Here is what it feels like upon entering the archives at Bad Arolsen: like a Steven Spielberg movie about an American lawyer of the 1950s, desperately searching for information on an escaped Nazi but with no computers, no modern technology, nothing but boxes and paper. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie with the Ark of the Covenant tucked away in a warehouse. There might be treasures here, amid a sea of seventy-year-old cardboard, but who would know?
To be fair, the staff at ITS were busily scanning documents when I came to town. By summer’s end, they would digitize 6.7 million documents on forced labor in the Third Reich. Soon, nearly all of it will be pixelated. But this was not the case when I arrived. Instead, the scholars I was with had the task of approaching the material and asking each box, each guardian of these massive rooms of paper what these holdings might reveal, and how the materials should be understood and integrated into greater Holocaust research.
The areas of ITS were divided into sections labeled vaguely “General Documents,” “Concentration Camps,” “Displaced Persons,” “Tracing and Documentation,” “Forced Labor.” In the general documents alone—a loose assemblage of items that were deemed worthy of saving, but unclear on their immediate category—there were 1,786 cardboard boxes filled with, among other things, documents on Heinrich Himmler’s Lebensborn experiment (the quest to populate Europe with Aryan children, using wombs from Germany to Norway and kidnapping children with Aryan features from Eastern Europe for adoption in the Reich), medical experiments, persecution outside Germany, maps, court cases, letters between members of the SS, the institutional history of ITS, mass graves, and exhumations. There are more than sixteen miles of files, with faded, neatly typewritten labels. Book after book of death lists, tied up with string. Typed documents drily, methodically explaining how, exactly, to turn a normal van into a murderous gas van—an early and, ultimately, unwieldy method of mass killing.
An entire maze of basement rooms is devoted to thousands of Arbeitsbücher—little green books that document each forced laborer’s time. The faint smell of paper decay and dust hangs everywhere. In the hallways, hand-drawn maps of the Nazi advance and concentration camp system are framed and hung as art.
On my first full day in town, I join the scholars on a field trip to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a three-hour bus ride through Germany’s glorious western countryside, past villages so tranquil and storybook-like, it was easy to be boggled by what they had been witness to. It is almost grotesquely beautiful—all cows and fields of wheat and rye and oats and grass. The former camp is now home to a modern museum cast from concrete, glass, and steel; it is smooth-walled and suspended, as if floating, as the ground beneath is hallowed, and filled with corpses. The architects, KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten, won a prize for the design, which is purposely, almost completely, absent of all color. The museum soberly, and carefully, details the fate of prisoners and tells the stories buried in the fields that surround it: mass graves that now look like nothing more than empty, grassy knolls which can be strolled for hours on end. There is a gravestone marking the loss of Anne and Margot Frank, who died there, but it is placed arbitrarily. No one knows, really, where the girls were buried; and the camp barracks were, for the most part, burned to the ground at the end of the war to stymie the virulent typhus epidemic that killed the sisters and continued to claim victims long after their jailers had fled. Some fourteen thousand inmates died after liberation by the British. Many of those souls who had survived so long only to die in the transition to freedom were Jews.
It is Bergen-Belsen that shaped the world’s collective mental images of the horror that was the Nazi concentration camps. It was from here that American moviegoing audiences saw the horrific piles of naked, lifeless bodies pushed by bulldozers, as well as the images of the opening of the camp by the British, and the emaciated walking dead they encountered, the skeletal remains of humans whose eyes blinked enormously from their skulls.
On the drive, Jean-Marc tells me that Marlene Dietrich’s sister had lived in the town of Bergen. When the actress toured Germany after the war, she came upon her sister, who revealed that she had run a movie theater for the SS guards of the camp; she maintained no interest in distancing herself from her Nazi past. Marlene, disgusted, eventually denied the sister existed. Some said the two never spoke to each other again.
When we arrive at Bergen-Belsen, hordes of German soldiers mill about the entrance. One of the scholars sees me gaping and explains that we are near one of the largest military training grounds in Europe and they are there for training—in sensitivity? In history? Perhaps both. It is stupidly unnerving to see them there; the soldiers are a part of a different story now, though not disconnected from this history. Yet toggling back and forth between the past and present makes my vision blurry. Fatigues and army boots feel disconcerting here.
Bergen-Belsen is, otherwise, strangely sanitized. It is beautiful, all that concrete so favored by architects and interior designers lately, with miles of texts and horrific videos, all arranged and presented in a way that feels as smooth as the walls, not easy—the subject matter is too heavy for easy—but not hard either. You can avoid the worst films if you’re weak of stomach; they are shown in mini-theaters hung with heavy velvet curtains. Survivors speak out from television screens, but they are many years past the point of their experience, and their testimonies are softly lit, their voices audible only once you pick up headphones.
It is far more modern than what we will see back in Bad Arolsen. Somehow the ITS archives, their condition, their presentation, pulls us all backward in time, to a pre-digital era, draws back the curtain, to some degree, on the breakdown in communication between cities and countries—let alone families—that delayed survivors of the Nazi era from finding one another to begin with. ITS, when I see it first, is a hodgepodge of disconnected papers, each recording at length the difficulty the Allies had, the Red Cross had, the refugee organizations had, in tracking down survivors, in reuniting families, in finding places for the displaced to go. In Bad Arolsen, wartime confusion still feels palpable, the number of those affected is so immense, and the inability to search for anything—other than by the sheer legwork and real-time reading that marked research in the postwar era—makes all work cumbersome and paced in a manner completely contrary to the way we live now. “We need a very detailed inventory,” Jean-Marc says of these messy archives. “For the moment we don’t even know exactly what’s new.”
In my fantasy version of discovery, Valy’s file at Arolsen is filled with everything from handwritten notes (hers, her mother’s, friends’, lovers’) to details of her work assignments, to her path after deportation, to—and this was, in retrospect, the most fantastical—clues as to whether she survived. Perhaps, I think, as I tour the grounds, there is an Arbeitsbuch with her name on it, a detailing of the work she did in the Jewish Hospital, a record of the old-age home she wrote from in 1941. Perhaps she had to fill out a request to emigrate, and this, I hope, will be here as well.
Yet, as Wolfgang Benz had warned me might be the case, none of that is here. There is, however, a small stack of papers including a copy of her name on a deportation list and a last-known address typed neatly at the top of an official-looking Red Cross missing persons report.
But, no. There is more than that. Linked to her file is a similarly thin folder with information on a much younger man named Hans Fabisch, born April 29, 1921, in Breslau. Below his name, on his card file, I see Valerie, geborene (née) Scheftel. Ehefrau. She is listed as his wife.
At some point after her letters to my grandfather had stopped, sometime, it seemed, around the same time my grandfather met my grandmother, Valy not only met another man—she married him. Hans Fabisch. I say the name aloud, the first syllables of both names so round and patrician and Germanic, though I note he was—obviously—also a Jew. How did it happen that a thirty-one-year-old intellectual married a twenty-one
-year-old boy from Breslau? Did she love him? Was this a happy ending? Was it a marriage of convenience? Was this a means of survival? Here I had imagined Valy pining away, desperate, despairing, when war cuts off mail between Germany and the United States. I had imagined her shrinking away without the lifeline my grandfather’s hope gave her, desperately in love, and desperately angry, filled with recriminations, and waffling endlessly between those—I realize now—overly romantic sentiments. Was she instead curled up in bed next to a man a decade younger than my grandfather? It is strangely comforting, this thought, the idea that perhaps Valy finally understood there was little my grandfather could do for her from afar, that to deny herself human contact was a punishment she needn’t inflict upon herself, especially in a time of great punishment. Here was a glimmer of hope, or of resistance. To marry so late—clearly sometime in 1942, as my final letter closes out 1941, possibly as late as 1943—was, perhaps, a sign she believed in the future, or, at the very least, was no longer exclusively living in the past, no longer mooning over Vienna, but trying to find a path forward, a way of surviving, if only mentally, if only emotionally. The file is simultaneously enormously exciting and incredibly disappointing—I can merely guess at these things. I can’t know how they met. I can’t understand her motivations. I don’t know if she was in love, if this was impetuous, or exciting, or wonderful. Or was this merely a symptom of the persecution? Instead of finding answers, now I have only more questions.
Most of the scholars on this trip keep me at arm’s length. They distrust journalists, I am told; they think we will be too superficial in our analysis, or think we will scoop their scholarship, or think we will be too blithe in the way we cover this material—or all of the above. They will not be convinced otherwise. Most refuse to be on the record with me, or speak much with me at all.
But one of the other USHMM-sponsored scholars doesn’t mind me; he is a jocular Aussie academic (by way of Holland and Germany) named Konrad Kwiet. I tell him about my grandfather and Valy, and of my discomfort with what seems to be my grandfather’s inability to help her. “I think one should not impose any moral verdicts on behavior,” he cautions. Konrad has a bald pate, a fringe of nearly fully gray hair, and a bit of a Falstaffian air. He is considered the foremost scholar on the Holocaust in Australia; it is a position of some renown: half of the country’s Jewish population descends from survivors, people who, mostly, tried to leave fetid Europe for the United States or Palestine and were thwarted. Konrad Kwiet was himself war flotsam. During the war, his Christian father and Jewish mother would have divorced but stayed together to protect her. Such Mischehen, as mixed marriages were called, were life rafts, preserving, often, the non-Aryan partner. After the war his parents, finally, broke up. But the good deed was done. All survived and Konrad, eventually, landed on the other side of the world.
“There are documents here of utmost significance, but it depends on the questions you ask the document,” Kwiet tells me. We are sitting in a mediocre café across from the archives; I am perpetually hungry reading about starvation. “It’s not a Holy Grail,” he says, “but it will change the direction of research. It’s not revolutionary—it’s not Hitler’s order to kill the Jews.” Again that phrase! “But it will become a place of institutionalized memory.”
I am curious if anyone from my family has ever searched for anyone here. It is one of the oddities of ITS that I might actually know that. A former NATO driving school houses an annex where the requests from families—called “Tracing and Documentation” files—are stored; it is a few miles outside town. The building has the feel of an abandoned elementary school: banging metal doors, wide stairwells, dusty halls. Everything is on paper. Piles and piles of paper. Stack after stack of desperation. The pages aren’t protected, merely preserved in the sense of not thrown away—set aside, open to the air. Dust motes hang in the air; each breath I draw brings with it the sweet smell of aging paper. I wander, overwhelmed, around the aisles, each delineated by metal shelves of the sort people use in basements, or rec rooms. The earliest files are yellow and crumbling, filled with tracing paper sheets in triplicate, missives sent among the American, French, and British zones after the war. Visitors can touch what they want. Loose reams of paper are piled in chronological order. Room after room with a thousand files per shelf. About three million requests for information, sixty-two years of desperate pleas to find family members; all are lost, endless suffering on paper. “Unsolved,” they are stamped with a special rubber stamp created just for this; or “Auschwitz, no further information.” I get lost for a time reading the story of a boy named Louis Clerc, whose mother, left all alone, her husband dead, searched in vain for her son for years. He had been seen, the file said, after the war, on the road to Ulm, he had been in the hospital, he had been released, his trail had run cold. His mother wrote every Allied country, begging for information. The file is in three languages. There is no end to his story. It simply trails off.
“When I am falling victim to routine,” Udo Jost, for many years Arolsen’s chief archivist, tells me, “I take out folders to read, and then I am angry again. I need this furiousness to be committed.” He takes a drag on his cigarette. One year, the federal archive of Germany requested that Bad Arolsen begin microfilming and then destroying the original records. Jost lost his temper. “I say no! These are victims! They lost their names! They were given numbers! And in a few years, there will be no survivors, and then the victims will only be numbers!”
I first met Jost on a tour of the archives; he is a bearded, portly, unkempt man with a gentle, genial manner. We began that first day in an anteroom of the archives. He gestures behind him toward a plate-glass window protecting a sea of library-card files. “What you see here is the main key to the International Tracing Service,” he says, speaking in German and pausing for translation, though he speaks English nearly fluently. “This is the Central Names Index—CNI—which covers three rooms and includes fifty million references for seventeen-point-five million victims.”
Jost flips open an encyclopedia-heavy tome that explains an arcane alphabetic-phonetic formula developed in 1945 for researching Nazi victims’ names: in World War II prison camps, names changed from Cyrillic spellings to Germanic, Germanic to Francophone, Francophone to Polish, depending on who wrote down a prisoner’s details upon arrival in a work, concentration, or annihilation camp. In practical terms, that means there were 848 ways to spell the name Abramowitz, 156 versions of Schwartz. There are not nearly so many options for Scheftel, but the point is well understood. “ITS was not structured like an archive,” Jost continues. “The task was searching for victims and clarifying their fate. That’s why the documents could not be structured according to geographic or national criteria. Families searching for relatives generally did not know to which place their loved one had been deported.”
“There is so much that it is difficult to get a handle on where to begin,” explains Paul Shapiro, of the Holocaust Museum—arguably the person who took the archives’ closing most personally, who worked hardest, and who might take the most credit for its opening.
“It is very difficult to overcome sixty years during which the material was never seen as a resource for understanding or teaching, it was only seen as a resource from which one could find a name.” He went on: “The most common description of the documentation at ITS that was used for fifty years was they are ‘lists of victims’—lists of prisoners, lists of names. But in the first place, it is more diverse material than that. And second, a list of names takes on a different meaning when it is observed through the eyes of a researcher or someone who knows the history, or through the eyes of someone who wants to understand the dynamic among populations, or what brought survival rather than death. Here you can sample different kinds of people as they made their way through—or failed to survive—the Nazi system. . . . The first challenge is having people understand that there is a broader significance to this material, and the material
has to be mobilized and integrated into the way we understand the Holocaust.”
With Shapiro’s words in mind, I continue to comb the archives, hoping there is something more for me. I try different routes through the material, and one morning I find cousins in the “Displaced Persons” files—they list my immediate family as contacts in the United States when they try to emigrate: Henryka and Benzion Feldschuh, denied access to Palestine and the United States, request to emigrate to Sydney, Australia. Their exit interview with DP officials details their war years, from time in the Lodz ghetto through camp after camp, a bizarro résumé required for refugee status listed by date: 1936–1940, Lodz; 1940–1944, Lodz ghetto; 1944, Auschwitz; 1944, Bergen-Belsen. Similarly, jobs are listed—“teacher” gives way to “farmer” at a work camp—and the reason for termination is “liberation.” In their interview, they expressed a desire to never return to Poland (reason? “anti-Semitism”) or stay in Germany even if it meant settling three quarters of the way around the world.
Konrad Kwiet connects me to a genealogist in Sydney, who, I discovered, not only knew my cousins personally but had worked alongside Henryka in the 1960s. He tells me both died many years ago—news that I shouldn’t be shocked by, but which nevertheless depresses me immensely. I am so terribly late to be contacting these people; I had had such an—I know—unreasonable hope that one of them would be alive, that one of them could tell me what my far-flung family looked like, that one of them could tell me how the family members contacted one another before the war, how they related to one another before the apocalypse and how they communicated after. Instead, the genealogist puts me in touch with their son, Michael, who is somewhere near my father’s age and thus too young to have known those for whom I search.
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