Farewell, dearest! Your Valy kisses you many times.
Please do not send registered letters as I do not know where I will be during the next period of time; due to the signature requirements, this would only mean delaying the mail.
Please write soon! Please!
It sounds ridiculous, perhaps, now, to our ears, to say it was a “rape” to be forced into nursing, but it was, indeed, yet another indignity. Valy had spent most of the prior decade studying medicine. Now she is being pushed into what she saw as an inferior profession, or at least one that did not acknowledge her years of training. Young women, nineteen, twenty, with almost no schooling at all, are being sent into nursing, churned out in a year or two. None of them are nearly as qualified as she, none of them had taken their oral exams in Vienna as she had, none of them had spent half a decade in the lecture halls of the world’s best medical school, as she had. And yet she is expected to toil alongside them, learn to empty bedpans, to take the temperature of the children in her ward, to endlessly defer to those around her. It is an indignity, among all the other indignities she is suffering, and she cannot fully explain how this blow, issued, it seems, by the Jewish community itself, is in and of itself so demoralizing as to sap her strength. And yet this work is drastically better than her alternative, the mindless drudgery of forced labor; the backbreaking work her peers are struggling under. She has the audacity to want to be respected at a moment when such luxuries are no longer afforded to anyone.
Valy’s letters are always opened; they have been opened since the beginning. Geöffnet—they are stamped, across the back—“Opened.” Everything is read before it is sent along; an official makes small unintelligible notes in pencil at the top of the page and then forwards on the missive. Because of this, everything on her pages that is not about her longing comes as subtext, allusion. “The elite of the young people still remaining here,” she says, a nod to the fact that the vast majority of those under forty are gone, fled, in safety, or relative safety in the United Kingdom or the United States or Canada or Palestine or, only temporarily safer, in France.
There are so many things that Valy does not say: That the nursing program is really her sole option for staying in medicine. That her days are marked by a gnawing sense of persistent hunger. That she has been imposed upon with an extra name, “Valerie ‘Sara’ Scheftel”—that “Sara” stuck in under an August 1938 law; by January 1, 1939, all Jews whose names were not immediately identifiable as Jewish were forced to add Jewish monikers—“Sara” for women, “Israel” for men—to ensure they could not pass as Aryan even on paper. Valy just places that “Sara” there, quietly, it simply shows up, a stain; it is illegal not to use it. It rankled, it erased—pushing everyone into one category, denying her, and every other woman, the dignity of their own individuality. In Berlin I meet Hanni Levy, a survivor, who reacts to my name with a start, with a sigh—“Ah, Sarah,” she says with a small smile, a little shrug; “for too long I was Sarah.” I have always liked my name, but this gives me pause.
The weight on Valy comes from everything. The children in her charge are denied parks, they are forbidden to walk in the forest, they are forbidden to walk on the major streets of the city; and so they take to playing in the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, the only place left that Jews are allowed to walk freely outside. Air among the dead, as there is no air left in the streets for the living. I visit the cemetery with my parents when they arrive for a week. Weissensee is lush and enormous—the largest Jewish burial ground in Europe. These days it is overgrown, at least in summer, but the grounds are well kept, the paths are neat; the graves appear unharmed. It is a respite, strangely. Perhaps also because those buried here died, for the most part, of natural causes.
Jews are no longer dying naturally; they are taking their own lives week after week, at an alarming clip. When they don’t succeed in killing themselves, they are taken, ill, to the Jewish Hospital, where Valy works.
Gerda Haas, giving testimony to the Holocaust Museum decades after the war, explained the horror of it: Beginning in the fall of 1941, people were “disappearing every day to go on transports. And then many people made secret plans to go underground. That was a big deal. And many people made secret plans to go across the border into Switzerland, and many were caught. . . . The patients we got, most of them were suicides that we had to get back to life in order so we could ship them to the collection center to be going to transports. And you know we sat and agonized over that. Is it really our duty to bring those people back to life? But, yes, it was, or we were punished ourselves. The SS were always there to supervise us and do this. It was a very unnatural time, and always the fear that we would be the next ones to have the transport notice.”
I contact Gerda Haas’s family; she is still alive, and living near Boston. She is not well, they tell me. They show her, on my behalf, Valy’s name and photo. She does not remember. She does not know what happened to her. So she cannot tell me if Valy is alive or if she lived beyond the war at all.
Everyone left in Berlin is scrambling. In the city, Elisabeth Freund writes, “we are convinced that in reality America wants to help . . . but they do not know there how difficult the situation is; otherwise they would permit these poor and tortured people to get there quickly, while it is still possible. They could lock them up in a camp there until the situation of every individual is clarified, and the relief committees could bear the costs for it. But we had better get away from here, and as quickly as possible; otherwise we will meet the same fate as the unfortunate people who were deported from Stettin to Poland, or as the Jews from Baden, who were sent to France and who are being held captive there in the Pyrenees.”
I understand from reading Freund, and flipping back to the letter from Alfred Jospe, dated February 1940, that the destruction of daily life through restrictions on living and shopping and eating and walking was made all the more terrifying by the small bits the Jewish community knew of what was happening in the east. The Jews of Stettin who didn’t die during deportation were sent into what was known as the “Lublin Reservation,” the marshy area set aside as a reservation for Jews, part of the so-called Nisko plan dreamed up by Hitler himself, as well as Alfred Rosenberg, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Eichmann, the Obersturmbannführer, and formally the architect of the forced emigration of the Jews of Vienna.
Similarly, the Jews of Baden, Germany, near the French border, were deported west, into France, only to be interned by the Vichy government in Gurs, the camp in the Pyrenees, where life was freezing and muddy, and, later, in Rivesaltes, the camp in Languedoc-Roussillon, originally created for Spanish refugees, and then eventually housing foreign Jews, Roma, and other “undesirables.” Rivesaltes is a brutal slice of land—in summer it is hot and unprotected, in winter it is freezing and the same. It still stands as a camp today, dusty and cracked, with the walls of the barracks marked with the slashes of prisoners, and bullet casings still in the ground. I visited once, two summers after I left Vienna, and the dust seemed to cling to me for hours after I fled that terrible place and headed out toward the beautiful sea, the Mediterranean that the Jews interned at Rivesaltes likely never saw. Eventually so many of those ill-fated Jews were sent directly to Drancy, the camp outside Paris, and then on to Auschwitz. Most were murdered.
But in part, at least, because her letters are opened, instead of deprivation, and certainly instead of deportations, Valy speaks of loneliness, of desire, of human need.
Reading her words against the restrictions she is under, against the contemporary accounts of the walls closing in around her, I have to constantly remind myself that, unlike me, she doesn’t—can’t—know it will get worse.
As Jewish hospitals closed across the Reich, and doctors fled, the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, founded in 1756, was kept open because there was nowhere else for Jews—or anyone considered Jewish under the Nuremberg racial laws—to go. Aryan doctors would not touch them. The ho
spital continued to train nurses (the program Valy so resisted) long after the right to carry the title Doctor was gone.
The Jewish Hospital still runs today, and, bizarrely, is still called the Jewish Hospital of Berlin, though it is in no way segregated now.
The hospital is perched in the district called Wedding, at the edge of Berlin, midway between Tegel airport and downtown; the streets around it are filled with kebab places and phone card stands; immigrants. I take a tram from Prenzlauer Berg up and then transfer to another, and am promptly lost. I wander in the bright sunshine and finally come across it. A friend of a friend has arranged for me to meet a colleague there—a cardiologist. He in turn connects me to Dr. Richard Stern, one of the remaining Jewish doctors on staff—if not the only one. Stern’s specialty, poetically, is heart failure.
Dr. Stern was born in Romania and immigrated to Germany in 1975, when he was twenty-four. His own father survived Auschwitz as a teen and would never speak of the experience; his paternal grandmother and aunt survived, but his grandfather and uncle were murdered.
“I’ve heard some stories from my father,” says Dr. Stern. We are sitting in a second-floor doctor’s lounge with brightly colored faux-leather seats. “But there are these experiences, they went so very deep and were so intense that—you know when you cook a soup with a pressure cooker? And if you open it when it’s boiling—well, you can’t. You have to wait till it cools down so there is no explosion. I’m convinced these experiences went on boiling in these people—but it was possible for them to go on living by keeping closed down. Because if you were to open it would be a kind of an emotional explosion that would sap you of your strength to live. But his second wife told me that he woke at night––sweating and shouting. He never told us what was in those dreams.”
Stern explains some of what I already know from reading. “The Jewish Hospital was the only Jewish institution in Germany when all other institutions were closed. This hospital never stopped work as a hospital; and during the war, all during the war, there were still Jewish doctors treating patients. . . . They weren’t called doctors, they were called ‘Jew healers.’ It was a multifunctional place, this hospital. It worked as a hospital but also as a deportation camp.”
He means a transit camp. When the deportations began, he says, from the train station in Grunewald, “those Jews who were sick or couldn’t travel” were set aside. The Gestapo, of course, “didn’t tell them they would be deported to be murdered. It was said it was deportation for work.” But if people told the Gestapo they were sick, they were investigated by doctors or nurses at the Grunewald train station. If a person was sick enough, he would be taken for treatment and brief convalescence at the Jewish Hospital “to make him fit for the next journey.” The doctors and nurses would cure people in order to murder them later.
The Gestapo had a station at the hospital. “It was part of the hospital,” Stern says. “It was a prison.” The Gestapo would come and ask the doctors for a list of who was fit enough to go to the camp. “And if the doctor said, ‘I’m sorry, they are not fit enough,’ or ‘I have nobody,’ [what people told me was] the Gestapo would then say, ‘Okay, maybe I take your uncle or your aunt or someone of your relatives.’”
After the war, the hospital became the center of the remaining Jewish community. The first postwar bar mitzvah was held here. Stern tells me that in 2006, at the 250th anniversary of the hospital, a handful of nurses who worked through the war came back. They told the current hospital staff stories of work under occupation—and about Dr. Walter Lustig, the Jewish director of the hospital, who ruled like a little king. He has been described as having been something of a pig, Lustig; he regularly took nurses to bed, controlling, as he did, everyone’s destiny, so that few felt they could refuse. (“We called him the Schlächter. The slaughterer,” Inge Deutschkron told me, indicating that everyone in the remaining Jewish community knew of him. She, too, spoke, with disgust, of his sexual exploits.) Eventually he took the helm of the Reichsvereinigung. At the end of the war, he disappeared. It was rumored that he was killed by the Soviets for collaboration. In truth, no one knows.
WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM
FEBRUARY 21, 1941
TO: WILDMAN, [ST. LUKE’S] HOSPITAL, PITTSFIELD, MASS.
TELEPHONE CALL VALERIE SCHEFTEL AND MOTHER BABELSBERG
BERGSTR. IMPENDING—INITIATE IMMEDIATELY RENEWAL OF
AFFIDAVITS PLUS OTHER DOCUMENTATION AND PROOF OF
RELATIONSHIP AIR MAIL DUPLICATE SHIP MAIL—CABLE TO US RE
SHIPMENT
AID ORGANIZATION ZEDAKAH
These days, unlike when Valy worked there, the hospital no longer has a children’s ward. When I ask to see what still exists, and operates, in the same manner as it did when she was here, Stern suggests we walk over to the small chapel on the campus of the hospital. It is a synagogue, nominally; there are cardboard-bound slim prayer books and small kippot waiting for those who would like to pray, though there is no longer a Torah scroll here: the aron kodesh, the small cupboard that keeps the Torah, is empty and the ceiling is peeling in places. It is no longer specifically Jewish, I suppose, more like those “prayer rooms” one sees in hospitals everywhere, or in airports. What remains is the shape of the room, a hint of its former life; on the wall there is a Jewish star, and the shape and structure and texts of a Jewish prayer hall.
In the early months of 1941, people were still leaving the hospital nearly daily, fleeing on the last trains and boats out of Germany; it was a scramble, it was awful, but it still seemed—however remotely—possible that emigration could happen. Valy clings to the hope of boarding a ship and sailing away from this nightmare.
[Spring 1941]
Dear, dear boy,
Today I have to write to you again. It is so sad that by now our correspondence has come down to an exchange of letters only on certain occasions. 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! And one can have so many experiences! 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!
But, darling, I can understand! Especially right now I really can understand as I have just had a passing experience that showed me how strongly the present can demand its right from us. But, as I said, this experience touched me only lightly and everything was nipped in the bud. It was a man who often reminded me of you. He was a bit like you, somewhat older, quieter, a little less genial, but perhaps a bit kinder. But he is not free and I, too, still do not feel free enough and therefore we did not live the experience to the fullest. Therefore, Karl, I could understand everything, although it would make me incredibly sad! What I find almost impossible to understand, however, is the fact that you don’t write about anything at all!
I have wanted to write this to you for a long time.
The immediate reason for today’s letter, however, is our emigration. As you will have learned from the cable that was sent three months ago, the matter now has become current, thankfully. Whether it will be doable, however, is another, far less simple matter. A couple of days ago we received another affidavit from Dr. Feldschuh that we will pass on immediately. Hopefully, it will suffice for the two of us! Because we do hope that dear mama and I will be able to emigrate together. Now the additional, very important question of the passage arises. It is of the utmost importance that two passages be booked on a certain vessel and for
a certain date to the U.S.A. It would be possible to deposit a down payment from the US; the rest could be taken care of from here. What is really important, however, is that they be reserved and secure places! From here I cannot judge which shipping company would be feasible. I have learned that the American line is sold out until February of 42. Starting from September, there may be places available with the Spanish–Portuguese line, but I don’t know whether this is certain. If there is a possibility via Sweden, I think this would be best, although it supposedly is very expensive. Please contact Uncle Isiu and Dolfi Feldschuh from Vienna. We have also written to both of them/please make it possible for us to get out of here, as well. Maybe you could also consult with Alfred Jospe. He cannot do anything financially, but maybe he has some good advice. He is currently trying to get some of his relatives out, and maybe he has already got some experience. I will also write to him. Darling, many, many thanks for all your effort and please, please do not get tired and let up on your efforts! . . .
Unfortunately, I don’t have much good to tell you about my work right now. A couple of days ago, alas, I returned from the course I had written to you about. It was quite wonderful! Full of youth, spirit and verve! For the first time, since Vienna, I again felt glad and young! Now it has finally come to an end, unfortunately. I did a lot of teaching there and I believe that I have become a well-respected teaching authority there—your legacy, Karl! Upon my return, I unfortunately had to learn that I no longer can continue my work at the hospital and at the seminary for kindergarten teachers due to a general cut in positions. If I do not succeed in becoming confirmed as an itinerant teacher for various retraining facilities, I will have to start working in a factory before too long.
Well, darling, this letter was not too exhaustive, was it? Now you know everything about me—really everything and honestly told. Just the way you always wanted it! And I don’t know a thing about you! Don’t you think I should know of the things that matter to you and thus also to me?! . . .
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