The night before I interview Pomerance, I meet with Dr. Andrea Löw from the Institute of Contemporary History at a trendy little waffle shop filled with purposely mismatched flea market furniture and attractive, hip twenty- and thirtysomethings in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of former East Berlin. She is thirty-four, and she is the first person I tell on this journey that I am pregnant. I blurt it out, perhaps because we are surrounded, crushed in, by baby carriages; perhaps because she is only slightly older than I; and perhaps because, as always when I start on a Holocaust project, I feel very conscious of my own Jewishness. I tell her I am growing a little Jew. I am not sure she finds this amusing.
For Andrea’s work, Valy’s letters are just as important as any lists or new information she might come across at ITS. She thinks she might be able to include a few in a multivolume collection of wartime documents she is helping to compile—her hope is to use the voices of the persecuted to humanize the stiff bureaucratic decrees that bloodlessly lay out, day after day, the orders to discriminate against and separate Jews from German society. Andrea reads a few of my photocopied letters as we eat our waffles. They are fairly typical of this type of correspondence, she says, looking for visas, affidavits, for exit doors. We see Valy’s fear rise from June 1940 when she writes, “Darling, I have inquired repeatedly when my number will come up. All I get in response is some vague indication of one to two years.” To the desperation of October 1941: “Even if there were a possibility to do the expensive detour via Cuba, it would be too late because, meanwhile, German citizens between the ages of 18 and 45 are no longer allowed to emigrate. I cannot tell you how desperately unhappy I am about this!!!! What did you try to do, my darling? Oh, but I am afraid that it all will be to no avail. And I need you so badly! I need to be with you so much. My beloved, you can do so much, why can’t you take me to you? But I know that it will not be possible.”
But Andrea also prods me to consider how my grandfather handled the demands of dozens of cousins and friends, desperate and angry that he got out and they didn’t. It is the first time I discuss this idea of his guilt with someone else. She is sure it would have been awful, and she is also quite certain he was not alone in shouldering this burden, that everyone like him, every single refugee who made it to calmer shores, was engulfed by the burden of having left others behind. We both agree that the weight would have been too much to bear, it was so heavy, it couldn’t be processed daily, it had to be let go of—perhaps that spoke to his idea of herrlich, the marvelous, the need to make the world brighter in the midst of all that was so very dark.
We talk about the moral ambiguities of the period: What did my grandfather owe these cousins and friends? Why didn’t he take Valy with him? She herself never says that he left her, exactly, nor that he purposely didn’t take her; I suspect she would not have left her mother behind, in Czechoslovakia. And once she decided to come and join him, he was in no position to help—I tell Andrea about the receipts I found in the box of letters, which showed my grandfather was in the process of paying down loans from the National Committee for Resettlement of Foreign Physicians, in amounts so low he couldn’t possibly have had any extra cash to send abroad. He was quite poor in Vienna to begin with—and, like many refugees, he arrived with barely enough to start his own life. In turn, she tells me the story of refugees who tried, unsuccessfully, for years, to get parents out of Germany. They never forgave themselves, she says, though they exhausted every means they had at their disposal. It is a reminder that these stories, so often, have no happy ending, are unhappy at their core.
Our waffles finished, we stand to leave. It seems somehow incongruous, our conversation, set against the brilliance of a June day in Berlin, the city in full bloom, so warm and inviting and hip and cool. Everyone is on a bicycle, there are dozens of children running and playing in the streets of Prenzlauer Berg, and I walk to meet a German friend at an outdoor Vietnamese restaurant with massive paper lanterns that sway above our heads as we eat from terra-cotta bowls; we banter as though I haven’t spent the day immersed in the past. The juxtaposition is jarring. It couldn’t be more different from the postwar newsreel images, and not only because the streets, in many places of this incredible town, bear little resemblance to what was before. The city of Berlin was so incredibly damaged, and so much of what is here is new—though throughout the former East, there remain gaping holes where bombings took out whole buildings. It is a sharp contrast from Vienna, so perfectly preserved or reconstructed it is a museum.
I’m eager to get going. I want to ask people about who Valy might have been and what she might have experienced. But I also want to know what the popular—and academic—expectations are for the Bad Arolsen ITS archives. I want to know, so to speak, whether there is anything in that bag for me.
Before I get to Arolsen, I have two more stops to make. The first is to Wolfgang Benz, one of the preeminent scholars in the field of Holocaust studies and director of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, deep in former West Berlin. He was born in 1941, and when he is asked why he is a Holocaust historian, he parries with, “Why do you use a pencil?” He believes ITS is much ballyhoo about nothing—stirred up largely by misinformed Americans. “This was the campaign,” he says, running his hands through wildly unkempt white hair. “The greatest archives of the Holocaust!” He makes his voice deep and mean. “And the Germans! They will not show us! Terrible! It’s garbage.” He slumps back in his chair. The archives are just “lists,” he tells me. The only “scandal” of Arolsen, he says, is when the “eighty-two-year-old Ukrainian man” asks for compensation for being a forced laborer, and the archive staff is not fast enough with information to ensure he receives payment in his lifetime.
“For normal people, ninety-five percent of the material in Arolsen is extremely dull. It’s just working papers. No decisions. No secrets of the Nazi state . . . Maybe some journalists picture archives as a dark room and you come in and here lies Hitler’s personal testimony and here the archivist is like a magician and says, ‘Oh! You cannot read this!’” He makes a face. “It is an archive with material concerning German camps. Camps of all types.”
I switch subjects and ask him again about Valy. Are small stories important? His entire manner shifts. “Yes,” he says, immediately. “As historians we can describe what happened. Where it happened. But we cannot exactly describe why it happened. The historian cannot describe the suffering of the individuals. Therefore we need the memorials. We need the letters, the diaries, the memories of the individuals. As the main part of the picture of what happened.”
It will humanize the story, I say.
“Yes. It is the only way for younger people to understand.” Benz lectures in schools. The number “six million,” he tells me, means nothing to kids. “I say, ‘I will tell you the story of my friend Richard.’ Richard was a young man from Czechoslovakia. Jewish. When they brought him to Theresienstadt, he was seventeen or eighteen years old, and from Theresienstadt he was sent to Treblinka. He was one of about forty people who escaped from Treblinka. And then I tell young people the story how Richard went with a friend, two inmates from Treblinka, and they hid in a lake. When the SS looked for the escapees after the uprising, Richard and Carl were underwater in a lake near the camp Treblinka. For six or seven hours.”
“How did they breathe?” I ask, horrified. “With a straw?”
“Yes. With a straw. And then they proceeded. And he tells it—he was a very humorous man—they proceeded through Poland a little right, a little left, on to Germany, and in Germany at the end of 1943, they said, ‘We are foreign, we are foreign workers from Czechoslovakia, we lost our papers in the last air raid.’ And they were [given factory work] and survived.”
Benz pauses, collects, goes on. “When I tell the story to young people, I continue here: We were on a walk near Berlin years ago, it was a very hot summer day, we came along a lake. And Richard trembled. He trembled and he had this
”—he demonstrates a terrible shaking—“and he says his body is doing this, the body is remembering the situation in Treblinka. . . . He said, ‘This always happens when I am walking around the sea.’ And the young people? Now they can understand that this is happening for a person . . . remembering against his will. . . . That this is not statistics, that this is not politics from a dark time sixty years ago, that this is not touching them personally. Now it is a story of my friend.
“And then they are asking, ‘Why was he brought to Theresienstadt? Why was he brought to Treblinka?’ And I say, ‘Because he was a Jew. That’s the only criminal fact, since he was a Jew and therefore he was there.’”
Richard was seventeen, eighteen, twenty years old during the war. Valy was thirty-one when her letters end. Was that old, I want to know?
Benz sighs. “A lady of forty-six or forty-eight coming in this time may be young. And a lady of twenty-seven may be old. They decided in seconds on the fate, and it was not rational, the decision. Thirty-one is very, very young. I can’t—I cannot, of course, I cannot really imagine.”
I show him a letter. I ask, “Is one woman’s story a tragedy but six million too hard to understand?”
He dismisses that. “No. In this, in this great tragedy there are millions of individual tragedies. And, as a historian, I must see both. I cannot reduce the Holocaust to the history of Anne Frank.
“But Arolsen? Again! I say it again and again. Arolsen is not the ordinance of Hitler, ‘Now we kill the Jews.’ There are no personal records to declare what happened to any one person. Archives are dusty rooms for historians.” He sighs. “What is the importance of an archive?”
The next morning, I board a slick InterCity-Express train bound for Weimar and then take a bus down what was once nicknamed the “Blood Road,” to Buchenwald, the concentration camp ten minutes outside the city of Goethe. I am visiting Volkhard Knigge, director of the camp memorial foundation. Knigge is dressed like an art-gallery owner—black jacket, black button-down shirt, black jeans, white hair. He teaches cultural studies and the history of memory in Jena. Knigge rejects Benz’s idea that there is nothing to be found at ITS. “There is material from all the camps,” he says, as well as DP (displaced persons) camp material and all the postwar trial materials. Before this year, he says, “more than ninety percent of the Buchenwald records were in Bad Arolsen. We could see meters and meters and meters [of documents], but we didn’t have the right to look in.”
Yet now that he’s had a look inside, Knigge cautions that opening ITS doesn’t mean rewriting the history of the Holocaust. Rather, “it is a bit like completing a mosaic: you had some stones before; now you have many more, and the picture becomes much more clear.” He thinks there is more there for laypeople than Benz believes. “For survivor families, we can reconstruct much more precisely, with much more detail, the biographies of prisoners.” That’s what I want to know, I say—I want to know if I can discover exactly what happened for Valy during the war.
He nods. Knigge also has an answer to Benz’s rhetorical question about the importance of archives. “I think archives are kind of . . . living monuments. They are more important than monuments. A monument is just a monument, a symbol. But an archive is an original, authentic expression of what happened in history. It is, in a way, living history.” He is very earnest, despite his generally dry demeanor. “It is something like a bridge to the past.” He sees Arolsen as an important pedagogical tool—giving students new and tangible materials to understand people who existed and were extinguished.
I am eager to get there. At my request, ITS has already pulled Valy’s files, as well as the files of a few cousins. I will find them on arrival.
For most of the hour-long journey from Kassel to Bad Arolsen, I was the only person on the train. It was, for all intents and purposes, a milk train, but since this is Germany, it was souped-up and sleek with a bullet nose. The train conductor and I pass through bucolic villages, miles of farmland, rolling hills, everything short of shepherds in lederhosen. It’s painfully gorgeous, lush in its early summer greenery, a beauty that makes the past’s horror that much more bewildering.
The night before my journey to Bad Arolsen, after Buchenwald, I stayed in Kassel with my old friend from Vienna, Uli, and his partner, Urte. Uli is a sociologist; Urte, a scholar of feminist literature. Uli likes it very much when I tell him I’m growing a little Jew. He will ask me now, endlessly, how the “little Jew” is doing. The transgressive nature of the description suits him.
Urte—who is as petite as Uli is tall, and has a face filled with freckles framed by a sheet of chin-length coppery brown hair—has family from the agricultural region outside Kassel. During World War II, as with most farming families who sent a man off to the front, the Reich gave Urte’s family a forced laborer, a Russian, probably a POW from the Eastern Front, who was forbidden to socialize with the family. Years ago, Urte came across a photo of her grandmother’s first husband with the SS symbol on his collar scratched out; he was killed at the front.
We three tell these stories freely, of our grandparents; it is a relief, somehow, to be able to discuss our relationship to the past with no pretense, no artificial idea that it has no impact upon us, and yet, at the same time, no burden that we are in some ways responsible. Uli reads some of Valy’s letters. Immediately, he highlights a question I have asked myself again and again reading her words: Is Valy driven by love alone? “It is so sad that by now our correspondence has come down to an exchange of letters only on certain occasions,” she writes; it is June 1941. “It is much, much more than just sad. You don’t know how awful this is for me. But, my darling, do not think that I am reproaching you. I know that three years is an awfully long time! So much can happen during that time!”
Uli believes that she no longer loves my grandfather but that my grandfather simply provided her with her only path out; he was a rope to the other side. I am not sure in her mind there was a distinction: her love for him was intermingled with her need to leave, her need—really, her desperation—to leave seemed to hinge entirely on her love for my grandfather and whether that love was returned. She seems, at times, to believe that if their love is sufficiently strong, it will allow her to weather the indignities and the deprivations; at the very least it will find her a visa and a passage out of Germany. “A long, long time ago you wrote to me from Vienna, when I was supposed to go to Prague, that one should not be so small-minded to sacrifice the present to the phantom of the future. You wrote these words in a completely different context at the time. But you were so right then! And maybe that’s your thinking right now as well. And maybe you are right in not wanting to sacrifice your present either to the past or to the future. It is, however, so terribly sad for me because I live almost without a present, and I can live only for the past and for the future! . . . The immediate reason for today’s letter, however, is our emigration.”
As the train pulls into the station, I see that the outskirts of Bad Arolsen are filled with gingerbread houses, low-slung neat cottages with sharp sloping red roofs and flower boxes overflowing with the fecundity of early summer. German flags are hung everywhere—on cars, in windows, in the street. The UEFA European Championship is in midswing and Germany is doing well. Some nights into my stay, I run into Kathrin Flor, the enormously tall ITS communications director. She is wearing two-inch-long fake eyelashes, in the colors of the German flag.
Bad Arolsen is strangely dreamy. The center of the village is baroque, plucked out of a fairy tale—a Prince (Wittekind of Waldeck and Pyrmont) rules over the town; he resides in a wedding cake of a country palace, Schloss Arolsen, a miniature Versailles built in the early eighteenth century, whose land abuts the hotel I’m staying in. His godfather was Heinrich Himmler, the Gestapo overseer; his biological father was given a life sentence at the Buchenwald war crime trials for his role there as an SS officer. The sentence was eventually reduced to twenty years, and then red
uced further still for health reasons. In the end, war criminal or not, he died a free man.
Down the lane and across the street are a row of whitewashed late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings. The grounds in front of each building are neatly manicured; a flag from the International Committee of the Red Cross flies above a low-slung office building, one of the newer structures. Villagers loaded down with groceries pedal along a paved bicycle lane. The setting is so rosy, so collegiate-bucolic, it could be a university campus in New England. Instead, some of these well-kept buildings are former SS barracks filled with clues to the fates of 17.5 million victims of the Nazis.
Piles and piles of paper: searching for survivors at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany.
At my hotel I am given a very comfortable duplex room with a kitchenette; there is also a pool. In the morning I do yoga, at night I pretend to swim laps. Mostly I stand at the shallow end and chat with Jean-Marc. My pregnancy is, for the most part, still a secret, though now, in a bathing suit, I see the swell of my belly and I feel self-conscious.
It is a strange juxtaposition, the lush fecundity of the setting and my own body, with my search. I am here to see if Valy’s medical work counted as slave labor or if she went on, after her letters to my grandfather stop, to work in a factory—in either case, ITS might have her work files. I am here to see if somewhere in these pretty streets, in one of these lovely buildings that house Arolsen’s meticulous yet enormous holdings, Valy’s story will unfold before me and the gaps in my knowledge, left by the abrupt ending of her letter-writing campaign, will be filled in by the hard facts of her Gestapo files and her relationship to the Nazi state. More than that I do not know what to expect, or to hope for.
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