Paper Love

by Sarah Wildman

  I believe, dear friend, that you are fully in the picture, and I send you and your loved ones my most cordial regards.

  Such a terribly large amount of pressure placed upon him, and so ridiculously little he could actually do to help—“I do hope . . . that you together with our noble and much esteemed friend . . . will find ways to help us.” And still the letters keep coming. “Hermann, Lola and Paul, in addition to their in-laws (all of them Polish quota) already have received good news from the American consulate and will be able to travel to the U.S.A. already at the end of September!!” writes another friend, who has made it as far as Prague in August 1939. Were they still able to leave, once the Germans invaded Poland? This I don’t know. The letter, in any case, continues. “I, my wife and son and brother-in-law Karl will stay behind. In our case it is even questionable, due to the Romanian quota, whether we will get a chance at all.” Here he gets to where my grandfather could help.

  Now I would like to share the following plan and idea for implementation with you: From here already several general practitioners (i.e., not clinicians or otherwise prominent scientists) have traveled to the USA outside the quota to take up hospital or similar positions or contracts. Since such opportunities could just be imaginary positions, this should not be too difficult, given your cleverness! I would herewith like to offer you Dollar 50.00 for your efforts (and positive outcome) in this regard, and I shall reserve this amount for you. In this way, I hope to be able to travel quickly with my wife and son. Our emigration formalities (highly complicated) have already been initiated here, and we hope to be able to travel via Italy in about 3 weeks. . . . Let me therefore please ask you not to let us wait too long. I am sending best regards to you and your family members.

  Laurel Leff confirms for me that this rumor was true, that there were some who were able to receive appointments at universities, a golden ticket that allowed them the miracle of bypassing the nearly impossible quota system. But the author of this missive—who writes in formal German and appears not to be a particularly close friend—is asking my grandfather to concoct a fake appointment, to ensure his family safe passage by pretending to hire him as a professor: “This should not be too difficult, given your cleverness!”

  So many people need him. And these weren’t even the letters from Valy, for whom, I will discover, he tried to do everything; for whom, I will discover, the price of survival would climb and climb as 1939 turned into 1940 and 1940 turned into 1941.

  A small leatherette address book is stuck into his collection of letters. It was purchased, it seems, in America, as on the cover is written very faintly in English, “Notes.” Inside are listings for dozens of aid societies, doctors, and friends from Vienna. One after another, addresses in Vienna were crossed out and new cities, new countries, written in. These refugees were in good company: some 206,000 Jews lived in Austria before the Anschluss; from the date of Hitler’s arrival through May 1939, about 130,000 fled.

  Everyone is searching for safe passage to another country; or at least passage. “The family is torn without knowing if we will ever be again together in our lives,” write close friends who have landed, uncomfortably, in Shanghai. “Only God knows how troubled our hearts are, not to be able to come to you.” Vienna is disappearing already, it no longer exists, it is no longer the city of his youth; it is not even the city of the days after the Anschluss. Precious Vienna has scattered into a million tiny pieces across the globe.

  Two

  THE WONDERFUL CITY

  Oh Vienna. My grandfather and his sister pronounced the city’s name in a full breath, a sigh, emphasis on the first syllable, and a lilt on the last. The city was the epicenter of my family’s fantasy life: it informed the food we ate, the literature we read. It was our destination, and our origin point, literally, figuratively, a sepia-colored lost-promise land. In fourth grade, when we chose country reports, I confidently picked Austria, even though, somehow, carefully tracing the lines of its strange, landlocked borders (shaped, vaguely, I thought, like a cartoon bubble waiting for words), I couldn’t see where my family fit there at all.

  That Vienna obsession—my grandfather’s, Valy’s, their friends’—was passed on to me. It was a love affair with geography, an (oft-unrequited) ardor for the history and grandeur of the city. It was an obsession shared across the Jews they knew, these assimilated, ultracultured Jews, who remained faithful to the ideal of the perfect city. It was a love that, ultimately, drew me to Vienna as well, that led me, as I began this quest to find Valy, to realize I needed to begin my search there to find what drove them, what shaped them. I wanted to “breathe in a little of this Viennese atmosphere,” as Valy wrote. “Vienna waits for you,” went the tourism campaign when I began to think of spending time in the city. It was simultaneously passive and enticing.

  Josef Wildmann, my great-grandfather, in Zaleszczyki, Poland.

  The truth was, even in Vienna, my grandfather was foreign. He was born in Zaleszczyki, a spa town and Jewish honeymoon destination known as the “Polish Riviera” nestled into a bend in the Dniester River, a waterway that meanders from the Carpathian Mountains until it plunges into the Black Sea. Now in Ukraine, at my grandfather’s birth Zaleszczyki was a sunny slice of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; after World War I, it was folded into Poland, rendering him, effectively, stateless. Its nearly twenty-five hundred Jewish residents made up a third of the town’s population in 1912, the year of his birth. Of those who remained after World War I, more than eight hundred were murdered on a terrible day in mid-November 1941, when Zaleszczyki Jews were brought to the fields at the edge of town, forced to dig graves for their friends, family, and colleagues, and shot by one of the Nazi mobile killing teams called Einsatzgruppen. Remaining Jews were sent to forced-labor camps and nearby ghettos. No one returned after the war.

  But 1941 was nearly three decades after my grandfather’s family ran to Vienna while the guns boomed for the Great War; he was barely two years old, it was 1914. The Wildmanns—they then carried an extra n, in the Germanic style—arrived in the heart of the second district, on a slip of a street called Rueppgasse, along with other flotsam from the first major upheaval of the twentieth century. A veritable flood of refugees from the east cascaded into Vienna in those war years, overwhelming the capital and reigniting the anti-Semitism that had crept into Austrian politics some twenty years before the end of the previous century. Thousands of them were Kulturjuden, Jews who worshipped the German culture represented by the heart of the empire, Vienna.

  Just after college I drove to Cranbury, New Jersey, lugging audio equipment, to interview Cilli Feldschuh, my grandfather’s sister. She described that first refugee episode of her life, aged four or so, traveling to Vienna, a journey that began in a wagon filled with straw, until they reached the first train. “It was a very frightening experience, to take this wagon, this covered wagon, it was so dark in this wagon.” She never lost her Viennese inflections; the moment I slip on my headset and press Play, I am pulled into the living rooms of my childhood: “wagon” becomes “vagon”; “the” becomes “da.” Throughout the tape she stops and laughs at me, so serious with my equipment, and my questions. I looked up the route from Zaleszczyki to Vienna—these days, on modern roads, it would take twelve hours. There were treasures my great-grandparents left behind, she was sure, buried in that resort town—there was silver, there was, possibly, jewelry. Her mother feared being robbed along the way; in any case, she was certain the family would return when the war ended. There was no need to carry it all. But they never did return. There were pogroms in those first years after World War I, both before and after the armistice was signed. Jewish life deteriorated; it simply wasn’t safe. And, treasures or not, soon after they arrived, their finances disintegrated, their lives took an abrupt turn for the worse; there wasn’t money for a return trip, even if they’d wanted to take one.

  “It was 1916. My father was fifty-six and he had an obscu
re kidney ailment and he was sent to a sanitarium,” Cilli told me. “We had money and he didn’t have to go to the general hospital. The corridor was surrounded by professors. P.S. In one week he was dead.” She pronounces it “dud.” “And then I was six years old and it was a raging war and then we really didn’t have anything to eat, all the money we had saved disappeared, it was inflation, so much so that if you took the electric train to get your savings [at the other end of the line] the savings would have been worth less than the [cost of the] train [trip]. We were without money, at all.”

  My great-grandfather died and with him went their income, and comfort. They had been relatively well off, Cilli said, and then, suddenly, they were destitute. My great-grandmother, I heard, sold eggs, singly, and pieces of string in the market; some family members tell me she went off to work in a factory; of this I have no record. I know, instead, flashes of their story: that Karl, for example, resoled his shoes, again and again, never able to buy new ones. When he grew older, he tutored other Jewish students for money. Cilli would later tell me, in that first call I made to her after I discovered Valy, that it was Valy who enabled him to do this during school hours—she would attend class and take notes, then give him the lecture, later, late at night. There were always too many people living in their tiny apartment, yet somehow there was always room for one more. Cousin Reuven, whose father was killed in a Ukrainian pogrom, wanted to study in Vienna? He’d come to live there. The only daughter of your old Zaleszczyki neighbors had decided to attend medical school? She could come, too.

  This grinding poverty was not much spoken of in America, nor the fact that the people my grandfather emulated for the rest of his life didn’t live anywhere near Leopoldstadt, as the second district is called, where Jews from the scattered corners of the Austro-Hungarian Empire settled, nor the fact that the children he tutored lived in apartments six times the size of his. They were Jews, too, but they were Jews with plush couches and servants and ham sandwiches; somehow this traif was a sign of their cosmopolitan mien. For the first half of his life in America, my grandfather would associate ham with success.

  And yet, despite the family poverty, he was sent first to Gymnasium, one of the preparatory upper schools of the German-speaking world whose emphasis on classical education was both arduous and impressive, and then on to medical school, clear, if only in his own mind, that one day he would live like his pupils, ignoring the already virulent anti-Semitism festering around him. “Jew, Jew spit on your head,” Cilli remembered neighborhood kids singing when she was seven or eight. “I couldn’t love Vienna,” she said, contrary to my grandfather, who very much could, and did. It doesn’t get any better than this, he would recall thinking, in his rosy recounting of life in Vienna; it was the thought that ran through his mind when he bounded up the steps to his home, aged eighteen, the year 1930, depression everywhere, except in the world of his making. It was all there for him; he just had to scoop it up.

  A photo I have from around 1930 shows him on a holiday trip, in a small bathing suit cut like shorts, with the stomach muscles of an athlete, a girl on each arm, two more girls just beyond his reach, laughing in an enormous group of swimsuit-clad friends. Somehow, even nearly penniless, he projected rich; he lived richly. Life was already herrlich—marvelous. Superb. Delightful. He would see the theater twice on Sundays—a matinee and then, as soon as that ended, he would line up for the evening opera performance. He took the standing room tickets—it was all he could afford, but who cared? The music didn’t change from the front of the theater to the back.

  That sense of the herrlich world buoyed him throughout his life. He would kiss the palms of my hands like a Viennese gentleman; he would wax poetic about the wonderful city he’d left behind; he would sing Richard Tauber and Joseph Schmidt, the voices of his youth (never mentioning, of course, that Schmidt had raced from country to country seeking refuge, only to die in a Swiss refugee camp). He would wear the finest that European tailors could provide. He was known for celebrating the best things in life: he owned a Leica because it was the best camera; Italian custom-made ties because they were the best; Head skis, when those were the best. He stayed at the Bristol in Vienna, one of the dowager queen five-star hotels on the Ringstrasse, because it was the best. He and my grandmother went to Vienna for six weeks every other year starting in 1950 because it was still the best, the most cultured place in the world. He returned to study at the university a few years after the war—purportedly because the medical school was still a pillar, still at the height of the field—and perhaps, too, to show that he could.

  He never spoke of persecution, not to his children, and certainly not to his grandchildren. He did not tell us of the rumor (surely apocryphal but still telling) that the last time the radical revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky spoke in Vienna, in the winter of my grandfather’s graduation from medical school, the speech ended cinematically—with Jabotinsky holding up a suitcase and shouting in the packed Konzerthaus, “Run, Jews, run!” He never talked about the virulent xenophobic wave that drowned his Vienna when Hitler was received like a messiah; he did not speak of leaders of the Jewish community scrubbing the street on their hands and knees, of windows smashed or painted over with the word Jude, a word that would come to feel like a curse rather than a description, or an identity. He did not mention that in the heart of the gorgeous first district, amid all those ornate buildings and lovely shops that carried the best of the best, nestled up against the stately Staatsoper, the grand opera house, a massive billboard had gone up promoting a “special edition” of the anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer, festooned with the tag line Judentum ist Verbrechertum—“Judaism is criminality”—and accompanied by the most base, awful caricature of a hook-nose Jew the artist could conjure. He did not mention what it looked like when the Kärtnerstrasse main drag, the Madison Avenue of Vienna, was filled with massive red Nazi banners, or what it felt like to walk those streets the moment that somehow everyone, overnight, had armbands and flags that identified them with the Nazi Party. He did not speak of the terror that the marching hordes brought with them, the bands of men with their arms raised who rode through the streets on trucks, nor the shouting, ecstatic Viennese girls thrilling to the presence of German Nazi officers. Nor did he speak of the looting that began overnight, immediately—the stealing from Jews that ranged from wresting the works of great art held by high families to the pillaging and destruction of humble shops. He neglected to mention that, when he first returned to Vienna in 1950, it was not so much simply to visit, but to look for survivors, if not of people, then of the city itself, to take in the destruction, to contemplate what was left, or really, what, who, was gone.

  And to me, at least, he did not mention Valy, the girl with whom he had taken classes, who had pined for him, until he finally noticed her, swept her off her feet, wandered in his city with her, taking in all things they could on their limited funds. He did not speak of this girl who sat in on class for him, took notes for him, freeing up his time so he could tutor other kids and bring in money for his family, for himself. He did not tell us that in those heady, awful, terrifying early weeks of Nazi rule, not only did he lose his freedom, he lost his lover when she ran back to her home country to care for her mother, to plot escape on her own. What would he have said, after all?

  Instead, what we heard, what we were schooled in, was the importance, the near perfection, of Vienna’s symphony and art and parks, of Goethe and Zweig and Schilling and Schnitzler and Freud. For my grandfather, as Tony Judt wrote in Postwar, “in the early years of the twentieth century Vienna was Europe: the fertile, edgy, self-deluding hub of a culture and a civilization on the threshold of apocalypse.” It was the city of his friendships, his essence, his very being. Only rarely were there hints to what lay beneath. As October turned into November 1956, the year after Vienna finally emerged from occupation by the Allied powers, the year Vienna picked up her head from the curfews that still, to this day, keep sh
ops closing at six in the evening, the Hungarian uprising was suddenly crushed. My grandparents were in Vienna when the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest; it was the only time, my grandmother told me later, she saw my grandfather panic, the only time she saw a glimpse of whatever had settled into his marrow in 1938. He hustled them, immediately, to Paris, sure, or at least sure enough, that the Soviet tanks would continue to lumber west and engulf them, too; this time he didn’t want to wait around to see what happened.

  But he was suppressing more than simply a sense of dread in those October weeks. The city Karl cherished already no longer existed when he came back in 1950; the people he had known were entirely scattered—or dead. I suppose I didn’t really think this way as a child, it was only later that I came to understand the peculiarity of postwar refugee life: that even if one got out—with a great story and four other family members—you did not necessarily ask what had happened to the man who’d sold you bread, the girl who sat next to you in class, your doctor, your butcher, even your cousins and their wives. You simply did not see them again. And, especially after time passed, you assumed. Any expectations—if you had them—of returning to life as you had once known it had long since dissolved; that life, that community, was no more.

  He finally took his children to meet the city in 1963 and again in 1965. Together, both times, they walked through the Innere Stadt to pick up the aboveground tram, line 21, at Schwedenplatz. They sat as the tram made its way up Taborstrasse, winding through the second district, staying on board when the tram turned right on to the boulevard Heinestrasse. They stepped off at tiny Rueppgasse, whose centuries-old buildings look impressive only to the untrained American eye and are, merely, simply, old. A whole trip just to look up at his old home, not even to ring the bell. To his sister, Cilli, he wrote a postcard with a single line in German—“a backwards look at yesterday.”