Paper Love

by Sarah Wildman

  “There were centuries of persecution,” she says one afternoon as I put away groceries. “Don’t you think that means there was something wrong with Jews?” She wants to find a way to share the guilt between us, a means to draw a line blaming Jews, at least partly, for their own destruction. She wants us to be different.

  I try to explain that, for centuries, simply not believing in Christ made Jews suspect, put them at odds with kings and states. This response bores her. “Look,” she says, and leads me into her home office, until now off-limits to me. On her bulletin board are photos of her grandfathers. Each wears a Nazi uniform, smartly pressed. She tells me she pinned them there to remind herself—both of what they had done, and her refusal to be ashamed of her lineage. I am suddenly hot, and, I find, angry—angry because it is I who feels ashamed standing in front of these long-dead men, doing nothing to convert their granddaughter. I am ineffective.

  The Germans and Austrians at my Institute are bemused by these stories. How, they wonder, have I managed to find a thirty-six-year-old woman who says things long considered unacceptable? Yet when my roommate asks, in one of her strange tirades about the war, wasn’t I bored with being obsessed with the Holocaust, it wasn’t clear to me that it was only I who was obsessed: Wasn’t she obsessed as well? Weren’t the others around me? There is Uli, a German who proudly declares that his country deserves to be dissolved for its sins. He is a Marxist and spends his free time translating for me the unsubtly antiforeigner posters placed by the far-right political parties in the subways. We walk the city together, late at night, around the Ring, once the trams stop running and the Viennese have long since gone home. We mimic my grandfather and his friends as we sit in cafés earnestly discussing history and the state of the world. I wonder, a bit, if my appeal is my Jewishness, as though I am somehow a part of a subconscious atonement plan. At the same time I don’t care. I like it, this strange connection. I like his anger. It feels entirely inappropriate to our generation; it comforts me that I am not the only one still thinking of these things.

  And then there is Thomas, the one other Jewish fellow, a thin, beautiful, Budapest-born philosopher with dolorous eyes, an ever-present pack of Nil cigarettes, and a postcard for the 1924 movie Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews) pinned to his office corkboard. In the film, a city banishes all of its Jews and then falls apart; the city has to invite them all back. It is a comedy. I fall in love, a little bit, with them both, Thomas and Uli; I fall in love, a little bit, with everyone at my Institute.

  It is here, in Vienna, when I realize I have always lived with ghosts. I have always sought, in some way, to understand what connects me to my grandfather, to this time. I spend night after night, for months, drinking with Germans and Austrians; we reassure one another that we are disconnected from the war, distanced by more than time, that we are not to blame.

  Yet I wonder, even as I collect a group of friends in this town, if I have any place here at all. In Vienna, outside my tight intellectual cohort, when I mention my family, the room turns silent and aggressive, or silent and sad, or silent and annoyed. God. Another Jew looking for her roots, they seem to be thinking. Why must you people always be with your heads in the past?

  I think of Valy often as I walk these streets, as I meander down Heinestrasse, the street listed as hers on her school forms, as I visit the places she mentions in her letters. Nowhere is Vienna more idealized than in Valy’s letters. “Unfortunately, I don’t have much good to tell you about my work right now,” she writes in late spring 1941. “A couple of days ago, alas, I returned from the course I had written to you about. It was quite wonderful! Full of youth, spirit and verve! For the first time, since Vienna, I again felt glad and young! Now it has finally come to an end, unfortunately. I did a lot of teaching there and I believe that I have become a well-respected teaching authority there—your legacy, Karl! Upon my return, I unfortunately had to learn that I no longer can continue my work at the hospital and at the seminary for kindergarten teachers due to a general cut in positions. If I do not succeed in becoming confirmed as an itinerant teacher for various retraining facilities, I will have to start working in a factory before too long.”

  Vienna, for Valy, the longer she stays in Berlin, becomes as much a symbol of freedom and life as my grandfather himself. She is a faithful recorder of her time in the city. She writes on it, muses on it, returns to it again and again. She and my grandfather, she writes, spent an “unspeakably beautiful” summer together in the Mediterranean-like warmth of Lake Wörthersee, in Carinthia, near the camp for Zionist Jews, swimming alongside the athletes of Hakoah of Vienna, the superstar sportsmen and women of the era, the best swimmers in Europe. In the winter, they dance at the Medizinerredoute, the medical students’ formal ball. They debate how they can be together with no money: it is one thing to travel as students; it is another to live, forever, impoverished. One day, as they walk in the Augarten, my grandfather tells her that she should marry. She doesn’t understand what he means—to him? To anyone? Is it to pull her back from her mother, who waits for her in Czechoslovakia? Is it to keep her from focusing only on her work? She wants to know what he meant; she doesn’t ask.

  The night after she graduates from medical school, they stand on the Ringstrasse, the grand Viennese circular boulevard with its enormous mansions. They are on the stretch of the Ring near Parliament, diagonally across from the lights of stately Café Landtmann. They stand there and discuss the future. I have been on the Ring dozens upon dozens of times, crammed onto trams, talking with friends, walking late at night when the weather turns warm. It is much the same as it was then, and I can see Karl and Valy there, beneath the glorious statues of the parliament, the imposing marble, alongside the electric streetcars with their peculiar distinctive smell of sweat and wood, I can hear the strange way the tram creaks and bends, like an arthritic elbow, the Austrian-accented nasal German of the recorded station-stop announcements, Stadiongasse/Parlament, Rathausplatz, Schottentor.

  They stand there together, basking in the glory of her degree, and she catches her breath, she has something important to say, she musters her courage: she wants to ask him to stay with her, to be with her, to marry her, to have a life together. But then she doesn’t say any of that; she hesitates. The moment passes. She loses her chance.

  Four days later Hitler annexes the country, and crowds fill Vienna’s Heldenplatz, a pulsating mob with hands held high, palms out. Swastikas fill the city, overnight—there is a run on the flag, there aren’t enough to go around.

  The crackdown begins immediately. Jews are forced to scrub the streets; the local newspapers run headlines, “Are we German? YES!” Their precious Augarten is taken from them within six weeks. They can no longer sit on benches; they can no longer enter parks. My grandfather joins the endless lines searching for visas, he writes to cousins for an affidavit. Does he try for Valy, too? Does she want him to? “Not all of you have to go!” an acquaintance tells my Aunt Cilli. She scoffs. She says she knew they all must leave.

  Violence tilts the city. Jewish stores are sacked. The wealthy students my grandfather tutored are looted; their fathers are arrested and sent to Dachau. Some don’t return. Jews are paraded for humiliation. My grandfather pins a Polish eagle to his cap and pretends to be a Pole. He can speak just enough Polish to render his disguise believable. Where did all these Nazis come from? Five years of what had been incrementally imposed anti-Jewish legislation in Germany was put in place in Austria all at once, in a matter of weeks. Restrictive measures were only part of the mortification of the community: the Nazis quickly began to confiscate Jewish property and art, shipping it all immediately into the Altreich, the heart of Germany, businesses are “aryanized,” taken over by racially pure business owners.

  And as my grandfather knocks on doors and cuts the lines at the consulates, Valy takes the train three hours northeast to Troppau, Czechoslovakia, leaving behind her adopted city, and her lover.
She can’t abandon her mother, in another town, another country. Even if he’d asked. And it does not appear he asked. Plus—at first—returning home was an escape. Czechoslovakia was not yet occupied, was ostensibly out of immediate danger.

  Somewhere in those weeks of plotting for freedom, my grandfather began to morph into the hero who enabled his sister, brother-in-law, mother, and nephew to escape Vienna in the nick of time; the hero that I knew. Valy began to write to him from the moment he set foot on the boat—first from her mother’s, and later from Berlin.

  You should know that I bought myself a flute because I am always so dreadfully lonesome. While I don’t think that my musical productions sound very good at this stage, I am really enjoying it.

  And I am practicing an awful lot so I will be able to play really well once you and I are reunited again. You love music so much! And even though it cannot be piano which you would have wanted—I don’t have the sufficient means for that in more than one respect—one can make beautiful music on a flute, as well, don’t you think? And you are going to sing along with my playing, in your full-throated “steam bath” voice. And, whoever does not like it can just buzz off. We are definitely going to like it!

  She dreams of everything they shared, a dream that she nourishes as the world around her becomes increasingly nightmarish and the past becomes the only sharp, clear, beautiful thing she can think of:

  I live through all the different phases of our being together. Do you remember? The Friday nights. When we went to your Mama’s house. All the other evenings in your place. Everything you did. Do you remember? Talking. How can we without money . . . ? Skiing classes . . . The different relationships between us we lived, together . . . And this time cannot be over yet darling. I beg you . . . tell me. That this cannot be. It is impossible don’t you agree? It cannot be. Darling?! I think about all those things and I ask myself in which phase of your life you are right now.

  I show these letters to friends in Vienna and Berlin. One friend tells me they are too personal to translate. Not only because Valy was trapped, but also because she did not sound like a woman who fully believed herself to be loved, to be supported, to be cared for. “You are and remain far, far away, out of my reach, you exist only in my memories, in my wonderful, beautiful ‘sunny past.’”

  Even more than emigration, Valy just wants the past to no longer be past. She meanders for pages, she reminds him of the poetry they read together, the books they debated. “Do you remember? Once, many years ago, we were walking through the Prater, it was in October, and you recited the Oktoberlied for me, talking about the overcast day which we wanted to make golden. . . . We were so happy then, or, at least, I was. With you, I never was quite sure how things were.”

  I am struck, seventy years on, by the poignancy of that insecurity. My grandfather was in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, by the time she wrote those lines. It was fall 1941. By then his medical practice had been open a year, he was settling into his new life, he was dating my smart, pretty grandmother, who had gone to Smith College and then transferred—it was still the Depression, after all, and Smith was pricey—to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She was the daughter of Jewish immigrants (one Russian, one Latvian) who made a solid living selling wallpaper and paint. Her mother had been a businesswoman in her own right, as a fashion buyer in her early twenties; in all, the Kolmans were a very American, quiet-success story.

  In Berlin, in the meantime, Valy was entirely living in the past, comforted only by a phantom version of Karl, a shadow version of their relationship that had long since become as one-dimensional as his photograph.

  I discuss all this with Herbert Posch—the life my grandfather created, the life he left behind, the eventual American wife, the girlfriend, the lies, the omissions, the sadness—and he listens, quietly. I wonder aloud about what Karl told my grandmother, and what he knew about where Valy was during the war, and after it. I raise for him the questions that have been consuming me—about my grandfather’s lovers, about his guilt, or his lack of guilt.

  I tell him that as a teen I made a pilgrimage with my parents to my grandfather’s former home, Rueppgasse 27, a street that, to my seventeen-year-old eyes, seemed gray and uninteresting: poor. We took the train from Munich to Vienna on that trip—schlepping a million bags from train to train. I remember thinking, I say, How odd, how disturbing, to be asked for papers and passports in German. In Vienna, my father went to the bank, to withdraw money. My grandfather, I learned only then, had squirreled away money outside America, should he need to flee again. This was a bewildering thought—Karl had not been sure enough of the United States to entrust our banks with all of what he earned. Instead, he opened accounts in Switzerland, perhaps also elsewhere, in the event that he was once again a refugee, he could enable the family to start over. Not only that—he had also secured a passport for my father when he was born, so the family could make a quick exit if they needed to—little Joseph Wildman is held up in his passport photo by my grandmother. The knowledge altered something for me, even then, opened questions I hadn’t known to ask before. That same anxiety that had prompted him to flee the city in 1956—sure that the Soviet army was on his heels—lurked elsewhere in his psyche. He hadn’t believed in his success as much as I’d thought.

  I suspect Posch is used to this. He gets these same navel-gazing musings from all the others like me who have come to see him, all of us on a pilgrimage to a messenger rather than to a place.

  Posch invites me to visit the tiny former synagogue on the medical school campus that is now a memorial site called Marpe Lanefesh—“healing of the soul.” For years it stood dormant, decaying, after it was forcibly decommissioned in 1938. By the 1970s, he tells me, no one remembered it had been a synagogue; it briefly became a transformer station, an electricity hub, a center for switches. But a researcher of the architect Max Fleischer, a prolific synagogue designer of the turn of the last century whose work had been entirely destroyed on Kristallnacht, wondered if, perhaps, the little octagon opposite the campus insane asylum (really) was actually a synagogue. In 2005, a Bulgarian artist—Minna Antova—created the memorial; in it she literally layered the history, placing three glass floors one on top of the other, the first layer a magnification of the 1903 architectural plans of Fleischer; the next a series of words, a Nazi text calling for the destruction of Jewish holy sites on Kristallnacht; and the top a sketch of the electrical plan of the building. Visitors must put on gray felt clogs to walk on the glass so as not to scratch it; the roof was replaced with a glass cupola so Marpe Lanefesh, even on the gloomiest of days, is filled with light. The feeling is not so much of a synagogue, but of a breathing memory.

  In fact, says Posch, it is one of only two standing synagogue structures left in Vienna, though this one is not a functioning chapel. The other is on Seitenstettengasse; that one is gilt and lush, with a soaring ceiling painted like a starry sky and endless names of the dead on the wall, most of whom were killed in the Shoah. All of the other synagogues of Vienna were destroyed on Kristallnacht.

  By that terrible night, neither Valy nor my grandfather remained in Vienna. On Kristallnacht, my grandfather was in New York. Valy was preparing to leave Troppau for Berlin. From her letters, I knew it was Berlin where Valy had experienced all of the horror and deprivation that would characterize the ensuing years.

  Knowing this, I wondered if the key to finding Valy wasn’t in Vienna at all, but Germany itself. I dreamt of finding answers, of understanding some essential truth about her time there, of finding a clue to whether she might have lived through it all; and where she might be now.

  Fantastical as my hopes were, I nurtured a belief that there was a place that might actually provide some of that—a complete mapping of her devastation and her path through the war; a final reckoning of the experience through Nazi records. That place was the enormous archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross—the International Tracin
g Service (ITS)—in Bad Arolsen, deep in the countryside of former West Germany. I had heard rumors about them for years; the problem was, they were not just closed but barred to researchers. ITS was created, solely, to reconnect families after the war, to provide answers, to provide an end to stories, happy or not. But so many legal barriers were in place to seeing what was inside, it seemed impossible I would ever get in there. Yet the more difficult it was, the more I wanted to go.

  My time in Vienna is ending when I read that the archives in Bad Arolsen would finally be opening to outside researchers.

  After months in the imperial city, I finally understand my grandfather’s obsession with Vienna. When my fellowship draws to a close, I take a taxi to the airport; the driver takes me circuitously and, strangely, I find myself just at the corner of my grandfather’s street. And there, in the back of the taxi, I finally cry. It is, in part, because I have been lonely here, I have missed those who have been gone from my life for years now, but I have made my own connections in Vienna; I have complicated my relationship to this geography with my own friendships, my own intellectual curiosity. I open a book that Thomas and Andrea, my friends from the Institute, gave me as a parting gift. “Vienna loves you, little Wildman,” Thomas has written on the inside flap.

  I call Herwig and weep to him that I feel ridiculous for these tears, that I feel a part of me is here in this city, even though my German is not good enough, my time so superficial, that I have not found enough out, that I have not done what I came to do.