Maierhof also tells me, with huge excitement, she knows someone in Berlin who studied at the Kindergartenseminar—perhaps, she wonders, with some awe, she was even Valy’s student: her name is Inge Deutschkron, and she’s a local celebrity in the world of survivor-speakers. She was the Israeli daily Ma’ariv correspondent in Frankfurt during the Auschwitz trials and she later wrote a book—called Outcast in English—about her experiences under the Nazis; the book was made into a play that is still regularly performed by school groups in Germany. She speaks often to children’s and women’s groups.
Deutschkron, Maierhof says, was saved by a man named Otto Weidt, a kind of small-time Oskar Schindler. Weidt, who was himself legally blind, ran a small broom and brush factory that employed blind and deaf Jews, alongside a handful of sighted ones—like Deutschkron. He insisted, for years, that his staff was essential and couldn’t be deported; he rescued them from roundups again and again. Eventually, his efforts to keep them aboveground exhausted, he helped some, including Deutschkron, secure new identities. Once, Weidt traveled from Berlin to Auschwitz itself to rescue one woman, a former worker and—it was rumored—his lover. She survived, but not all his workers were so lucky: he kept a family of four, stashed behind the wall of an armoire, all hiding from the Gestapo until they were denounced by one of the Greifer, the Jew-catchers.
The week I meet Gudrun, my friend Baruc Corazón is visiting from Madrid. I tell him these stories and he parries with an anecdote he had recently heard of similar reverberations, into our generation, in Spain. A contemporary of his was in the process of researching her grandfather’s death, he says, a killing that took place decades before her birth at the end of the Spanish Civil War. The grandfather had been exposed—and then, in the final moments of the war, was summarily shot, without trial, for being a Republican. Baruc’s friend looked up the grandfather’s records and discovered the name of his denouncer; all involved lived in a small town on the Costa Brava, the beautiful swath of coastal Catalonia just above Barcelona. The granddaughter called the house, and a family member told her the denouncer had died the week before. The man on the phone said, tearily, “He was a wonderful man, he just died.” And Baruc’s friend said, “He may have been a wonderful person, but he denounced my grandfather, and ruined my family.” We sit with that for a moment, stunned even in the retelling.
Weidt’s former factory is now the Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt; it is at Rosenthaler Strasse 39, down a graffitied alleyway in Hackescher Markt, the heart of the old East. These days, there is a Starbucks just in front of the alley, and, next door, an art-house cinema; dozens upon dozens of bikes are always parked there—the area has become known for boutiques and eateries. The museum itself is up a small flight of stairs, easily missed unless you’re searching for it.
Deutschkron’s and Otto Weidt’s stories are marvelous, even cinematic, but when I meet her, Deutschkron is unsentimental to the point of caustic. She is a compact woman, with short-cropped hair, a similar color to Gudrun’s, that unnaturally red-purple; her eyes are lined in kohl and she looks younger than her near century of living. When we meet, she is dressed in a way that reminds me of my grandparents—put-together: a leaf-green sweater and a bouclé tweed skirt, pearls, stockings, and orthopedic shoes. She has the brusque deportment of someone who has relied on herself for her entire life; she makes it clear before I come that, at nearly ninety, she hasn’t time for small talk, long interviews, or second visits. (This is nonnegotiable, I find. Upon arrival, I see I have forgotten my camera, and she insists she will absolutely not allow me to return for a portrait. I show up, instead, some days later at the Blindenwerkstatt, where Deutschkron is lecturing to a group of immigrant women. She grumbles, “None will have heard of me there,” meaning America, but then submits to my camera.)
Deutschkron’s tenure with Otto Weidt came well after her experience at the Kindergartenseminar—she was in the school only for a year, and then was pressed into forced labor, standing for some twelve hours a day in a factory. Eventually, she got herself the (relatively) easier job as secretary in Weidt’s factory by purposely screwing up her right knee; it never properly healed.
I show her a photo of Valy; she barely looks at it, and scoffs when I say, quietly, perhaps she might have known her. It is uncomfortably warm in her apartment; we are sitting in a small, sunny, enclosed porch that amplifies the effects of the sun. Then I make the mistake of saying that Valy might have survived, being young; that I am hoping I might discover she outlived the war. “Why should she have survived?” she nearly shouts at me. I start to cry. I want Valy to have survived, I say, aware, immediately, how ridiculous, how childish, it sounds. I’m so close to the idea—the fantasy?—of Valy, I almost want to will her into being, into finding her.
Deutschkron sighs heavily at this. She is unimpressed by Americans. She is unimpressed, particularly, by young American Jews who come to weep with her, or who weep at all. She feels Jews in the States did nothing and come back now, seventy years on, to express their sadness. She doesn’t want it. “The Germans forbid immigration in October 1941, so, until then, everyone knew in the world—if they wanted to know—what was happening to us. And the Americans could have helped us! They could have helped us to get affidavits! Ach,” she practically spits the words. “Disgusting! I think this is really disgusting and they are the ones to shout at the Germans ahahahaha!” She jabs a finger in the air, accusatorily. “You know what happened to me in the States? I had two lectures there, in both of them [people said], ‘What you are telling us can’t be true! Germans didn’t help Jews!’ in that fashion. Thank you very much! They didn’t help us! Ach! I could tell you after the war how many American soldiers opened parcels that we got, and took out coffee and things like that, but that’s perhaps human, but it was unbelievable.
Inge Deutschkron lecturing at Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt. Behind her is a photo of her from the early 1940s.
“What do you mean, ‘should have survived?” she asks, switching back to Valy. “Were they not masters over lives and deaths, these people, these Nazis? Why would she have survived? Just she?” She laughs, bitterly. “There is no ‘should.’ You see what I mean. I was helped by twenty Berlin families who helped us to survive. This was a dictatorship of the worst sort and whoever was found helping Jews was taken to a concentration camp. The Americans! Their immigration quotas were from 1918 or something. They didn’t change these quotas. I think they allowed a certain number of people in.” I tell her Valy writes to my grandfather that, at best, her number on the quota list was two years off. “Exactly!” she says. “Disgusting! Honestly. That’s how I feel about it. Especially when Jews from America come along and tell me, Oh, how hard. The Americans didn’t help us!”
Deutschkron is also unimpressed with me because I have not yet read her book (I will, upon returning to the States, but that is some months away, and I hadn’t heard of her before meeting Gudrun). And she is busy. “I have so much work to do! I’m eighty-six, you see. And I don’t have much time! . . . Incidentally, what you should see is the play,” she adds, meaning the play that was made from her book. She tells me it has been performed more than three hundred times in Berlin alone, but no one in America has interest in it. “I have an agent who says it is hopeless. They are interested in Jewish victims but not in those who survived with the help of Germans.”
I disagree, but I don’t want to fight with her. I can’t say exactly why one story is picked up over another. And, to her greater point, I think there, too, she is mistaken: Americans are obsessed with the exceptions, the defiance, to the detriment of the bigger picture, the bigger loss, the norm of death. We are always looking for the happy Holocaust story. Even me, here, I realize. Though I am busily breaking down the myth perpetuated by my grandfather—his own defiance, his own happy story—I am clinging to the hope that, somehow, Valy could have survived the trauma, the vicissitudes, the cruelty, of Nazi Berlin, until the end.
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We sit, for a moment, in miserable silence. Hoping to make the most of a visit that has been, at best, uncomfortable, and at worst a waste of her time, I ask Deutschkron if she wouldn’t mind telling me her story anyway. So, after some grumbling, she does, in great detail, over the course of the next two hours. And of course, as with all such stories, it is shocking, and it is amazing. She lived in hiding spots that ranged from the temporary and uncomfortable to the distinctly miserable—including a wet and cold goat shed whose only benefit was its relative safety. She pretended to be a refugee from bombing raids—first in the east, then in Berlin itself—lying directly to Hitler youth, using false identities and claiming her papers had been destroyed, along with her possessions, by British bombers. And yet hearing her tale gets me no closer to knowing more of what happened to Valy—other than to know that Deutschkron and her mother, both of whom survived in hiding, did so with the help of many, many friends and acquaintances who had known them before the war. In listening, I am reminded that Valy had no such network. She was foreign in Berlin, alone, save her mother.
“We couldn’t get an entry permit into Great Britain,” Deutschkron says. Immediately after the November pogrom, Deutschkron’s father fled to England at a time when many believed men were at greater risk than women. And she—like Valy—had missed a chance to serve as a maid in the United Kingdom.
“Immigration wasn’t easy, because countries didn’t want us. It was the same with Great Britain [as America]: they asked for bank guarantees or rich relatives who would take us in. Well, my father had a cousin in England who was really British, and though we didn’t know her very well, she offered to help, to provide a . . . bank guarantee. For one person. She couldn’t provide three. So we thought it was best for my father to go. Men were going to concentration camps, and besides, my father was an active Social Democrat and he was dismissed from service, not because he was Jewish but because he was a politician. We thought it would be easier, once he was there, to get us out, and he looked into us being [maids]. And indeed he found a family that would take [my mother and me] as a cook and an assistant. But this didn’t work because we had to fulfill so many things—like paying Reichsfluchtsteuer [the tax charged by the Reich to leave; it was twenty percent in 1933, and by the end of the 1930s it would fleece a family of all they had] and all the strange boxes Jews had to check off in order to leave! We had to list all the things we wanted to take with us, like handkerchiefs and underwear and so on. Someone came from the [tax office] and the finance office, and they checked whether it was all correct and so on, and it took a lot of time and then the war broke out.” And so they were stuck, much like Valy.
By October 1939, the world tipping into war, Valy toggles between hope—that she may yet be rescued—and despair—her chances, she fears, are already lost. To get to America, she has applied too late, she is thousands of names down the list and the quota system is capped and truncated, it is keeping not just her but thousands of her compatriots, and her co-religionists, out of the United States. By the following spring, even those most reluctant to leave had applied to place their names on these lists. “My registration number is very high; I applied too late. I am number 77,454 under the German quota, which means I will have to wait at least five to six years,” teacher Hertha Feiner wrote her half-Jewish daughters, who were already safe in Switzerland.
But those who had applied—like Valy—earlier still held out hope a window would open for them. Even as Valy struggles for a way around these emigration problems, life in Germany itself is getting more and more surreal—on September 6, a curfew is imposed on Jews, making it illegal for them to be out past eight p.m; they are also no longer allowed radios and other such small comforts. Her mother, at last, has made it from Troppau. She has work, food. The Seminar girls were even given gas masks, as the Reich was still protecting Jews in the event of chemical warfare. She can see the deprivation all around her, she knows her position is fortunate—for now. But Valy is so very, very lonely. And so very, very sad.
Berlin, October 12, 1939
My dearest, very dearest boy,
Today, finally, after an interminably long time, a letter from you arrived. How I waited for it, how I yearned for it, how I rejoiced . . . and how much I would love to be with you again. And since it seems to be absolutely impossible that we will see each other soon again, so hopelessly long, that I am sometimes completely desperate and feel that I cannot take it, although, speaking from a purely external viewpoint, I am, relatively speaking, well off: I continue to be in the seminar and I am making money, and I am able to have my mother with me; together we live in this, the most beautiful room of the villa; mother has been a “guest” of the Reichsvereinigung for the past three weeks; over the next few days, she will begin a “retraining” course /housekeeping, and we hope that she will obtain a relatively good position here. They like me here and they are fantastically nice to my mama; most of the people here are nice and good to me, the children adore me, and there are surely many who are deeply envious of me. . . . Still and all, I am absolutely not happy with this life I am forced to lead, devoid of intellect, friends and love. I work a lot,—15 hours a day; every third day I have nightshift; that does not leave a lot of time for intellect, joy . . . [or] love . . . and I long so much to do something other than wiping children’s derrieres and struggling with unruly kids and tidying up children’s rooms—that, however, hardly ever are really tidy, and that, just like today, time and again cause interminable fights. But I must be quiet and seemingly content because I must earn money, and, as I said before, I am really, relatively speaking, rather well off.
Isiu got a summons to the Consul for November 6th, and hopes to be able to travel soon thereafter. Hermann is in Trieste on his way to Shanghai. My grandparents and Berta are in the interior, and we worry a lot about their livelihoods.
Oh my darling, how much I would like to hear your supposedly poor German—something I really cannot imagine and how terribly sad it is that even you consider it questionable if and when this may be possible—although you always were such an optimist in these matters. But let us not give ourselves headaches over this now; somehow or other it will work out, and it is impossible to make plans since all decisions are being taken away from one. Unfortunately, however, one can’t help but feel miserable at times, but that, too, shall pass.
Darling, are you now the “top banana” or close to it, at the St. Luke’s Hospital? Do you like it, and do you feel good about things, everything told. Lonka was wonderfully kind and nice. And it almost did work out. Unfortunately, I no longer can write to her now. Please give her my very best regards!
I want to write to you very soon again, my darling. But, please, you must do so as well. I do not know how much longer I will stay here; maybe my own disorderliness is my undoing. Now you see—that’s what you get for always calling my sloppiness largesse and geniality (but only when you were in a good mood). But, surely, there is much positive about my work here, and the people do like me. Maybe I will even stay.
Goodbye, my beloved boy. Give my regards to Mama, Cilli and Karl (what are they doing???) and countless kisses (if I still master this technique) from your
Valy
Lonka remained Valy’s contact in London. “Unfortunately, I can no longer write to her now”—Germany has invaded Poland. Another route to salvation has closed. Karl and Lonka continued to write back and forth about Valy, until Lonka could no longer offer much hope at all. Lonka writes to this effect in September:
17.9.1939
My Dear,
How very nice of you to think of me in your prayers. What is a pity is that they’ve not had the effect you wanted for though your intentions were good, things don’t look too cheerful just now. . . . The American consulate is closed for emigration for an indefinite period as they have got too much to do with repatriating their own people. So only God knows when we shall be there, provided we shall be able to go at all. H
ave you been in New York for the high festivals [Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur] and have you, by any chance, seen my sisters? It really seems absence makes the heart grow fonder for the last two weeks I have been longing for my sisters and brother more than I ever did before. Talking about high festivals, I forgot: a very happy new year to you.
And how is the world treating you except that you have to work 24 hours a day in your hospital? . . . I have not heard from Valy and I don’t suppose I will now as I have not got friends in neutral countries on the continent who would forward my letters to her. I feel so sorry for her, poor girl, in occupation. I am so lucky to be here. . . .
Valy’s own “disorderliness,” I can only imagine, meant her delay—at least compared with Karl—in joining those who were lobbying for visas to America, in putting her name on those interminable quota lists. The problem facing Valy extended back decades—quotas were instituted during and at the end of World War I, a nativist response in the United States to an influx of immigrants. Germany’s numbers, officially, weren’t actually all that low—just over 25,000 a year—but there was never a year that immigration actually reached those heights. And then it dropped to a minuscule percentage of that number, as the Great Depression engulfed the States in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Quietly, as the American economy teetered, President Herbert Hoover pushed American consulates to reinterpret and enforce the clause for keeping out immigrants. A line in the law which read if an immigrant was “likely to become a public charge” was reread to mean essentially “needed work,” a move that reduced immigration beginning in 1930 by ninety percent, limiting those coming in to the independently wealthy. By the late 1930s, the numbers had climbed a bit again, but the actual numbers remained well below 10,000 people per year. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington estimates that something like 300,000 Jews applied to immigrate to America between 1933 and 1939, and some 90,000 were accepted. It was a battle at the State Department between those who believed that the United States was, for most intents and purposes, full, and those who saw it as a haven of some kind.
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