Paper Love

by Sarah Wildman

  There was no money for visas to Chile. There was nearly nothing to eat. He is embarrassed. I find a draft of a letter he wrote to Tonya Morganstern Warner, dated December 14, 1940, months later. “I regret to have to tell you that I am not getting on so ‘very’ well as you seem to believe. I am probably doing much better than anybody else who has been practicing for 6 weeks, but it is still far from being satisfactory.” He is not yet in control of this new country—him! The one who mastered everything, the one for whom everything came easily—languages, affidavits, visas, jobs. Here he was failing Valy, not by his own accord, but what did that matter? He couldn’t win. He had nothing to offer her beyond the affidavits he had already issued, the affidavits that would soon wither and expire. And here he was, shamed by outsiders, by his old school friend Paula, by Valy’s Uncle Julius, by this stranger, Rabbi Jospe—all of them underlining for him that he is failing her. It is simply awful. It is unfair. He seems unwilling to let that be the case, and yet neither can he realistically offer much in the way of material support.

  New York, April 19, 1940

  Dear Karl,

  Forgive me for not answering your kind letter until now. I couldn’t get around to it sooner. Thanks very much for your aim and intention to help my sister and Valy. But I can’t ask it of you, because you’re in the phase of establishing your livelihood, so that material obligations on your part are impossible. Besides, I doubt that the [option ] proposed by Dr. Jospe will become definite/official.

  Warm regards,

  Julius

  I want to know more about what Julius and my grandfather did, about what they tried to do. And more about what Jospe could realistically offer. But I have no one to ask but the letters. Alfred Jospe lived in Washington, D.C., until his death in 1994—he was the national director of B’nai Brith Hillel. I know that I cannot be searching for Valy’s contemporaries, I know I will not find them, but it feels so desperate and awful to know he was right here and that I missed him. Jospe saw Valy in Troppau and knew her choices, knew why she had gone to Berlin and knew about her mother, her quota number, her inability to get to a third country.

  Perhaps my grandfather’s own misery made him silent; how helpless he must have felt, how incompetent. And so, instead of writing her, he trucks along, trying to make his life on these shores make sense. And she is angry.

  Berlin, 04-13-1940

  My dear, dear boy

  The many unanswered letters I have written to you meanwhile have become a legion! . . . All I can do is to hope that my letters will reach you one day and you will write to me. . . .

  I am no longer in the seminar for kindergarten teachers. The children’s group was discontinued, and I became superfluous and left. Three afternoons a week I now teach health and nutrition issues and was thus “retained for the institute” through this ingenious idea of the leader of the seminar, a woman who feels very well toward me. That’s what they say in the home, and they seem happy with it. So am I, very much. In this manner I am able to make some money without taking on work in the afternoons. During the mornings I go to the hospital where I do not learn a whole lot, but still something.

  I lead my life the way I’ve been doing for the past 2 years: In a spirit of waiting, without much joy or hope. But, my darling, don’t feel sad for me; I want you to know that I have people around me—women,—you know that only women are left here?!, who still have something to say, who like me, who help me and who want to make life pleasant for me. But I do not succeed very often, and they never will be able to replace you, my boy! You are and remain far, far away, out of my reach, you exist only in my memories, wonderful, beautiful “sunny past.” . . . You are no longer even a letter, such as tiny, modest piece of the present. Why don’t you write?? . . .

  Now I have again finished a letter to you. Will this one also be lost or read perfunctorily and then forgotten, and, in any case, remain without answer? I am so very tired and sad. Even in the most positive of circumstances it will be such a long time before I hear anything from you. Please write me lots about you! It will not be long now that you will have gone through your hospital residency year. What will you do then?

  Farewell, my darling, many, many thousand kisses and WRITE IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!!!!

  Your Valy

  And then, a postscript:

  04-14-1940

  Darling: Mrs. Jurmann, Paula’s sister, told me today that Paula has written and reported about you. She says that you don’t know where I am and that you did not have any news from me and that you are “upset with me.” I am so happy—as ridiculous as this may sound. I am so happy that this worrisome silence of yours has a natural explanation. Naturally, our letters do get lost! They always used to get lost when it was particularly important that they would reach their destination on time. And, of course, it is also natural that you after sending an exploratory letter into the world—exhausted from this effort and very pleased with yourself—were “waiting” a bit. Well, my one and only, beloved boy: I am still alive, currently residing at Berlin, Rombergstrasse 2. That’s where I am awaiting your letters. Maybe it is better if you send your letters to Wangenheimstrasse 36, Berlin Grunewald. It is possible that we won’t stay at Rombergstrasse very long, and somehow I always get mail in Grunewald.

  And now, in closing, the upshot of my letters from yesterday and today: I am waiting, waiting, waiting for letters from you.

  Your Valy

  Is it true that he hasn’t heard from her? It’s possible some letters were lost—among those I found, there are enormous gaps in time. But it is also possible that she has seized on this, chosen to believe he hasn’t heard from her, rather than think he has forgotten, or turned away, or has become inured to their plight. I wonder: Was he was too sad to write her? Too chagrined that for three hundred dollars, he would be of no help? Julius doesn’t feel sorry for him, though. He writes again, angry now:

  N.Y., 05-06-1940

  I just received a card from dear Valy from 04-19. She writes: “. . . The last letter I have from Karl is dated August 27, and I got it in mid October. Since then I have written a lot, but never got a reply.” At the end she wishes you would write. Could it be that your cards and letters, in particular, did get lost for the past 7 months!? Please, pull yourself together and set aside at least once every few weeks 5 minutes to write a couple of lines to poor Valy. She also writes that it will be her turn only in about a year (and her mother in a few years’ time); she is working at the children’s ward at the local hospital and also teaches hygiene at a seminar. Her address: c/o Mrs. Levy, Berlin, N.O., Romberg Str. 2

  Otherwise, everything unfortunately unchanged.

  Regards,

  Julius

  But then something does change. My grandfather writes again, giving her hope. Her letters in June 1940 are suddenly buoyed, even happy, all fueled by his returning to her, at least in writing.

  It’s a good moment for hope, because the Jews of Berlin have been suffering, increasingly. Berlin in the first half of 1940 is claustrophobic; it is grinding oppression, a dangerous cocktail of malnourishment, social exclusion, and, early that year, freezing temperatures. They are prisoners in their homes, in their lives. In January, Jews had been denied legumes, most fruit, and meat.

  They are now being forced into Judenhäuser—Jew houses—clutches of people forced to live on top of one another, all in one space, desperate for resolution. It is the end of privacy. Jews no longer have a moment to think, to be alone. Inge Deutschkron described the time to me like this: “Every day there was a new law. A new something: One day they took the telephone from us; then they asked us to hand in wages, then we weren’t allowed to sit on public transport. [Then] public transport itself was totally forbidden, except for going to work, and only if the workplace was seven kilometers away.”

  For a time, there was still the Jewish newspaper. “And then of course they stopped that too. By then we were all forced to
live together in a Judenhaus. . . . We lived on Bamberger Strasse at the corner of Guntherstrasse. Bamberger Strasse 22. . . . The Judenhaus was owned by a Jew, and two people always had to share one room. That meant one five-and-a-half-room apartment was shared by eleven people. There was one toilet and, of course, one kitchen. You can imagine what was going on there. All of us wanted to get to work on time—we were sure we would be in danger if we weren’t on time—and if someone was sitting too long in the toilet? You can imagine! Bang! Bang! Bang! at the door. And so on. And the same would happen in the kitchen. Everyone came from work at five o’clock, and everyone always wanted to cook as soon as possible. They were always hungry. Because we didn’t get eggs, we didn’t get anything! They had laws that said Jews are not allowed to buy eggs or buy a cake! It was unbelievable the ideas that these people had! There must have been somebody special who thought every day, ‘How can I punish the Jews?’ It was impossible to follow all these rules.”

  As time passes and Valy’s work changes from the oasis-like Kindergartenseminar in Grunewald, with its lovely private attic room, to the more tedious Jüdisches Krankenhaus, the Jewish Hospital, her letters are no longer sent from Wangenheimstrasse 36; they are now posted from all over Berlin. Each return address indicates that she has been added on to a new household, she sleeps in a new bed, or on a new couch, always in someone else’s space. Perhaps, as she hopes, my grandfather is writing to one address, and she has already left. It is possible: from Ostender Strasse, near the Jewish Hospital in the Wedding district, her address is listed “care of Schwartz.” From Rombergstrasse at the bottom of Prenzlauer Berg, not far from Alexanderplatz, it is “care of Levy.” Who are these people with whom she now shares a bathroom, a kitchen, a living space? She does not say. She is a wanderer in the city; she lives like a ghost, a shadow, unseen, almost unknown.

  I go in search of these small markers in her journey, but I often find nothing when I arrive, no trace of what she knew or saw. That is the case in Rombergstrasse—in fact there is no building there; the entire block was destroyed during the war and rebuilt, decades later, into large, Mondrian-style apartment blocks, with shiny bits of blue and red. Even the name of the street has changed. Now—as it was before the Third Reich—it is named Mendelssohnstrasse, after the composer Felix, who, like all Jewish artists, was forbidden and smeared by the Nazi propaganda machine during the war. (Mendelssohn had been the focus of an anti-Semitic tirade by Richard Wagner at the end of the nineteenth century. In his vitriolic essay “Judaism in Music,” Wagner wrote of the “involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews” and singled out Mendelssohn, then a star of modern music.) The street name was changed in 1938; it was restored to honor the composer well after the war.

  Of those transient homes, Valy writes nearly nothing—other than that she has found herself a furnished room—for the first time, on her own, but not on her own terms because it is not with my grandfather, not with friends, and not even with her mother. It is a symbol of her own transience, her loneliness, her plight, her own sense of distance from the rest of the world, from her friends, her former life.

  About her fourth home Valy writes much more. That is the house in Babelsberg, the village within Potsdam, an area known as Germany’s Hollywood—its film production output, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, rivaled that of California. Valy’s mother has finally found work—suitable work, work that befits a woman of skill, a businesswoman, a woman who had once held a position of high regard in her community. She is now the director of an old-age home, located in a villa. It is calm here, and so beautiful Valy feels almost as though she and her mother might have actually chosen this spot. Best of all, letters from Karl reach her here, and the combination of her reinvigorated correspondence and the sudden, if relative, comfort gives her a new burst of optimism.

  This letter, from June, is perhaps the most poignant, the most hopeful, the most vivid letter of her whole oeuvre.

  Berlin, 06-07-40

  My beloved only one, my boy!

  You will be with me in this world! This one sentence in your last letter stays with me all the time, wherever I am; I can hear it, see it and feel it. Always! When I am doing what I’ve been doing all these days, when I am dressing the children’s wounds, when they call out to me at night, when I cannot go back to sleep afterwards and when I am sitting by the window, sick with longing. Always your words—“you will be with me” are comfort and torture at the same time, because of the question: when will I be with you? Please tell me, beloved, when? I do not know the answer, and the consulate has only a vague idea of 1–2 years, meaning an eternity, unimaginable, inconceivable—equal to a hundred years to me, who must be with you within the shortest imaginable period of time, right now and immediately.

  Now the third summer without you begins. Instead of going swimming or boating, hiking in the woods and sharing all the beautiful things with you, as it should be, I am sitting here, pounding insanely, madly and full of sadness at the typewriter. And the summer is so beautiful this year! But there is much else I need to tell you. Mama has been asked to manage an old people’s home in Babelsberg near Potsdam, one hour from Berlin that is housed in the villa of a former Russian diplomat. The house has a dreamy location! It sits at the highest point of the town, next to the university’s observatory and is surrounded by an enormous, completely overgrown, jungle-like fairy tale kind of garden. The house itself looks like a castle [Burg] and everyone here calls me “Burgfräulein” [damsel of the castle]. There is a large cupola at the very top and a blue room with lots and lots of little windows. Earlier on, this was the music room, and that’s my favorite spot where I love to spend time. Here I am singing “Solveig’s Song” and all the other songs you used to love. I am spending a lot of time sitting here and dreaming of you. And then I sometimes climb up on the roof or I go all the way up to the very top of the cupola. The view from here is absolutely spectacular—one can see villas, woods and lakes. It is simply unbelievably beautiful. It hurts so much that I have to see all of this by myself and that I cannot show it to you. I will have to bring people out here. Maybe, when I am not so alone and all by myself, I will be able to forget from time to time that it is not you who can be here with me.

  Objectively speaking, the fact that my mother was asked to run the home here is a wonderful solution. Although mama makes only a very modest salary, it frees us from the most pressing and sometimes almost dramatic existential needs. Most importantly, however, my mother now is doing work that corresponds to her qualifications. She is again able to manage, to organize and to direct. As always she is rising magnificently to the task, is up to both ears in work and does not have any time. That is wonderful! There is so much work to be done here, and I can only hope that she will not exhaust herself. During her, admittedly, very sparse leisure time she has the use of the balconies and of the garden. I am incredibly pleased and grateful that everything turned out this way and that my mother got this position.

  Unfortunately, however, I am not able to live in Babelsberg. I had to rent a small furnished room near the hospital—the first furnished room without you, all by myself. I am coming out here every weekend and sometimes even during the week.

  Professionally speaking, things are going well for me. During the past two weeks I had the sole responsibility of leading the Children’s Ward at the hospital. One of the women physicians was on holiday, and the other one fell sick. During that time I was living at the hospital. Unfortunately, this is over now. There was an incredible lot of work during the time when I substituted. . . . This was a real test of strength and I never thought I would pass it. But I did pass it quite well! Naturally, the head of the Ward would make his daily rounds and spend one hour every time. He did not spend any more time or stay any longer than when the physicians were around. The nurses, however, were the most difficult problem for me. They are a particular breed of people, especially in the Children’s Ward. While t
hey may be quite agreeable in private, in the Ward, the head nurse has the say, then comes nothing, and then, after a long while, come the nurses and then maybe, just maybe we come. One day, they may almost die from their own sense of importance, these nurses!

  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. . . . I will, however, go to the consulate one more time in order to try and get more information.

  Please write to me soon and write a lot. . . .

  And now goodbye for today; I am kissing you many, many times.

  Your Valy

  Darling, I just learned from Mr. Jurmann, Paula’s brother-in-law, that our affidavits must be separated, i.e., one for me and one for my mother and that this must be initiated in the USA. Additionally, he thinks that several supportive affidavits from relatives naturally would improve the chances. Would you please tell me the exact degree of relationship for the issuers of my affidavit, as I do not know these relatives particularly well and one is required to give exact information about the degree of relationship? Please, be so kind and initiate the separation of our affidavits, if necessary. Much love.

  Your Valy

  I look up “Solveig’s Song,” originally part of the incidental music for Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt: the music, by Edvard Grieg, is haunting, beautiful. The lyrics, translated from the Norwegian:

  Both winter and spring might pass, perhaps

  and next summer too, and the whole year,

  but sometime you will come, I know for sure,

  and I shall wait, as I promised before.

  I cry, listening to it. I imagine Valy hoped my grandfather would take out a recording of this song and think of her in the countryside. My father, when I tell him of the song, gives a start. “Peer Gynt?” he says. “How odd. It was on often in the house.”