterating how miraculous this all felt and how hard I had struggled to find this information.
“I actually consulted a medium,” I said, “that’s how desperate I was!”
“Wow!” she said. “What did you find out?”
“Not much,” I told her. “It was a couple of weeks before Trump was elected, so I guess the ghosts were a little busy with that.”
Sarah said she would pass along any photos or letters that mentioned Ruth or the marriage if she came across them.
* * *
• • •
After Sarah and I said goodbye, I reflected on the exciting coda to the Morris sisters’ story. I realized that these family search stories often have a stopping point, but they never really end. This book is over, but I have no doubt that in the years to come I will hear from people who know some fact about one or all of the Morris sisters, a detail that I missed, or who will point me to an archive that has just the information I was looking for when I wrote this. My search, like families, could go on forever.
But I’m finis
hed. For now.
I think.
Acknowledgments
Since I published my last book, Esther Newberg, my agent, married my husband and me. I think that’s all I need to say.
This is my sixth book and they’ve all been published by the team at Riverhead Books—there is no better place on earth and I’ll fight anyone who disagrees with me. Thanks to the A-Team: Jake Morrissey, Geoff Kloske, Jynne Martin, Ashley Garland, May-Zhee Lim, Molly Fessenden, Amanda Inman, Kate Stark, Lydia Hurt, Jacqueline Shost, and the magnificent sales department.
Deepest thanks and admiration to Viki Fagyal, the St. Louis Genealogical Society, Larry Harmon, Kevin Lake, Elizabeth McDonald, Diane Everman, Beth Gates, Erin Warnke, Mircea Rond, Alison Fairbrother, Estie Berkowitz, Angelina Krahn, Sarah Whites-Koditschek, and Valentin Georghe.
Love to my cousins for answering all my calls, especially Robert Berkowitz, Eileen Berkowitz, Sherie Wolpert, Carole Krinsky, Geraldine Velasquez, Sandra Khaner, David Green, and my Unky Hoib (Herb Khaner).
More love and thanks to Ann Leary, Meg Wolitzer, Laura Zigman, Claudia Glaser-Mussen, Patty Marx, Alexandra Mayes Birnbaum, Barbara Warnke, Kristin Moavenian, Adam Resnick, Molly Jong-Fast, Dorothy Warnke, Lydia Butler, Pari Berk, Lauren Gilbert, Jancee Dunn, Susan Roxborough, Vesna Jovanovic, Sam Maser, Martha Broderick, Mattie Matthews, Brian Klam, Matthew Klam, and Ellie Davenport.
David, I am so proud to be your mom and love you so much.
Dan Davenport, you’re the cream in my coffee.
In loving memory of Claire Manowitz.
About the Author
Julie Klam is the author of the New York Times–bestselling You Had Me at Woof, Love at First Bark, Friendkeeping, Please Excuse My Daughter, and The Stars in Our Eyes. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, People, and other publications. She lives in New York City with her family.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
*Marcella’s dates were actually 1901–1997 and Selma was actually born in 1893, but I didn’t know that yet.