Carol has two girls, Charlotte and Jessica, in their middle and late thirties, respectively, and a toddler grandson named Leo; his photo filled up her mobile phone. Charlotte and Jess were raised only nominally Jewish. It was Jess who looked me up on the Internet, read my stories online, and told her mother, I imagine, that I was legitimate.
Paul, Carol’s father, is still alive. A gifted athlete, he would have competed in the 1936 Olympics, in the decathlon, Carol tells me, had the anti-Jewish policies not been in place. The family story is that there was an “alternate” team of Jewish athletes, ready to go in the event the International Olympics Committee insisted Jews be included. No such team was called upon, but Paul remained active in athletics his entire life.
After arriving in England, Mayer enlisted in the British army, joined the SOE—Special Operations Executive—and parachuted behind enemy lines in France and Germany. After the war, he founded the Primrose Club, a youth and recreation center that helped survivor children and teens reclaim normal lives after their distinctly abnormal childhoods. In an effort to return joy and normalcy to the (mostly) boys who had survived the camps and emerged to find themselves virtually alone—their entire families, in so many cases, murdered—he introduced them to other Jewish British teens and involved them in dances and sports. Mayer was profiled in Martin Gilbert’s book The Boys, about the unlikely convoy of survivor children—mostly teenagers, mostly boys—liberated from camps and taken to the United Kingdom in the summer of 1945. He was, all in all, generally acknowledged for having addressed the trauma of those returning from camps in ways far ahead of his time; the idea of integrating these kids in groups with those who had lived the war years relatively normally, in England, was itself revolutionary, and fantastically successful. In the 1990s, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Potsdam University. Until recently, he lectured extensively on his life.
Carol says he has a trove of papers from Hans and the family—letters, photos, artifacts. “The next time you come,” she insists, “you’ll start to go through them all with me. You must come meet my father. And it has to be soon. He’s ninety-eight.”
“Now! Now you must write this book,” pushes Jean-Marc, who, by that point, has joined us.
As I get up to pay for our coffees, I realize I am witnessing an unspooling, an interconnectedness I haven’t remotely anticipated. The story is no longer just about Valy. It is a microcosm of the strange ways in which we remain connected to our history, the peculiarity in which the tragedy of the individual, amidst the greater horror, somehow allows Carol, me, our families to understand the war better, to incorporate it into not just our sense of self, but also how we internalize it, make it our own, how we relate to the past, all of us, and how we hold it, selectively, simultaneously close and at a distance.
Carol, too, has given me a tremendous gift: the opportunity to understand the rest of Valy’s story. Back in America, I read and reread the rest of Ernest Fontheim’s letter. But before I do, I look him up. Still alive, Fontheim lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is a professor and research scientist emeritus of physics at the university. I call the number in the phone book. His wife answers. “I’m calling about Hans Fabisch,” I blurt out, realizing I have not prepared what to say. “I’ll get Ernest,” she says.
Eleven
THE ONLY POSSIBILITY
Sometime in the lonely summer of 1942, Valy—bereft of even the rare letters my grandfather had provided, bereft of credible options to get out—sometime in those miserable months when it seemed the rest of the world had forgotten her and her mother, sometime in that period when it seemed nothing could ever shake the torpor that had settled over them, the endless waiting, the dreary sameness of their days, caring for the elderly and worrying they would lose even the small semblance of normalcy their lives still retained, by being sent, like their neighbors, east, whatever that meant, sometime in those months, Valy met Hans Fabisch. And as bleak as her world was, as miserable as she felt, and as hungry—and oh, they were so very hungry, food was all they thought about—suddenly there was something to wake up for again. He made her feel young, for the first time, really, since Vienna.
Hans was raffish, still a bit pudgy about the cheeks, despite malnourishment, despite entering his twenties. He had a stick of hair that stuck up in front, and a streak of noncompliance with authority, with the rules of the day, that felt, to all who met him, like opportunity. He had studied chemistry for as long as he was allowed to go to school and then he found work at the Jewish Hospital, as Valy had, but by the summer of 1942, he was a regular forced laborer, working ten-hour days on his feet in armaments at Siemens. Hans told Valy, with great confidence, his dream was to go back to school—it wasn’t an idle thought. He was only twenty-one. Their ten-year age difference meant Hans had been deprived the trajectory of a normal education: having grown up under the Reich since the age of twelve, he had been able to finish high school but not to go on to university. He would, he told her, become a doctor. He firmly believed the war would end, and he would find his way into a classroom—somewhere, he hoped, other than Germany. He was so certain of this, so refreshingly optimistic about his chances of survival, he was determined to keep up with his peers in his studies. To that end, he had started to train himself, he’d collected books; he studied on his own. Valy—as she had with my grandfather so many years before—offered to tutor him, to serve as a teacher, a sounding board, to quietly resist the system by refusing to let him be undereducated. In turn, Hans introduced her to his world of Jews who were fighting to remain sane—to remain human.
It was a welcome moment of forward thinking. Working at the Jewish Hospital, and then working in her mother’s old-age home, Valy had filled her days first by caring for the miserably malnourished children; speaking with the anxious parents who themselves seemed to wither away week to week, their clothes battered and patched, their spirits waning; and then trying to prop up the elderly who lived under her mother’s care, to keep them going physically and mentally.
Valy sewed a star onto each of her uniforms. She hoped her shoes would not wear out; if they did, she had no recourse. The fear of being sent on the next transport dominated every conversation, every waking moment. “What could we possibly talk about?” wondered Gerda Haas, a nurse at the Jewish Hospital. “We couldn’t go to a movie. We didn’t [have] concerts, or any of the culture that normal people grow up with. We couldn’t go shopping. We didn’t have any new clothes to show off. What are we going to talk about? Transports and going underground, and we had no family left. We couldn’t talk about family anymore, so we talked about that all the time. It was like ruminating—the same thing all the time. It was a very unnatural life actually.”
Hans Fabisch.
Ernest wrote:
In normal times, both of us would have studied at the university. Hans’s goal was to become a physician, and I wanted to study either chemistry or physics. The path was now blocked for us. Hans and I were very conscious of the fact that the combination of long hours at hard work in the factory and total lack of any cultural or intellectual stimulation would lead to a complete proletarisation in a cultural and intellectual sense. Economically we were already proletarians anyway. . . . We consciously decided to fight this trend. . . . We got together with a circle of Jewish young people, all of them forced laborers in the German war machine, all of them well educated and intellectually curious and frustrated over not being able to have any intellectual stimulation. This group of young people was not a formal organization, which would not have been possible anyway because it would have run afoul of Gestapo regulations for Jews. Most of us had some connections to Jews of the older generation who had been kicked out of their professions and were frequently eager to give informal talks to young people. We met periodically in each other’s apartments to listen to such lectures. . . .
Hans prepared himself very seriously for his medical career. . . . He had several me
dical books for this purpose. He did some of these studies with the support of Dr. Valy Scheftel, a Jewish physician from Vienna who then lived in Berlin and, of course, as a Jew could not practice medicine. . . . Hans and Valy fell in love and got married on January 5, 1943. Valy was several years older than Hans. She was a lovely and very warm person, and she and I also became good friends.
As soon as I return to America, I arrange to fly out to Ann Arbor to meet Ernest Fontheim—he seems excited to meet me, tells me to stay at Weber’s Inn for its indoor pool and fine hospitality. We debate dates, and shyly discuss the wonder of discovering each other. He cannot see me the night I arrive, then he suggests I stay only one night; our interview will last less than a day. Despite those restrictions, I am thrilled. In the back of my mind, I have Jean-Marc’s warning about not relying on ninety-year-olds, or, at least, not expecting much from ninety-year-olds, but I am too excited to know someone who knew Hans and Valy, intimately; someone who can provide answers—even to the simplest things, like where and how they lived. How they fell in love! What their love was like—and what they experienced each day, how they experienced each day, from the most minute, to the broadest expression of their time.
“As you know,” Ernest wrote Ilse Mayer, “[Hans] was alone in Berlin [i.e., without his parents] and shared a furnished room with another young Jewish man of roughly the same age, Karl-Hermann Salomon, in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment in the Hinterhaus of Brandenburgische Strasse 43, Berlin-Wilmersdorf.”
This meant the “backhouse”—these old Berlin buildings had a “front” and a “back,” with a courtyard in between, or even two courtyards and more buildings, all connected to the same address. When I first visited, I hadn’t known which part of the building they lived in. I had just wandered through, looking up, looking around.
They sublet the room from a Jewish widow, a certain Mrs. Striem. I vaguely remember that Hans told me that before being drafted to work for Siemens he went to the Chemieschule. That was a school run by the Jewish community of Berlin where students could learn the elementary aspects of chemistry to enhance their employment opportunities abroad in case they could still emigrate. For many of the students, the Chemieschule also served as a substitute university. Hans and Karl-Hermann were not close personally, and in fact Hans felt that KH often rubbed him the wrong way. I myself lived at home, a few blocks away at Eisenzahnstrasse 64 where my family (my parents, my younger sister, and I) sublet two rooms in a larger apartment belonging to an aunt and uncle of my mother. In addition to my family and my mother’s aunt and uncle, the latter’s son and two unrelated widows [all together nine people] lived in the apartment which originally only served my mother’s aunt and uncle. In those days all Jews in Berlin were squeezed together in so-called Jew-houses. That was one of the great ideas of the Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshaupstadt, Albert Speer. I had somewhat strained relations with my parents and Hans was all alone in Berlin. So we became each other’s confidants and did many things together in our limited free time.
At first I think, when Ernest arrives in the crisp, freezing morning to get me, crunching across the snow in practical boots and a massive jacket, Jean-Marc is wrong. Ernest is brilliant. He is rounding past ninety, and he is stooped, held up as much by his suspenders as his ever-sagging spine, his face craggy, his voice, within an hour of talking, loses energy, tone, and level. He still drives, a faux-fur-lined hunter’s cap pulled down tightly over his ears, and he banters without pause as we head from the inn into a cluster of professors’ homes in the Michigan suburbs. He is shyly pleased I have made so much effort to meet him, makes a huge fuss over the cookies I brought to give him and his wife. But then I am disappointed beyond reason: he is happy to welcome me into his home, but also adamantly determined that he will write his own memoirs. He is guarded with me and my three recording devices, my videos; he is afraid that I will publish his story before he can. That I will take it from him; render it mine and not his. He will not, he says patiently, but intractably, reveal anything further than what I have already read in my letter—or rather, his letter to Ilse, that Carol gave me in London. He will not give me anything further, nothing beyond the story of Hans, he will offer nothing about his own miraculous saving. He has given a testimony to the Holocaust Museum, he says, and as he sees me write that down, he adds that the contents of that interview are sealed until the event of his death or the publication of his memoirs. At the end of our first two and a half hours of speaking, he says, essentially, anything that is not about Hans is off-limits to you. I don’t want my life in print before I write it myself. I reassure him I won’t take his story. I understand his determination; in fact, I admire it. It is, in a way, a version of what the former Kindergartenseminar student Inge Deutschkron said to me in Berlin—we American Jews, so anxious to scoop up these stories, to take them for ourselves, we help ourselves to them, as though they are our birthright. We try to take more than our fair share, really. And here is Ernest Fontheim, who lost his whole family—who am I to take his story, too? Who am I to steal the narrative, the one thing he retained?
The Jewish Hospital’s notes on Hans, 1939. “We wish him only the best for his future.”
And yet I am also, selfishly, terribly frustrated. I offer to write a separate book—a separate something—I could be your interlocutor, I say, thinking this might be a solution. I can write your story—you can dictate it. He smiles and says, “That’s generous,” but he declines.
But, as Ernest said on the phone, he is willing to talk a bit about Hans. The two men met on the first day they were conscripted for forced labor at the Elektromotorwerk—the electronic motor division—of Siemens on April 29, 1941, Hans’s twentieth birthday. Explains Ernest, “He was almost exactly a year and a half older than I. We hit it off from the very first day. We had similar backgrounds, similar education, a similar sense of humor, and looked at life and our situation in much the same way. In many ways he was an inspiration for me.” Both had been pulled from school far too young. The two young men were from an intellectual tradition, and now they were dying intellectually, banned from all cultural events and academic pursuits. It was daily agony; so together they gathered a group of young Jews, all forced laborers, all with connections to Jews banned from their professions. They set up an underground salon, in essence: after the factory shift, the older Jews gave lectures to the younger ones: an architect; a former epidemiologist, who had run the city of Berlin’s epidemic response team from the city hall before 1933. For a moment, the disorienting, impoverishing, impact of all these accomplished Jews suddenly finding themselves without a perch, without their status, without their jobs, their livelihoods, was temporarily suspended. It was a respite from the desperation, and exhaustion. Someone had managed to scrounge an old phonograph, and others had saved recordings from symphonies. They played them, very, very quietly so as not to alert their neighbors, and they closed their eyes, pretending they were back in the concert halls of their youth.
Ernest and Hans began work each morning at six a.m., a shift that lasted until four p.m., with two thirty-minute breaks. To make the six a.m. clock-in, which meant a 5:45 arrival at the factory gates, Hans and Ernest would take the first S-Bahn train of the morning, which left their area of Berlin at 5:15. The streets would be as black as the inside of a closet, an unnatural urban inky hue, with streetlights darkened and apartment buildings shuttered, all prevented from emitting light so as not to attract bombers. Ernest and Hans would meet at the corner of Kurfürstendamm at a precise moment and whistle to each other. They were exhausted, constantly, and the companionship was as much motivational as it was practical. At Siemens, they were hustled into packs of Jewish workers, separated from their Aryan counterparts. Jews were not allowed to be sprinkled among the other workers, lest they perform sabotage, undermine the effort. All movement was strictly patroled. Jewish workers ate lunch standing, at their workspace—Aryans could use a cafeteria—and bathroom breaks for
Jews were at nine a.m. and one p.m., in a group, led by a foreman. Visiting the toilet alone was not an option.
Hans and Ernest riveted commutators, the rotary electrical switches for motors. It was long and boring work, always on their feet. Ernest remembers forty or fifty Jewish forced laborers, men and women, old and young; the youngest were two fourteen-year-old boys. None of these laborers had ever worked in a factory before. All were hoping for a swift Allied victory. I expressed surprise he knew so many young people left in the city. But of course, he said, there were kids who were too old for the Kindertransport, or whose families had not been able to get their children on a transport (there was a strict, limited number of spaces) or had simply not opted for it, as they couldn’t imagine separating themselves from their children; there were those whose entire families had tried to emigrate, but were unsuccessful, especially those who tried to leave after Kristallnacht, when the consulates were mobbed and the chances were dim. Among them was Margot, the woman who would, after the war, become Ernest’s wife, and before that, the woman with whom he would go into hiding. But though he filled me in on some of the details, under Ernest’s strict instructions, that story can’t be told here.
As harsh as the working conditions were, the hunger was nearly as bad. From the beginning of the war, on the first of September 1939, Germany introduced rationing for all food, says Ernest, stirring a cup of tea. “Dairy. Wheat. Vegetables. Fruits were subject to rationing, and ration coupons were passed out, including to Jews. There were three levels of ration coupons. One was a general consumer—Normalverbraucher. Then a higher category, somewhat bigger rations for workers—Arbeiter—and then the highest category was heavy workers, people like miners—Schwerarbeiter. The work we did at Siemens would have qualified us for workers’ cards, one level up from general consumer. But we didn’t get that. We got ‘normal consumer,’ and then after some time, cards were cut below that of the general consumer. The meat and meat product ration card was totally eliminated so you couldn’t buy any meat anymore, and meat also included poultry, of course. And meat products like sausages and so on. Oh, and also in addition to food, also tobacco was rationed.”
Paper Love Page 30