August 3, 1939
My Darling,
For such a terribly long time I’ve wanted to write you, and it was so totally impossible until today—and actually it’s impossible today too, because in a moment the children will be awake, they’ll cry and ask for their “Auntie Doctor,” and they’ll need to be washed, dressed, tended to, and supervised; they need me so badly to play, to pester, to not-obey, and to love. You see, I’m employed—really employed, Darling (me!!) and I’m earning money (!) (50RM [Reichsmark] plus board and lodging); I’m in a training college for kindergarten teachers, where some children (the number changes, at the moment there are 6) are housed as well! I’m with these children right now, and in addition I’m in charge of the trainees; they’re young girls from the big city, exuberant, sassy, in some cases very smart (in some cases not so smart!), who naturally don’t have a glimmer of respect for me and do whatever they want to. A few of them are nice and smart and don’t exploit the friendly relationship that I emphasized right at the outset (to my great disadvantage). But most of them do! And they honestly try to prevent me from “being happy” here. But on the whole, things are wonderful for me here (relatively speaking, of course!). We live in a gorgeous mansion in Grunewald [an upper-class Berlin neighborhood], with a garden, balconies and all the trimmings. I have a small, very charming (at noon, very (!) hot!!) attic room with such a lovely, charming, peaceful view over the treetops and mansion roofs. I greatly enjoy sitting at this window! And dreaming. And I so enjoy dreaming, only I have so very little time to do so!
Valy’s school was at Wangenheimstrasse 36, a stately villa in a neighborhood of villas in the lush Grunewald neighborhood deep in the far western half of Berlin. I take two overland S-Bahn trains out to this edge of the city and wander the streets until I find it. There are mansions all around, most built at the turn of the last century. But “36,” when I find it, looks all wrong. It doesn’t seem terribly old and I cannot tell if it is the right address—hers was supposed to have been built in 1909—but there is no one to ask, on the street, or around the building. On a Sunday, this suburb-within-the-city is leafy and green, and totally bereft of foot traffic. It might be that it is one of the grand houses across the street, one with turrets and small attic rooms, as Valy and others who recalled the seminar described. Though number 36 looks as though it may have been torn down and rebuilt, the rest of the area looks as though it has not changed at all since the turn of the last century. But I don’t know. There are no markers, no suggestions of the upheaval witnessed here. I linger as long as I can, wondering if anyone knows that this neighborhood was where Jewish girls came for their last hope of a good education as the 1930s drew to a close. Some long suburban blocks away, there is a small café where I order tea and Käsekuchen. But the waitress there appears to be in her twenties; she has no idea what the neighborhood once held.
The coordinators of Valy’s school, the rank and file of the prominent Jews remaining in Berlin, morphed into a new role as 1938 turned to 1939. With so many new regulations, there was a need for an interlocutor between Jews and the Reich leadership—so that Jews would understand how to navigate those rules, and know how to remain on the right side of the ever-shifting bounds of the law. The Reichsvereinigung filled that role, too. As I stir my tea and look out over this calm suburb, I wonder if Valy knew that, when she took her position at the seminar.
When Valy came to live in Grunewald, more and more indigent people were on the streets of Berlin; the desperation for emigration was becoming ever more frantic, as the funds necessary to leave were elusive, nearly impossible to come by—for tickets, of course, but also for the onerous system of fleecing and “taxation” imposed upon Jews who wanted to flee. Unfortunately for Valy, women were often seen as having needs secondary to those of men, as men had already experienced the brutalities of camps like Dachau and Sachsenhausen, where some thirty thousand were sent during the widespread pogroms of Kristallnacht. There was some trepidation about letting women leave alone, that they wouldn’t be able to provide for themselves, or live honorably. Men were privileged with the chance to leave first.
“The emigration problem demanded our greatest labors,” wrote Alfred Schwerin in 1944, after his escape to Basel, Switzerland, in a manuscript published, in part, in the book Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries. Schwerin, a Reichsvereinigung worker, had himself been sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht, though he was released within a few months. “We registered children and adults with the emigration aid agencies, filled out the endless questionnaires, wrote testimonials, and took care of providing funds for the journey and the purchases needed for it. This often entailed quite considerable sums. . . . The Reichsvereinigung did not approve immediately and readily, because it wanted to help as many people as possible and tried to avoid spending too great an amount for any one person.” Jews lingering in the Reich made the Nazi authorities angry; yet as angry as the delay in expelling the population made them, they did everything they could to make the process of emigration arduous, ruining, demoralizing.
The Kindergartenseminar at Wangenheimstrasse opened in 1934, the brainchild of the women of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (the League of Jewish Women, a remarkable feminist organization that lobbied for women’s suffrage and against prostitution before 1933; after the anti-Jewish laws came into effect, it became an advocate for Jewish women in the Reich) and the Reichsvertretung—the earlier representative body of Jews of the Reich. The idea was a school to train teachers, a place where girls could go after high school, or even just before graduation, and receive an education in pedagogy. It remained open as Jews were dismissed from all other areas of Aryan life. Students studied education theory, psychology, history, literature—as well as hygiene, civics, “gymnastics,” drawing, and music. There was also Hebrew, Judaism, and Jewish history.
Marianne Strauss was nearly sixteen and among the youngest of some thirty girls when she enrolled at the Kindergartenseminar in April 1939. Wangenheimstrasse 36, she told historian Mark Roseman, whose book about Strauss’s astonishing underground life is called A Past in Hiding, was a “very good address, like The Bishops Avenue,” in the Hampstead Heath neighborhood in London, “enormous, with I don’t know how many really splendid 1920s [era] bathrooms.” The building, previously the home of a Jewish banker, had been donated for use by the Jewish community in the mid-1930s. Number 36 housed the Seminar as well as a boardinghouse with space, at the outset, for fifteen girls and women who had come from other parts of the Reich. Strauss told Roseman that that attic room—perhaps the very one Valy claimed for herself—for a time, was the “plum,” the room everyone wanted, tiny, but with a fantastic view down Wangenheimstrasse through one window, and Lynarstrasse through the other.
Writes Roseman, “The elimination of opportunities elsewhere”—the closing of doors to Jews across the Reich and into Austria—“was a boon for the school as a glittering array of intellectuals and inspired teachers had joined the teaching staff. Aware that in different circumstances many of the students would have sought a more academic education, the college offered a far more intellectual and wide-ranging course than was usual for kindergarten teachers.” Rabbi Leo Baeck, the head of the Reichsvereinigung, was on the school’s board.
The Jewish community of Berlin provided not just education but also social and cultural services. With an eye to the needs of a people accustomed to steeping in opera and art, plays and concerts were arranged by the Jüdischer Kulturbund, employing the suddenly out-of-work Jewish actors and musicians in the big cities; tours were set up for the areas beyond. Only works by Jews could be performed, and each performance was vetted by Nazi henchmen; the Gestapo attended each event. The image is bizarre; I daydream about a room full of once-prominent Jews, a nefarious character in the back, out of Indiana Jones, taking notes in a small leather-bound notebook with a silver pen, a swastika armband gleaming in the darkened theater. These performances kept the girls of Wangenheimstr
asse 36 culturally engaged for as long as they were allowed. The Kulturbund was dissolved in 1941, well after Valy had left the Kindergartenseminar.
The girls in the Kindergartenseminar—many on their own for the first time—felt liberated, emboldened, thrilled to have briefly slipped away from their parents, to be studying with the best Jewish teachers left in the Reich from across the German-speaking world. The population they worked with, however, was miserable, babies born from and in terrible situations—made worse by the growing number of harsh covenants against Jews. Already in 1938, Jews had been banned from soup kitchens; throughout that year and into 1939, all remaining social services were, one by one, stripped away. They would be banned that winter from “warming rooms” for those who couldn’t afford heat. Jews found themselves running afoul of the law as well—traffic stings had been set up to charge Jews with jaywalking, giving them fines of fifty Reichsmark (Valy’s monthly salary!) for what would normally be a five RM fine.
At the same time, the population of young German Jews was diminishing rapidly: Marion Kaplan’s excellent account of life in Germany under the Reich, Between Dignity and Despair, notes that between June 1933 and September 1939, the population of Jews under age thirty-nine decreased by nearly eighty percent. It was a stark contrast to the still-rich world of the Kindergartenseminar, the bubble Valy lived in, in which, Marianne Strauss told Roseman, “you forgot really what was going on outside,” as there was “always something interesting going on. There were lots of interesting people still living ordinary lives in Berlin—very public well-known figures. . . . Musicians would come and give concerts; we’d have get-togethers . . . folk singing, lectures . . . wonderful social things going on all the time.”
So despite the increasingly difficult life outside the walls of Wangenheimstrasse 36, despite her mother’s rapid and bewildering, race-based impoverishment at home in Troppau, Valy’s time in Grunewald was, intellectually at least, peculiarly, and temporarily, not unlike her life in Vienna—and far, far better than it had been in her claustrophobic hometown.
On the other side of Berlin, near touristy Checkpoint Charlie, I stop at the Topography of Terror, an indoor-outdoor permanent exhibition situated on the land where the Gestapo and SS headquarters were located during the Reich. The museum narrates the Gestapo’s work over dozens of architecturally lovely panels; it is all Plexiglas and chrome, like an architect’s loft, incongruously pleasant to wander through. It’s an excellent exhibition, if a bit wordy, but I find myself inordinately annoyed that out of some, say, fifty panels, two are devoted to the “Jew catchers,” those Jews whom the Gestapo used as their sniffer dogs to ferret out other Jews in hiding. Granted, these Greifer, as they were called in German, did horrific work, but there were so few, in comparison to the minions of the Gestapo. There was debate, after the war, about the role of the Jewish councils, and Jewish organizations like the Reichsvereinigung—but the Greifer were in a whole other category of moral turpitude. They were tasked specifically with flushing out their co-religionists. To put so much emphasis on such an aberration here seems peculiar, as though there is a spreading of guilt in a way that seems, at least to me, grossly imbalanced.
In the small shop at the front of the museum, I pick up historian Wolf Gruner’s book Judenverfolgung [Jewish Persecution] in Berlin, 1933–1945, which lists the restrictions on Jews, day by day, for Berlin alone. Here I can match the dates of Valy’s private letters to what her public life was like. Every month—nearly every day—comes degradation, making her time in the Kindergartenseminar that much more precious. The restrictions range from the onerous and burdensome (throughout January 1939, for example, children were continuously deprived: first of the right to foster care, then to special-needs schools) to the humiliating (in March, Jews were denied access to city libraries, a blow to those like Valy who no longer had money to buy books). The children’s reading rooms were now barred to Jews as well, making those who cared for children stuck with trying to creatively entertain and educate kids in a world that seemed to contract, daily, around them.
Yet despite the intensity of the deprivation, despite the cruelty and randomness of the things barred to her, in August 1939, Valy still has a heartbreaking amount of hope that she, too, can leave. She’s sure of it, and so is everyone else around her.
I’m the acknowledged favorite of the director [a woman], and I’m addressed as “golden child” (people easily and often forget my [academic] title here). I am quite evidently being protected and favored by a female senior official . . . of the Reichsvertretung.
The director was Margarethe Fraenkel, a forty-year-old “Aryan” woman and mother of five who was married to a Jewish man. Fraenkel eventually joined the anti-Nazi resistance. Her extended family was able to emigrate, while she tried to “overcome her great loneliness by helping others,” as her colleagues described her. But it is Valy’s loneliness that engulfs, and propels, her to promise—herself, my grandfather—continuously, that she will leave soon:
These two women—they are quite extraordinarily smart and good (not only because they are nice to me)—shudder at the thought of the moment when I receive a Permit and leave. It defies all explanation, I think, because I never do anything at all exceptional, of course, and I am totally replaceable. But as far as I’m concerned, of course, they can just continue to “shudder.” I am so terribly busy here; my day starts at 6 a.m. and ends at 8 p.m. (theoretically, a few days off are envisaged, but there aren’t enough suitable supervisors . . . on the “theoretical” days off). In the evenings I’m very tired and in no way able to do anything for myself or to write. My mother is still in Troppau and busy shutting down the household, and after that she too is supposed to come here for the time being, and I hope she surely will find someplace to stay.
My prospects for England were quite good until recently, but the day before yesterday I received a letter informing me that my Permit can’t be granted for the present; I’m afraid that physicians aren’t getting [necessary] Permits. . . . Lonka Schlüssel had a very nice job for me as a lady’s companion, but I would have to be there soon, and with these new complications that is hardly possible. I’m really quite worn out, but that’s really not what I want to write you about!
Valy’s loss—the permit problem—is enormous. In fact, my grandfather already knew about her England prospects; Lonka had written him earlier that month, assuring him—he seems to have asked—that she had found a place for Valy. August 1939 was early enough that in Lonka’s letter, written in English, she worries more for herself than for Valy, even though Lonka is already safe in London. In her letter Lonka explains she had just been told her quota number had come up, she could meet her family in America, and then, just as quickly, she learned the consulate had made a mistake—her number was a ways off. “I fainted in the street,” she tells him, “and two people had to carry me into a shop nearby.” Later she gets to the subject of Valy. “Yes, I hear from Valy,” she says, and “I managed a post for her as a companion.” She, too, tells him about the Kindergartenseminar.
But permits to England would not get easier to receive. Valy’s lost window, in a few weeks, will be cemented over into a fully sealed wall. But even as she worries about her prospects for emigration, Valy is still racked by the feeling of loss from the forced end of their affair:
I was so delighted to get your letter; so very, very delighted! About everything. And it is just impossible to describe how much I miss you! I really didn’t mean to write you about this subject either, because it is scarcely possible to describe to you this feeling of emptiness, this dismal feeling of not being able to be with you, the catastrophic feeling of having lost something irreplaceable, and this out-and-out longing for you. It is indeed possible that someday I can come to you again, but the 3 or 4 years it will take until then seem hardly bearable to me, and very often I lack the courage to believe in this possible Later on . . .
Goodbye, Darling! I would be happy to hear
from you again soon. Please don’t forget to write! There is so little that brings me joy.
Lots of love and all imaginable good wishes to you, and thousands and thousands of kisses,
Yours,
Valy
The letter was written in installments. I was very frequently interrupted while writing.
“There is so little that brings me joy.” Such a small line, but so much—and it is only summer 1939, the world has not yet completely narrowed, it still seems possible to leave; the distances are still merely about time, not life and death.
To understand Valy’s experiences better, I seek out authorities on the Reichsvereinigung. I meet Gudrun Maierhof, a professor of politics and social science at the University of Applied Sciences in Erfurt, at a small café in front of the Charlottenburg S-Bahn station. She looks Israeli, Gudrun, from her dyed red-purple hair to the Hebrew chai (life) and ahava (love) necklaces she wears, a small nod to her immersion in Jewish history, or a flag of affiliation with Jews. She skims one or two of the letters I have brought along and then gives out a little yelp when she sees Valy worked for most of 1939 and part of 1940 in the Kindergartenseminar. Part of her dissertation was on the seminar, so she sends me a section of that (unpublished) text, to help me better understand the opportunity, the optimism the school represented. From 1938, she explains, one-year and six-month intro courses in child care and kindergarten teaching were offered. The hope was the girls enrolled would move on to exactly the kind of position Valy sought in the United Kingdom. In the end, though, dozens of the girls would be called to service in Berlin itself as more and more parents—and mothers of small children—would be pulled into forced labor by 1941, leaving thousands of unschooled kids in need of care, instruction, and supervision. It was a well-educated, if temporary, workforce, a high-end finishing school in the anteroom to hell.
Paper Love Page 16
