In the meantime, Pavel and I are at an impasse, which only worsens when we finally arrive in Troppau.
The peculiar thing about Troppau is that, at first blush, there seems to be nothing at all to connect the modern city—now called Opava—with the town that was before. At surface, today, you could easily never know its past: the Jews were expelled or murdered, and then, postwar, the rest of the Sudeten Germans were expelled and the city’s name changed. In the late 1940s, Opava washed itself clean of its German roots, started again with a new Czech life, and turned its back on the past, ending centuries of speaking, writing, reading, and using German in the town. It reminds me, when I first arrive, of something the late professor Fouad Ajami once said of the Turks under Atatürk: that by putting the language into Latin letters, and out of Arabic, the country no longer allowed itself to access the past. In Troppau, too, there is little access to the past: no one speaks or reads or grasps German at all, let alone remembers much of a time when there were Jews running half the city’s businesses. Troppau—especially Troppau’s Jews—was always oriented more toward Vienna than Warsaw or Prague. The town’s history is told in German, the town’s Jews were obsessed with German culture—which means this past is nearly inaccessible to most of the Czech youth I meet. Pavel can read and speak German; he is an exception.
In the Jewish archives of Prague, page after page in stacks tied together with ribbon testify to the relationship between the Jewish communities of Troppau and Vienna, stretching well back into the nineteenth century. By the early 1930s, smart girls like Valy were sent to Vienna to study. When she enrolled in the medical school in 1932, she was part of a second wave, a group of women who believed in their place as doctors, not nurses, and saw their enrollment as entirely normal, entirely obvious: feminists without using the term. There were dozens of women in the medical school in Valy’s year—and of those, more than half were Jewish.
She was a German aesthete—no money, but rich in the poems and music of the city she adopted. Her time in Vienna was a shelter for her, mentally, emotionally, a respite that she would return to, in her letters, in her mind, when life began to morph and twist into the horror of the Nazi period. When she graduated, five days before the Nazis took the city, she held in her hand one of the last degrees from the university given to a Jew before the Anschluss deprived her classmates of that privilege.
For some time I couldn’t understand why Valy hadn’t stayed in Vienna, or rather, why she hadn’t stayed long enough to flee with my grandfather. I assumed—I still assume—it was in part because she felt she must return to her mother, alone in Troppau. That sense of loyalty surely played a tremendous role. In her later letters she does nothing without her mother.
My mother is again with me. She was supposed to take on the management of a local home, but was not approved by the labor department, alas. Now she will probably have to take on a completely subordinate job—household or cleaning. It has to be that way. We are greatly saddened by this, because we fear that she will not be up to it physically. I just hope that it is not going to be too hard. We now live together in a furnished room and are truly happy to be together.
But it was also, I realized in the Czech Republic, because in March 1938, Troppau was a way of fleeing Vienna without having to go very far. It was free. It was (relatively) safe. It was, she thought, they all thought, enough out of reach of the Nazi arm that they had time to collect themselves, to consider their options, before emigration. So she went to Troppau to organize her life, to escape the Anschluss, to reunite with her mother; and—maybe—to wait for a marriage proposal. And Karl continued on his path to emigration.
Valy began to write to him from the moment he set foot on the boat from Hamburg to New York.
Troppau. September 13, 1938
Beloved boy,
A warm welcome to America!
Europe and I send you greetings. We both grieve for you! . . .
When your card arrived, I wanted to fly to Hamburg. I simply could not fathom that you were leaving and that I had to stay back here by myself. It was inconceivable no longer to have you here within reach. Finally, I comprehended that you had actually taken the step you had been contemplating for months and that I must be happy.
Do you remember, darling, how you would console me when I used to be so unhappy at the onset of the long summer break because we had to separate for such a long time? “Be sensible, there are only six weeks that separate us; neither you nor I go to America!”. . . And now, many weeks and sky-high obstacles, an entire world history is between us! Isn’t that so sad that one might want to die? . . .
Valy
Her uncle, she writes him, is worse off than she—he is now considered stateless and is wandering from place to place, using up time in each country till he can find safe passage to a place he might actually stay in. Statelessness was suddenly a massive problem affecting Jews across the German-speaking world. Jews were increasingly deprived of citizenship, taken in by no one, wandering from border to border, illegal, hungry, fearing their own incarceration. Erich Marie Remarque wrote a whole forgotten book on the phenomenon—Flotsam, on the unlucky ones (in his book, they are not only Jews) shunted across borders, never taken in, doomed to wander just like their stereotypes. The book appeared before things turned even darker; it was 1939 and the characters of Remarque’s imagination consider Paris. And Mexico. Valy does not immediately consider traveling toward France or South America; she wants only to meet my grandfather in New York. Her mother suggests Palestine; Valy doesn’t want that either.
The week Valy’s letter was sent, Chamberlain flew to visit Hitler. “The Third Reich will win again—whether by bluff or by force,” wrote Dresden diarist Victor Klemperer on the twentieth of September. So: poor Valy. Only months after she is out of suffocating Vienna, and days after her lover has fled the Continent, her hometown is handed to Hitler; the Munich agreement gives him Sudetenland, and thousands of Jews flee into the Czech interior. But not Valy and her mother; they stay, with her mother’s shop, with their smothering surroundings. Even as early as September 1938, the small towns were oppressive for Jews. It got worse and worse. Kristallnacht was particularly brutal in the Sudetenland, an eager proof to the Nazi government that the newest citizens cheered the Nazis’ racialized violence: that night Troppau’s gorgeous synagogue burned, the fire department stood back, keeping the crowds, and the lifesaving water, at bay. Almost every synagogue, for miles around, was turned to ash.
When Pavel and I finally arrive in town, we walk immediately over to see where the synagogue had been. There is no plaque. The square it once stood upon is just a stretch of lawn, with trees and grass, a leafy traffic island. Nothing was built to stand in its place, and nothing marks that anything once stood here. But next to it, the brick rabbi’s house still stands, and we peer in the windows where photos of the once-magnificent synagogue are hung. Okay, let’s go, says Pavel, but I say, No, let’s go in. So we do. There is a Roma evangelical revival meeting taking place—boisterous praises of Jesus and the Lord in Czech. Pavel sits in the corner, plugging his phone into the wall, while his mother and I chat with the leaders of the meeting, the pastor and a bouncy, tall woman named Blanca, with an open, young face. Her “half Gypsy” daughters are in the meeting and she hopes to bring me to Jesus. She speaks impressive, if quirky, English—and Spanish from years of living in the Canary Islands.
“Here was the most beautiful synagogue in Czech Republic, here in Opava,” says Blanca, using the modern Czech name of the town. “Here we pray to say ‘We are sorry’ to the Jewish people for what happened in Opava because they were killing many Jewish people.” Eventually the pastor joins us. His skin is ruddy, and expressive, and he looks fit, more like a gym teacher than a spiritual leader. The pastor adds, “We were just talking about this yesterday—in this city it was once only Jews and Germans who lived in the center of town; Czechs lived in the surrounding towns.” He runs and br
ings me a photo of the synagogue’s famous cupolas, burning. But when I ask if they were aware of this history growing up, they demur. “It was Communist, so they didn’t teach us these things,” says Blanca.
Blanca prevails upon me to come into the revival meeting. One very young woman standing near Blanca’s older daughter is openly weeping; Blanca whispers that the woman’s daughter has just accepted Jesus. Her own daughter is a head taller than her “full Gypsy” friends, she has dreadlocked hair pulled back in a ponytail tied low at her neck; she wears a—yet another!—large silver Star of David around her neck. The girl grasps her friends around the shoulders and sings with gusto along with every song. Blanca signals to the keyboardist and then stands in front of the room; the music begins to slow and then, finally, peter out. Blanca tells the group that I am Jewish (a woman in the crowd gasps, another begins to cry) and that my family lost family members—just like you, just like the Gypsies—in the Holocaust. There is much nodding; many eyes are moist. The keyboardist stands up and announces, in halting but clear English: You have been sent by Jesus. Pavel has finally come to join us and whispers, “What the hell are we doing with these Gypsies?” But his mother, at least, looks happy, and when the music starts up again, she begins dancing, merrily, arm in arm, with various members of the crowd. She hooks an elbow into mine and suddenly we are square-dancing with the evangelicals.
The next day, when I arrive at the archives, I will discover Blanca and the “Christians of Opava” have preceded me—leaving a Gideon’s Bible at the front desk, inscribed to me; wishing me well on my journey to Christ. “We find the mesia [sic] is there and we wish you will find Him as well. We pray for you. Read John 1:42–43.” They were so very sure that my stumbling upon them was about them; so clear that it was Jesus who brought us together, not Valy. But before that, Pavel, his mother, and I wander the town, in the dark, and come to the opera house where Nabucco is onstage and I am—momentarily—transported seventy years into the past. As we arrive, Pavel is telling me how he put on a production of Brundibár on this stage—the children’s opera by Czech Hans Krása, staged at Theresienstadt and recently restaged, in New York, by Tony Kushner and the late Maurice Sendak. I slip away from him for a moment into the warm theater and stand there, imagining Valy and Karl taking in the same arias seventy-five years before me, finally feeling like I can grasp them a little bit, see them walking down the hall, giggling together, see them in their lives together, and finally feel a bit closer to her.
When I come back downstairs, Pavel and his mother are drinking sweet pink sparkling wine with an usher they know. We wander on, trying to determine which home on the inner ring was Valy’s. There are several old buildings still standing—in fact, contrary to our argument on the train a few days prior, the entire city was not bombed, just pieces, like missing teeth, which were filled in Communist-bloc style, so the effect is that of a home misarranged, mismatched, that was once a grand estate.
One of the standing buildings, from the late nineteenth century, reminds me of Paris apartment buildings of the Haussmann era. It is a grand presence, all large windows and carved sills; I am sure it was Valy and her mother’s building, it is the same number! It is the right period! I want so badly for it to be so, I want to know that I have found the markers of the beginning of her life. Beneath it, on the ground floor, there is a small depressing casino, filled with slot machines and the kind of dead-eyed gamblers of small, poor towns the world over. The workers in the casino look at me dispassionately. They have no idea if number 43 from 1940 has anything to do with a building numbered 43 in 2012; the street name, not to mention the numbers, is different today. We leave with no answers.
As dawn breaks the following morning, I am picked up by Aron, a friend of Pavel’s who is a bond officer in Opava. I am bleary with exhaustion, and in my sleepy haze, I decide Aron looks like he’s playing the part of Tevye in a school play: a scraggly beard, a belly, enormously tall, a wool paper-boy cap, he drives a creaky old black Mercedes that needs a great deal of love to keep it moving. Like Pavel, Aron is not Jewish but is deeply involved in the recovery of the area’s history, and we talk about what it was like growing up, the jokes that were told about Jews (most involving gas—“Why did Hitler kill himself? He got the bill for the gas”), how he long believed—or perhaps hoped—himself to be Jewish—his grandparents were descendants of ethnic Czechs who spoke the language peculiarly, and with an accent. He was sure they were hidden Jews—it seems, like many here who have taken an interest in the history, to some degree he wanted them to have been hidden Jews—but, he now knows, they were not. He grew up near one of the abandoned Jewish cemeteries and taught himself basic Hebrew reading the tombstones; now he is the president of the Krnov synagogue association.
Pavel and Aron are curious corollaries to my strange roommate in Vienna—for them, as rebellious teens, as outsiders, Jewishness was a bit interesting, but unlike Hilke they went toward it rather than against it. Judaism was in some ways a means of embracing a worldview different from, perhaps more exotic than, what they knew. It feels at times like searching for Native American roots in the United States.
Aron drives us into Troppau and we go up to his office for coffee. There he tells us a bit about the history of the town—“It was high society,” he says, meaning haute bourgeoisie—and he and Pavel discuss the rise of anti-Semitism here.
After being kept from living downtown until the mid-nineteenth century, restrictions against Jews were lifted and, suddenly, by the turn of the twentieth, they were flooding into the professional classes. As in Vienna, in Troppau they made up a quarter of all doctors, a fifth of all lawyers. And they started to buy up houses in the main squares. “People had the feeling that every second house in the center of town was Jewish. And every second shop.” Tensions rose between Jews and non-Jews over perceived Semitic success.
Aron is due at the prison, so Pavel and I walk on, through the city’s parks and around the center. Finally, we arrive at the former Silesian parliament building, now the home of the regional archives. It looks a bit, as many of these buildings do, like a medieval hospital, a miniature version of the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid; the floors are wide-planked wood or massive ceramic tile, there are high plaster archways everywhere, and the walls are filled with photos of old military men. The archivist speaks no English and Pavel translates. We tell him that we are trying to establish where Valy and her mother lived—Oberring 43—and together with the archivist we scan the 1938 town address book, and pull up map after ancient map on the archivist’s computer. Finally we see it. The building we had walked into last night, the small, sad slot-machine casino building, nestled into the ornate apartment house that I was so sure had been theirs, was not Valy’s home. Their building was directly across from the opera house; the old number 43 was leveled by bombs and postwar cleanup. I am sad to know it, sad to know that I cannot touch what she touched, see what she saw—what they saw together.
Then the archivist asks if I want to know why they left Troppau. I say I think I know: anti-Semitism was terrible in these small towns, and I hear Pavel, translating me, and I get the sense he is making fun my assurance. “She says she knows already,” he says, in a falsetto voice. Perhaps his words were different; I can hear the tone, I don’t understand the words. The men in the room laugh. “Are you mocking me?” I ask, shrill, I have it on my tape, my exhaustion, my near tears. Everyone sobers. Perhaps, the archivist asks, you would like to see the forced aryanization papers? We all stop talking for a moment. “That’s a possibility?” I ask. I would very, very much like to see that. And, suddenly, before us is a book; halfway through it we see that Toni Sara Scheftel, Valy’s mother, has a file. Pavel and I both are taken aback, thrilled even, to have a chance to see its terrible contents.
The introduction to the book is entirely in Czech, but I photograph it and take it with me to send on for translation. “On 26 April 1938 Regulation came into force regarding register
ing Jewish property in the whole territory of the former Germany.” April 1938 was one month after Valy returned to her mother; the regulation applied, after September, to the Sudetenland. “In that regulation, it was ordered that every Jew . . . must register all their domestic and foreign property as of the date on which this Regulation came into force. . . . Intentionally falsely reported data subjected the [false] reporting person a subject of criminal prosecution, with the maximum penalty up to ten years in jail.” By November 12, 1938, a few days after Kristallnacht, the Reich announced “the exclusion of Jews from German economic life.” Effective two months later, on January 1, 1939, “Jews were forbidden to operate stores, shipping or ordering companies, as well as to be self-employed in business. In addition, from November 12 they were prohibited to offer goods for sale in markets of all kinds, and exhibitions, nor were they allowed to advertise goods. Jewish businesses operated in spite of this regulation could be closed by the police. From January 1, 1939 a Jew was also not allowed to lead any company.” All membership in professional organizations was also stripped. All Jewish property, including investments, was taken away, and Jews were not allowed to own gold, silver, platinum, or jewels.
And then we are presented with Valy’s mother’s file, antique pages we spread out on the floor to see them more clearly, ancient pages detailing the careful dismantling of her business, her life, her livelihood. “What lengths did they go to,” marvels Pavel, “to despoil the Jews!”
The pages look like this:
LIST OF ASSETS OF JEWISH PERSONS
with the effective date of April 27 1938 December 1, 1939
for Ms. Toni Scheftel
Business woman (shoe store)
in Troppau
Adolf Hitler Ring 43
Personal Data
I was born on December 27, 1885
I am Jewish (Paragraph 5 of the First Regulation of the Reichsbürgergesetz (Citizenship Law of the Reich of Nov. 14, 1935, Reichs Gazette P. 1333) and German citizen . . .
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