Letters still surface from strange parts of the world. In June 1942, an old schoolmate, David Teichmann, writes him unhappily from Tatura, Victoria, Australia, where he has been interned in a prisoner-of-war camp for German nationals. “You may be surprised to hear from me from as far away as Australia,” Teichmann writes, wearily. “Just a few weeks before I was due to leave for America from England, I was unfortunately interned and sent out here.” I read that twice—he was deported, I realize, with horror, from England to Australia. “I am not too bad, but I find life in here pretty monotonous.” He asks my grandfather to send him a few medical textbooks, as his own are out-of-date. Konrad Kwiet, the Australian Holocaust historian I met in Bad Arolsen, sends me a paper on these Jewish unfortunates. Some two thousand German Jews were interned in Australia, deemed potential fifth columnists, and stuck, like poor Teichmann, in camps like Tatura.
My grandfather may worry for them all, but his life is in an infinitely better—easier—place at this point. His relationship with Tonya, the girl he first dated in America, has fully ended—though she continues to write to him, to push for his attention. He is considering how to join the war effort. “It is every Jew’s duty—this is the only country in which we still have some freedom,” Tonya wrote that summer. And he is dating my grandmother, Dorothy Kolman, who herself seems to still be wooing him. Dorothy writes, that same month, “I came to Philadelphia yesterday and spent last evening with a southern friend of mine. . . . There, at long last I met her uncle, a young, brilliant lawyer about 27—whom I’ve been hearing about for years. . . . Funny thing, the family always considered us a wonderful match and were sure we couldn’t resist each other’s charms should we but meet. . . . When I met him all I could say to him was ‘Oh you’re the man I’m sure to marry!’ And he said practically the same thing. He is incidentally quite fascinating, and what quick wit!” I tell my father about this letter. He says he knew of it already, that it was part of the oft-told story of their courtship—the big trip she took, the way she told Karl there would be other men, and the way he called her back and said he wanted only her, and asked her not to see any of her other suitors anymore. He may be passing messages through the Red Cross to Valy, but he is also moving on.
Dorothy Wildman, née Kolman, my grandmother, around 1941.
I have my grandmother’s letters to him as she traveled to North Carolina, for a college reunion, and New York. She notes the ramp-up to war, but life is not yet defined by it. “Near Washington we had to stop for an unusually long time so I raised my window shade to investigate. To my great surprise I looked right into a train just crowded with soldiers . . .” She, too, worries, about when and whether Karl, too, will be sent overseas. His army status remains unclear. By October, they have determined their own status: they will marry. She travels to New York to look for wedding clothing and to meet with his family; she investigates for him how to strip the second n from Wildmann—to remove that German stain. Their lives are otherwise so very normal: “Our trip down was pleasant enough. There was no traffic and conditions were ideal for speeding but we drove 55 miles per hour as patriotic citizens should.” She considers who will be in their wedding party. Cilli, Karl’s sister, she writes, has declined to be a bridesmaid, she claims she is too busy running after her children. Dorothy teases Karl in an earlier letter—“Your diagnosis is correct, doctor, I miss either seeing or talking to you and hearing your deeply philosophical observations on life and love or your scintillating analysis about such weighty matters as your right shoe.” But mostly she talks of how in love she is, how much she misses him when she is away. The words, at times, mirror Valy’s. “I feel like kissing you but since I can’t I’ll just have to imagine it.”
In November 1942, The Berkshire Eagle will run a story about Karl and Dorothy’s wedding, accompanied by a lovely photo of my grandmother, her lips reddened, her face turned demurely to the side. “The bride wore white satin with a sweetheart neckline, a fitted bodice and a court train.” There was a violinist, a vocalist, and an Orthodox rabbi.
The walk from the train to Valy’s last address in the city is past a massive sex shop, the sort with cartoonish-looking photos of women of enormous proportions and furry handcuffs in the window. Brandenburgische Strasse 43, Wilmersdorf, is a mixed-use building from around 1910. On the ground floor I see there is a homeopathic medical practice, a lawyer, a taxi school; the upper floors are residential apartments. When a tenant enters the foyer, I slip in after him and begin to take photos. I am obtrusive. A man in his late sixties approaches and asks if I need help. I demur. But then I babble a bit: I tell him I believe the building had once been a Judenhaus. He looks perplexed. I feel badly, suddenly, about saying this; he was clearly born after the war, or, at the very least, had been quite young. It is an ambush. “I’ve been here twenty-seven years,” he says. And the building, he tells me, has been standing on the same spot for over a century. He is confident I am mistaken: nothing of import took place here.
A much younger man joins us, with better English. “I’m a journalist,” I explain. “A woman I know was deported from here.” I pull out Valy’s International Tracing Service file that I received in Bad Arolsen and show them. “You see,” I say, pointing to the address listed at the top of her form. “She lived here. And was sent away from here.” They seem surprised. The older man invites me to dinner, he is curious to know what I have discovered.
I have discovered, I say, that life was increasingly unbearable. Even years before deportation.
Beyond the address, the ITS file showed me something else I had not yet wanted to think about, had still not yet known how to consider. Valy’s ITS file is not connected to Toni’s at all. At the beginning of January 1943, seven months after she reached out to Karl through the Red Cross, Valy changed her name from Scheftel to Fabisch, after Hans Fabisch, her husband. Like Karl, Valy married.
Unfairly, I found this heartbreaking to know—I simply couldn’t fathom what had changed for Valy after her final letter, which is still so filled with love and desperation—“You know, darling, when I am asking why a cruel destiny has separated me from you.” What brought her to the point of agreeing to marry this other man?
Was she, like Karl, finally moving on? I wondered if this was a sort of final recognition that this was her reality, this diminished world, this life seemingly without a present; and to deny herself the only possible sliver of life, the closeness of another person, the normalcy of physical contact, was not only no longer a priority, but no longer even practical. In 1941, she wrote my grandfather that she passed up romantic opportunities for him; by the end of 1942, clearly, she no longer denied herself. Perhaps, I thought, this was a happy turn—this relationship—perhaps it gave her a bit of joy, a piece of something that could not be taken away from her. In the years since Karl fled, after all, her entire relationship with my grandfather had taken place in her mind. A romantic daydream, made more vivid, made more tangible, tactile, present by her increasing desperation, her “endless hibernation,” a life lived in black and white while his continued on, far away, in Technicolor.
It was hard to know how to understand the shift because, while I knew and loved my grandmother, about Hans I knew nothing, other than that tantalizingly strange detail of his age: born in 1921, he was twenty-one to Valy’s thirty-one, a gendered age gap as unusual then as it is now, if not more so. How they met, I had no clue; when she had decided to finally give up on my grandfather and marry someone else, I could not say. It seemed that, because of him, she left Babelsberg and her mother to live, once again, in Berlin. But all I knew for sure was that their names are linked beginning in late 1942.
Their names are linked not only at ITS. I look again at the two fat files that arrived in the mail for me—one from the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv and the other from the Entschädigungsamt Berlin, the indemnity agency that holds the reams and reams of paper regarding restitution and compensation cases. In
the 1950s, a case was opened on behalf of Valy and Hans.
In Hans’s property files I received from the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv, I see that Valy and Hans, like all Jews facing deportation, were each declared enemies of the state. The couple, then, like Toni, were required to fill out detailed property files so that the Gestapo could thoroughly loot everything that they still owned. Their assets were inventoried, and appraised, as follows:
1 linen cupboard, coated cloth, Reichsmark (RM) 20
1 dressing table, coated cloth, RM 20
3 tables, RM 25
1 shelf, RM 10
1 red plush couch, 2 armchairs, RM 25
1 narrow rug (runner), RM 20
1 narrow rug, RM 10
1 carpet, RM 10
1 microscope, RM 25
1 ceiling lamp (3 parts), 1 table lamp, RM 5
About 50 books, garments, clutter [no value given]
Total value for this page: RM 170
Affidavit of service, January 27, 1943.
Living in one room, they list very little—two chairs, one bookshelf—but I’m struck by three items declared in her handwriting, things she must have dragged from home to home for years: a red velvet couch, fifty books, a microscope. All those books! A microscope! Preserving her intellectual identity, I imagined, was a way of preserving her dignity. She writes to my grandfather of reading Faust; in fact, she writes of reading continuously, she quotes poetry, she writes of the time when they read together, when they were studying together—she does not say that these daydreams, that these reading projects were an act of private sabotage, a means of resistance. Yet it was, and they were: the destruction of intellectual freedom, of intellectual stimulation, was as much a piece of the Nazi project of daily deprivations as malnutrition. It was a mind-numbing stripping of stimulation, of humanity. Keeping those books was a way of staving off that starvation of the soul.
The documents continue: “October 1, 1942: notice that all the assets of Valerie Sara Fabisch née Scheffel [sic], born in Troppau on November 4, 1911, and of late residing in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, 43 Brandenburgischestr., are to be confiscated on behalf of the German Reich.” About her—very new—husband it states that “Hans Israel Fabisch, a metal worker, a Jew,” was “earning about RM 32 per week working for Siemens-Schuckert and, since August 1941, living in Berlin-Wilmersdorf at 43 Brandenburgischestr., 4th floor, c/o Striem. He has one furnished room, for which he pays RM per month to his landlady, Gertrud Sara Striem, also Jewish.” Rent was paid through January 31, 1943. But an archivist tells me that Gertrude Striem—who was, apparently, a pianist—was deported on January 29, 1943, to Auschwitz.
Hans also has assets of up to 2,500 RM in the Deutsche Bank—access to which he would have long been denied, as those accounts were blocked. As for “Valerie Sara Fabisch née Scheftel, Jew, profession: nurse,” her wages are listed at “RM 110 per month,” and she is “employed by Reich Association of Jews in Germany at a Jewish home for the elderly in Babelsberg, residing since January 1943 at 43 Brandenburgischestr. in Berlin-Wilmersdorf.” She lives in one furnished room, for which she pays RM 40 per month to her landlady, Gertrud Sara Striem, a Jew. On July 15, 1959, a request from the restitution office for the files of Hans Fabisch was filed by the same Ilse Charlotte Mayer who wrote to the International Tracing Service on his and her behalf. Correspondence with Ilse went on for years.
What did Valy and Hans know, when they filled out these property forms? What did they expect? Were they preparing to go underground? Did they believe, at this late date, after more than a year of deportations to the east leaving Berlin, that the east could mean anything other than terror?
Inge Deutschkron, the woman who hadn’t remembered Valy from the Kindergartenseminar, tells this story, of her own incremental knowledge and her own realization that deportation would be worse than hiding: It was November 1942, and Jews in Berlin were leaving the city on train after train, headed east, though no one knew exactly what they faced when they got there. One day Emma Gumz, a laundress who had done Inge and her mother’s clothing for many years, beseeched the women not to go if and when they received a notice to leave for the east. Pressed to explain, Mrs. Gumz broke down—the neighbor’s son, Fritz, had come back from Poland. There he had seen terrible things done to Jews. Mrs. Gumz made the Deutschkron women promise to seek help from her and her husband and hide. Eventually they agreed.
“You don’t know what she knew. All you know is what those around her knew,” Marion Kaplan, the New York University professor and author of Between Dignity and Despair, tells me, when I start to relate Deutschkron’s anecdote. We had been talking about Valy, and she was steering me back into focus. “You can’t know. You’re barking up the wrong tree if you say what did she know and when did she know it. All you can do is paint a context in which you describe that she is a little fish among big fish—and those big fish probably did know. Did she know? Maybe she might have heard people talk or maybe not. Some knew from illegal radio broadcasts from the BBC. [Also] there are always people who sort of know some information but don’t absorb it for what it really means.” Kaplan tells a story of a family who all had the same information—two couples—one goes into hiding, the other leaves with the deportation. Both believe they have chosen the safer route, though only the couple in hiding will survive.
As for Valy and Hans, she muses further: “Do I think they would have known by then, by the end of ’42?” Meaning, would they have known that deportation might mean death. “Yes. Because they weren’t getting letters or cards from the deported. Do I think the people in the Judenrat or the Reichsvereinigung knew? Probably? But am I positive? No. She is a little person. A nobody. Would they have told her? Who knows. But remember, the BBC is already reporting this in mid-1942.”
Hans and Valy were living together at Brandenburgische Strasse 43, in Wilmersdorf, Berlin, until January 29, 1943. With a bit of sleuthing, an archivist at the Landesarchiv confirms for me that the building was filled with Judenhäuser, those apartment-sized ghettos, once single-family or single-person dwellings, now layered with strangers: all Jews. Eventually, fifty-four Jews were deported from number 43 Brandenburgische Strasse alone, and 765 from the entire street. Those living there now have no knowledge of what these buildings saw. The apartments once occupied by doomed Jews were absorbed back into city life, often immediately upon the exit of the condemned inhabitants.
In the middle of Valy and Hans’s property files, notes indicate that Nazi officials began to clear their apartment of all the couple’s remaining possessions on June 12, 1943. It is all dry and bureaucratic: They reassess and decide Hans has overestimated—it is not 170 RM worth of goods, it is 100 RM. Then they sell it. All of it. Eighty RM for the remaining worldly possessions of Hans Fabisch and Valerie Scheftel. The next page notes there are still 600 RM in Hans’s account, left in Deutsche Bank, still to be requested on behalf of the Reich. In the meantime, Brandenburgische Strasse 43 once again became an apartment building like any other, with residents going about their lives, much the same as today. An immediate, purposeful fog of amnesia descended upon the street.
There is nothing further on the newlyweds. On all postwar documents, Valy is simply listed as missing after January 29. Her mother lived on in the city, alone, for another six weeks. On one page of Toni’s property files, where she is asked if any family members have “emigrated,” she answers affirmatively—Valerie Scheftel—destination unknown. After all that time trying to stay together, refusing to emigrate without her, Valy had been sent east without her mother. Had she thrown a postcard to Toni from the train, as some did? Did she try to get her mother word of what was happening? I don’t know. I don’t know so much. I am frustrated. I have hit another dead end. I wonder—could Valy have survived under an assumed name? Could she—like one survivor I meet—have been on a list to be taken but then slipped away? Could she have changed her appearance and her identity
to live underground? Is this too fantastical to consider?
Sometime after I begin to parse these archival documents, I finally give birth. We name our daughter for my grandfather—his sunny worldview and cosmopolitan mien were things I was keen for my daughter to inherit. We decided our daughter’s middle name would bear weight: we would give her Chaim, his given name. For her first name, “Orli” had made the early lists: “my light” in Hebrew. It fit my grandfather’s unique ability to see the light, the opportunity, in every situation. It is the one characteristic everyone who remembers him recalls: his optimism.
Some months after Orli’s birth, Herwig comes to visit, from Vienna, along with his girlfriend Camilla. They ask where I am in my search, and I show them Valy and Hans’s files from Bad Arolsen, and the additional pieces I received from the German archives.
When I discovered Hans’s existence, I tell Herwig and Camilla over dinner, I began to construct a fantasy narrative about their relationship. How did she meet, let alone marry, a man so much younger? How did she, finally, give up on my grandfather? I spun romantic fantasies. Maybe he was a concert pianist. Maybe they met at a bar, though those were banned, so perhaps not. Maybe they fell in love over music; maybe he swept her off her feet. She had so loved music, I think, just like everyone she studied with in Vienna.
But in speaking of them, I realize I needed to return once again to these thick files. I take them back out of their manila envelopes. In fact, I see immediately, the files easily explode the idea that it was music that brought them together. In Hans’s file, I find a clue, a curriculum vitae, filled out by Hans in his own hand.
I was born on April 29, 1921, in Breslau, the son of businessman Rudolf Fabisch. After completing the seventh year of secondary school [Obersekunda], I spent April–October 1937 at the Gross-Breesen agricultural training school for emigrants [for Jewish youths wanting to immigrate to Palestine], in Silesia, where I was trained in market gardening and farming. I left Gross-Breesen to attend Dr. Hodurek’s state-approved professional school for chemists in Breslau, which I had to leave, however, after two full semesters because of my Jewish origin. To complete my education, I attended the Rom School of Chemistry, a Jewish school, in Berlin from January through April 1939. Then I was offered the opportunity to work in the Israelitisches Krankenheim [the Jewish medical facility] in Berlin, as a trainee in the laboratory, and also spent two months working in the facility’s kitchens. Since August 24, 1939, I have been working in the lab of the Jüdisches Krankenhaus in Berlin, on Iranische Strasse.
Paper Love Page 28