I want to know: Where were Toni and Valy in that system? So, I ask Meyer, was the Reichsvereinigung culpable? But Meyer, like other scholars I read later, rejects the question, rejects the purity of Arendt’s argument. The Reichsvereinigung was in an impossible situation, she says, and the leaders thought they were doing the best for the community with the tools they had in hand. “To claim that demonstrative refusal, open resistance, and a mass movement underground would have enabled a greater number of people to survive is mere speculation—and assumes that the majority of German Jews would have been prepared for this. . . . The tragedy of the Reichsvereinigung . . . is marked by the objective hopelessness of all attempts” to protect their own people. “The representatives became entangled in the Nazi policy of extermination, for which they were at the same time not responsible,” she wrote in an essay she sent me that was published to accompany an exhibit on the lives of Jews in Berlin under the Reich. In other words: the killing would have gone on, with or without their cooperation.
I press her further: Were these Jews in any way responsible for their own persecution, their own destruction? In Austria, the surviving Jewish officials were later vilified, prosecuted, sometimes to a greater extent than captured Nazis. Doron Rabinovici starts his provocative book Eichmann’s Jews with the story of Wilhelm Reisz, who was charged in 1945 by the public prosecutor’s office, who singled him out for having “brought misfortune on his compatriots in order to gain advantage for himself.” He was sentenced to fifteen years and three months of hard labor—a fate similar, Rabinovici points out, to that of the Nazi responsible for the deportations of the Jews of Austria, even though Reisz himself had lived with the constant fear of deportation. Reisz hung himself after his trial. But, Rabinovici says—and he will also tell me this in person, sometime later when we meet—that in Austria, as elsewhere, those Jews with some degree of power were afraid that if they left the task of organizing their cousins and community members to the Gestapo, it would be far more brutal; they were afraid, they argued later, that their own family members would be taken if they didn’t cooperate. And so they became part of the system.
Part of the system or not, the work the women did, and so many of these workers were women, especially while they skated closer and closer to their own deportations, weighed heavily upon them. Women were tasked with preparing food, sandwiches, for the deportees; these snacks and water were the woefully inadequate provisions for a trip that was days long, especially as the food brigade itself was slowly decimated, its members picked off for deportations, sent off into the unknown with the drip drip drip of horrific anticipation. I imagine, simply by dint of her position, Toni may have been among these sandwich makers, these deportation preparers.
“Of some forty women who helped in the beginning, in the end there were only eight,” wrote Herta Pineas in May 1945. She herself was a member of these provisions-preparing brigades. White armbands afforded them freedom of movement and set them apart from the unlucky. And they watched with increasing terror the manner in which the deportees were sent. “The trains were sealed before departure, and not a window was allowed to be opened!” wrote Mrs. Pineas.
At the rear of the train there was a machine gun, and in the middle there were also Gestapo. At the station there was no food even for the smallest children; there was only cold skimmed milk, and too little of that too. And for us at the train the families with many children were the worst. The children were holding their dolls in their arms, happy to be following their grandparents, who had already “departed” ahead of them.
Children were jammed into closed, windowless furniture vans to be brought from transit camp to train station. By the end of 1942, even the meager provisions these women prepared were no longer permitted or offered. By then, if one of the women workers expressed sadness or disapproval, she, too, would be sent along. So they suppressed all emotion. Aryans, too, would watch the Jews arriving and loading at open platforms, impassively. No one spoke of what they witnessed.
Toni and Valy, it seems, were just as trapped as those who left on trains before them.
Meyer asks me if I’d like to take a tour of Hamburg’s old Jewish quarter, filled as it is with Stolpersteine—literally, “stumbling blocks”—brass-topped cobblestones hewn by Gunter Demnig, an artist based in Cologne, that are laid in the ground in front of houses to mark those deported from address after address, in a project that began in 1992. There are hundreds in Hamburg, as there are, these days, across Germany and Austria. I found it enormously moving to look down with each step to see the carved words “Hier wohnte . . .”—“Here lived . . .” The entire former Jewish quarter is filled with them, glittering with each step. It is incredibly effective. A whisper that becomes a refrain—Lost lost lost lost lost. But the refrain is tempered: each Stolperstein must be purchased by an interested friend or family member; each stumbling block is requested—you must be remembered to be memorialized.
And as we walk, we talk. Meyer points out the theater where the Jewish community leaders brought sandwiches to the soon-to-be deported, a last piece of nourishment before the starvation that would come. Across the street, there is once again a “Jewish” restaurant, Café Leonar; the menu lists Jewish food, like chicken soup with matzah balls, Israeli salad. It is a bookstore café, and though it opened only in 2008, it is the first Jewish eatery to open since the war. We walk on. “This is the place where the synagogue was, and this is the ground,” Meyer says as we come upon a large square, with cobblestones laid out in the shape of a bursting star. The plaza is now named for Rabbi Joseph Carlebach, the last rabbi of Hamburg. The main synagogue of Hamburg, which stood here until 1938, was magnificent, with a cupola that soared high above the city; it burned on Kristallnacht.
Carlebach is something of a legend for having stuck by his congregation, even when he might have fled; he provided spiritual shelter to the desperate. Though five of his nine children escaped to safety in England and Palestine, the four youngest were deported with him to Riga, where all but one were murdered by bullets in the forests outside the ghetto.
According to the files at Yad Vashem and the notes I received from the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv, Toni worked in Berlin until March 9, 1943, when she was forced to list all of her belongings, in a property declaration that would have stripped her of each Reichsmark in property, on behalf of the Reich, if she had any property to speak of at that point. She had nothing at all by then. Her forms are nearly empty. She lived in the city until the twelfth; I know now that this was a (relatively) late date for Berlin. It is a sign she might have ranked higher in the Reichsvereinigung than, for example, the factory workers who were swept up and rounded onto trains during the last week of February 1943 in what became known as the Fabrikaktion—factory action—during which thousands upon thousands of Jewish forced laborers were taken away without notice, pulled directly from the factories into city-based transit camps, shoved onto trucks in just the clothes they were wearing, with no preparation, no food, no water, and with a great deal of public anxiety among the Jews—especially family members—who remained in the city.
I also knew that most of those Reichsvereinigung members not taken during the Fabrikaktion were given a horrible, horrible task. Hildegard Henschel, wife of one of the higher-ups in the organization, testified at the Eichmann trial that those women workers who were left were themselves roped into the effort: they were sent out to the apartments of the factory workers, to collect the children who had been left at home, locked in their apartments, as there was no day care on Saturdays and their mothers were all forced laborers. The Jewish women of the Reichsvereinigung were sent to take the kids from their homes to the deportations centers; the overcrowded transit ways, to these gateways of death. Eight thousand persons, the factory workers, were detained, Henschel explained in Jerusalem. “And they began, of course, to ask questions: ‘What is happening to my children, my children are at home, and where is my husband, he works in the factory, he i
s not here!’ The Jewish Community began to organize its staff, in order to gather the families together at least. The children were brought from the homes, where some of them had been locked in by their parents, since there was no school anymore and many people did not know where to leave the children. Attempts were also made to unite husbands and wives. These efforts were almost completely successful, as far as the children were concerned, but with the grown-ups it was more difficult.”
Henschel believed it was a service, that it was an altruistic effort to reunite families. But there is something terrifically chilling in this image, of Jews going to collect Jewish children, for delivery into the hands of their executioners. Valy’s mother, I am almost sure, though I cannot know, was among those nurses and staff who were sent to collect the children. By this point, she was working at Auguststrasse 14/16. She was a staff member of the Reichsvereinigung, and while she herself is spared these rounds of deportations, she might not have been spared the job of helping—inadvertently, forcibly—to destroy the youth of Berlin.
Beate Meyer repeats this story to me, of the taken children. “It was a chaos, too,” Meyer says. “They felt responsible for the children and they felt children had to stay with their families and so they were deported with the families.” But could the children, I ask, have been saved? She looks at me and shakes her head sadly. “Where could they bring them?” she asks. “There was no place for them to go.”
Sometime later I ask Meyer about why Toni was not taken with the people in her old-age home, and what she might be able to tell me about her reassignment, if it might lead me to know more about Toni’s import, her role, her time in Berlin. But Meyer can’t give me much more. “I went through my lists of staff of the Reichsvereinigung [Berlin] from January, April, and May 1943,” Meyer tells me, “but didn’t find any hint to Chana Scheftel, not in general and not in particular in connection to the Auguststrasse home. I don’t know why she isn’t mentioned at Auguststrasse. She should be. Auguststrasse was a Siechenheim, for elderly and ill people who were in need of care. In addition, it was used as accommodation for other Jews until their deportation. . . . In 1941–1942, the Reichsvereinigung tried to give the personnel from dissolved institutions jobs in other departments, mostly those ones that dealt with deportations, because this department became bigger. But in 1943 they couldn’t act in that way. Sometimes the staff of a home or a hospital was deported with the inhabitants or patients. Sometimes the Reichsvereinigung needed—just in that moment, when an institution was dissolved—a qualified person for another job at another institution until it, too, was closed. Sometimes a friend or colleague heard about the deportation of a certain home and asked superiors for help.” Meyer apologizes for not having a more specific answer and recommends another German historian. He writes me that he has no answers—the history of Auguststrasse 14/16, he says, is itself a book.
There is nothing further these historians can tell me, with certainty, about Toni’s last days in Berlin.
But what I piece together is this: Like other middle-level Reichsvereinigung members, Toni was useful until March 12. On that day, her work no longer “necessary” to the Reich, she, too, was shoved onto a train at Grunewald station, heading east to Auschwitz. There were 899 others with Toni on that train; she was fifty-seven years old—and, emotionally, she was alone. Valy was not with her that day.
At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, I watch video testimony from Norbert Wollheim, recorded in the early 1990s. Wollheim was deported on the same day as Toni. Somewhere in those same train cars, he, along with his wife and their small child, was shoved aboard. Of his small family, only he would survive. In his testimony, Wollheim explained that he and his family, after being picked up by the Gestapo, were driven to the transit station at Berlin’s Grosse Hamburger Strasse, in Mitte. It doesn’t exist anymore as a building, but there is a prominent memorial, with a garden, and a wall with an eerie series of statues of Jews waiting to leave. Wollheim recounted:
Then the procedure of deportation started with all kinds of paperwork. . . . Even in the middle of that war, when everything was short including paper, there was enough paper for all kinds of procedures. And we had to declare our so-called funds—our possessions—and we were served with a kind of summons . . . saying we had been declared enemies of the Reich because of our behavior and that we were to be deprived of our property. And this was served on all of us, including my then-child of three and a half years, because of also his outrageous behavior toward the German Reich. After two or three days we were taken by trucks to a German freight railroad station and put on cattle cars and then this train with approximately a thousand people left Berlin. We were—in each of these boxcars there were approximately sixty to seventy people, just a bucket for sanitary purposes, no water, hardly any air because they were closed.
“Somehow, for reasons that are difficult to explain,” Wollheim continued,
we felt a certain amount of relief, because after all these weeks of waiting, and these weeks of expectations, knowing that so many trains had left Berlin already before, we thought, “It’s a new chapter,” and we were actually looking forward to that chapter with optimism and hoping or believing, envisioning that we would be taken to some kind of labor camp where we could work, but survive, and wait for the end of the war. . . . We had difficulties to find out where we were going, but when we saw we were going toward the east . . . my wife . . . she and others wrote cards, postcards, because we knew it from other things, from transports which had left Berlin before, that people had thrown out these cards and these cards had been mailed. . . . We were in such a rather good mood that we even started to sing. There was a song in the youth movement, it’s in Hebrew, “How nice it is when friends sit together and are together in friendship.” . . . It was Friday evening after darkness fell, one of the elderly ladies remembered she had taken some candles along and she was lighting the candles and saying the prayers and we found this somehow encouraging, though it’s so absolutely irrational now, it’s so irrational that here, but nobody knew . . . that ninety-five percent of the people on that train would not live to see the next evening.
Surely among those who did not live to see the morning was Valy’s mother. In 1943, that brutal year, women in their fifties were not often selected for work on the notorious selection ramps that divided the living from the soon-to-be-dead at Auschwitz. Surely she was shoved into the line designated for gas upon arrival at the camp. Surely she was chosen for death. But of that I can only guess. There is no further information about her; she received no number at the camp. Her story has no end. She simply disappears.
Nine
A NEW NAME
There are no brass Stolpersteine marking the lost in front of 43 Brandenburgische Strasse 43, the last Berlin address I have for Valy. In the files I received from the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv, I confirm that, for a year or so after the letters end, Valy’s life remained in Babelsberg, Potsdam, with her mother, both women cut off by war from the outside world. And then, at some point, at the very end of 1942 or the very beginning of 1943, her time as the Burgfräulein comes to a close; like Toni, Valy moves back into Berlin, and out of the old-age home, just before all of its residents are sent to the east and, surely, to their deaths. The hope Valy writes of in late 1941—to hear the Shabbat morning service in the foyer for a long time to come—lasted one year.
I go back again to my box of letters to see if there is any chance I have missed something that can give me a clue as to what my grandfather and Valy were thinking or doing after Valy’s letters stop—during that crucial window from December 1941 until the beginning of 1943 for which I have nothing. When I first discovered the box labeled “Correspondence, Patients A–G,” I separated out a clump that seemed less immediately important. And there I see it. A letter postmarked July 21, 1942, from the Berkshire County Chapter of the American Red Cross. It is addressed to Dr. Charles (!) J. Wildman. Perhaps tha
t was why I didn’t open it originally.
“Dr. Wildman,” the letter reads, “We have just received the enclosed message for you from Germany, through the offices of the International Red Cross in Washington, D.C. If you wish to send a reply, the reverse side of the form may be used. Your message must be in English, must be typewritten, and is limited to twenty-five (25) words of purely personal character. The return message must be sent through the American Red Cross. . . . We shall be glad to forward it promptly for you, as one of the Red Cross Services. Very truly yours . . .”
There is nothing else in the envelope. Valy reached out, and my grandfather, it seems, replied. It was mid-1942. He got a poem from her, he responded in kind. But the words themselves are lost. I write to the Red Cross in Geneva, to ITS, to Sweden, and I wait.
Oh, what did they say! I call the archivists at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The librarian who answers tells me it is unlikely it contained much news—other than the very fact that she was still alive, still living in Berlin. He suggests it might be on file in Geneva, but it is unlikely. Representatives at the American Red Cross in Washington, as well as at the Pittsfield branch in Massachusetts, similarly turn up nothing for me. I open the envelope a dozen times hoping I have somehow missed something. The only piece of information I have is that they communicated, at least once, in 1942.
It is here where my grandfather’s story finally fully splinters away from Valy and Toni’s experience. It is unbelievably incongruous—almost unfairly so—to juxtapose what was happening for my grandfather the year that Valy’s life shrank from tiny to minuscule. In 1942, his practice has finally begun to thrive. The Vienna friends he hears from now are in Philadelphia, or Brooklyn—or they are trapped in Shanghai—desperate and poor, but relatively safe. He no longer hears from those who remain in Vienna or Berlin.
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