Let me close for now. . . .
Please also write to Karl on occasion and find out a little more about how he is doing, what he is up to and let me know. It should really be possible to find out what is going on with him.—And now, let me close, finally!
Thousands and thousands of warmest regards and kisses.
Your Valy
Please write to us very soon!
My dear Ones:
Valy has written everything already that is worth knowing. Let me ask you from the bottom of my heart, as well, not to leave any stone unturned to try and help. . . .
I will write more very soon. Please give my warm regards to Dr. Friedmann.
Toni.
Between this letter and the next, Valy’s angriest, most bitter, something finally gives.
To:
Dr. Ch. J. Wildman
St. Luke’s Hospital
Pittsfield, Mass. U.S.A.
From:
Dr. Valy Sara Scheftel
Potsdam—Babelsberg 2
1, Bergstrasse
09-03-41
Tell me, Karl, what is going on? Who am I to believe? You and my notions of you as my friend, my companion, the man, the most important person in my life, who will remain as such even though he may, in the firm confidence of my deep bond with him, not bother with me for a long time, for whatever reason? There may be so very many different reasons and I can understand them all. Or should I believe the people around me who keep telling me that your silence could have only one reason, namely that you have forgotten me a long time ago and probably even married and—that I simply cannot fathom—did not even think it necessary to tell me about it. One of them, however, is not all that convinced, although he, logically speaking, should be convinced, as he says. He thinks—forgive me, if this sounds somewhat vainglorious—that you are my friend and therefore incapable of acting in this manner.
Karl, I ask that you tell me what I should believe. I beg you to finally wake up and remember and understand that it is simply intolerable for me to live in this state of uncertainty. Do tell me everything. Do not let yourself be influenced by pity, nor by a temporary situation or fleeting mood that may pass. Only do write to me and don’t let me believe that I meant so little to you that it is unnecessary to let me share what is happening in your life. Karl, where are you?! I beg you to write to me and let me know.
I don’t want to write anymore today. Not today and not again—until I have news from you. Maybe these letters make you tired?! And I must know first how things are with you!
Farewell! I am forever your
Valy
This—this last missive—this seems to have done something. The response her threat to stop writing inspires is the only response I have in all of my grandfather’s papers; it is a draft of the letter he sends back to her, handwritten, complete with cross-outs and false starts:
09-17-1941
My only beloved!
How can I explain that I did not answer your letters? Your letters! Your sacred letters!
Beloved, I believe that you once read a book that begins with the words: “I want to write of a generation that was destroyed by war, although it may have escaped its cannons” and want to refer to this book. This is the only explanation I can give you.—I am dead because I have died—mentally and morally. I cannot remember having laughed even once during the past three years.
Shall I tell you that I have been terribly busy? Surely, I was terribly busy, but is this a reason for not writing to you?
Shall I tell you that I had so many cares and worries that I did not find the calm and concentration to write to you? Certainly, this is true as well, but is it a good reason?
Shall I tell you that I no longer love you enough in order to write to you? How could I when I feel every moment of my life how much I miss you, how much I long for you, how dear you are to me, how much I need you—your words, your laughter and your tears your hot temper, the inspiration of your great good and innocent character. . . . When you come here, little one, you will meet so many friends whom you haven’t met before and who have not seen you before, but know you so well through my talking of you, dearest one. . . .
Why did you not threaten earlier that you would not write to me any longer? I think, it is your fault!
Darling girl, I have not neglected anything regarding your immigration, nothing at all, and I am taking all possible steps to speed up the matter. I have just received a letter from Isiu (??) and shall reply immediately.
I am a very successful physician. I have two practices, one in Pittsfield, and one in a smaller town nearby. . . . I see ca. 25–35 patients on a daily basis, I have two assistants secretaries; but, my little one, I am not happy at all! I certainly did have girlfriends and more or less serious relationships.
Darling, will you answer right away? Please write immediately and I will write to you, every time and immediately, about everything you want to know.
Beloved, I kiss you a thousand times
Karl
He is, to put it kindly, telling only part of his story. He certainly has had girlfriends. Two who were quite serious—there was Tonya Morganstern Warner, in those early days in the United States. And then he met my grandmother, Dorothy, whom he would marry in the fall of 1942—surely there were others, but those are the ones I know of. Does he love Valy? I think he does. I think she was the love of his youth, the love of his Vienna years, the years that shaped him, and he loves her as much for what she stands for as for who she is. But his inability to get her out of the Reich makes her also a source of pain, of guilt, and this makes it hard for him to know how to relate, let alone how to write, to her. What will he say, after all? That he went boating with the woman who would become my grandmother? Or that he is worried about not bringing in enough money from one month to the next? By now he knows it does not compare to what she is facing.
So he doesn’t share his women, or his real woes, with Valy. Why? Does he want Valy to keep her hopes up? To keep believing in something? He is not lying—he has done everything he could do to aid her emigration—but he hadn’t the money or the connections he needed early enough. The one window of opportunity—if it even was that—for the hundred-fifty-dollar visas, twice over, to Chile came in 1940, at a time he could not afford his own rent, when his mother was selling her last possessions. He may be established, finally—but barely. And by 1941, connections and money simply weren’t enough. It doesn’t matter—the letter he sends picks her up, lifts her spirits. At her worst moment, so far, it gives her hope.
There’s not much to be hopeful for. Though the refugees have advocates in Washington—James McDonald and Rabbi Stephen Wise met with FDR the first week of September—their detractors prevail. Breckinridge Long wrote in his diary on September 4, “Rabbi Wise always assumes such a sanctimonious air and pleads for the ‘intellectuals and brave spirits, refugees from the tortures of the dictators’ or words to that effect. . . . Of course only an infinitesimal fraction of the immigrants are of that category.” Soon the visa wranglings in Washington are no longer the problem: the Nazis substitute forced retention for expulsion.
On the first of September, 1941, Valy is forced to sew a yellow star to her coat and clothing, to stitch it carefully, to ensure it was not obscured, and that it would not fall off. A hidden star was considered sabotage, grounds for arrest. No longer could she walk unimpeded; she was now marked. Jews were being picked up in the streets. There is panic everywhere.
Tuesday evening, September 30, as they had for centuries Jews began to celebrate Yom Kippur with the Kol Nidre service.
It would be the last Yom Kippur celebrated aboveground. Hundreds gathered at the Levetzowstrasse Synagogue in the Charlottenburg district of western Berlin, words from Isaiah were carved in Hebrew over the doorway: “O, House of Jacob, Come ye, and let us walk in the light of the lord.” At the end of the services, the Gestapo confiscate
d the synagogue and turned it from a place of refuge and worship into a place of devastation and horror: a transit camp.
No longer was Germany interested in simply expelling Jews to other lands, now German Jewry would be forcibly relocated to the east. October 1941 began a push into ghettos, into an impoverished, bare existence that would make the deprivations experienced thus far seem almost minor in comparison. The east was something fearsome. The Warsaw Ghetto had already been open for a year; in the fall of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen, the special mobile military killing units, were endlessly mowing down Jews in Russia and across the Ukraine, in what would, decades later, come to be called in French the shoah par balles—the Holocaust of bullets. Vans retrofitted to pump exhaust inside, rather than out, pulled the breath from groups of Jews stuffed inside. German soldiers on leave were told not to speak of what they witnessed, but some did: the black stories then trickled into the Jewish community. Rumors abounded.
Legal immigration out of the Reich is officially cut off in October.
Valy knew that the Gestapo had begun to gather people to send them out of the Reich, but she felt protected by her work and her mother’s position. She was buoyed by my grandfather’s renewed attentions. His letter sends her into a dizzy spell of love and memory, and she takes out their experiences together like a crushed photograph, smooths out her memories, and gushes to him that their time together was beautiful, even though it—apparently—was confusing to her even in times of peace and togetherness:
Dr. Valy Sara Scheftel
Potsdam-Babelsberg 2
1, Bergstraße
To: C.J. Wildman, MD
74 North Street
Pittsfield, Mass.
10-10-41
Beloved, I did know that I could believe in you and that I was doing the right thing—despite all the skeptical people and their common sense! I am indescribably happy that I did not listen to them who thought that my clinging to you was utterly ridiculous and almost humiliating. Those who judged you like this cannot help it. They did not know you the way I know you. Dearest one, most beloved, each line and each word of your letter made me so unbelievably happy. At first, I simply could not believe that I actually did hold a letter from you, from you, in my hand! I was speechless, almost in shock! And then, everything turned bright and light and so wonderfully joyous. And I remembered Storm’s “Oktoberlied” [“October Song”]:
Do you remember? Once, many years ago, we were walking through the Prater, it was in October, and you recited the Oktoberlied for me, talking about the overcast day which we wanted to make golden. . . . We were so happy then, or, at least, I was. With you, I never was quite sure how things were. . . . This morning, when I saw this overcast, ugly, utterly depressing day, I thought in my despair that one should gild it! And just a few hours later, your letter arrived and made this day golden—as ever a day was turned golden. More than the most wonderful wines of this world could make a day golden. This is just my own little modification of Storm’s “recipe” which you applied, but the result was so overwhelming that he, Theodor Storm, surely would have been happy with your effort. Just as Professor Biener was happy with your “Matura Arbeit” [written graduation exam at the Gymnasium in Vienna] “Schiller’s Cultural and Philosophical World View.”
You are a successful physician, my darling! That, too, had to come to pass. I never doubted it even for a second. The fact that it all happened so relatively quickly, makes me especially grateful and happy. You must tell me everything about it. How do you at this stage view medicine in general and your work in this field, in particular? You write that you are not happy. Does that mean that you do not view your work and your role in a positive way? Beloved, do write me about your life, including your outer circumstances, how and where you live. Tell me about your friends and keep on telling me that you need me. I cannot hear it often enough, I’ve been missing hearing it much too long!
I am now with my mother at the home in Babelsberg. I cannot go to Berlin. Due to health reasons, however, it is good that I should be here and not in Berlin. Several weeks ago I was quite sick. I had abscessed tonsils with everything that goes with it. My overall state was pretty poor, and recovery took a long time [handwritten, on the side] *(But I am already doing very well again). My former station physician (a woman) with whom I am very friendly, thinks that the reason for my low resistance is all the drudgery in the baby home where I worked before—you do know about that? She is delighted that I have been forced to stop this work. I, on the other hand, am not particularly pleased as I, despite all of the hard grind, had the opportunity to do some medical work—something that means a lot to me. My boss had outfitted a small laboratory for me, which made me really happy. Maybe I’ll manage to get a travel permit, after all, for which I did apply. Right now, I am by and large quite content in this beautiful, quiet, secluded house—I did describe it to you earlier on, right? I read a lot, I help out a bit, and have recently begun to take English classes again. As you can see, I have not given up the hope to join you some day, although right now the situation in this respect seems very, very sad, even impossible.
Even if there were a possibility to do the expensive detour via Cuba, it would be too late because, meanwhile, German citizens between the ages of 18 and 45 are no longer allowed to emigrate. I cannot tell you how desperately unhappy I am about this!!!!
What did you try to do, my darling? Oh, but I am afraid that it all will be to no avail. And I need you so badly! I need to be with you so much. My beloved, you can do so much, why can’t you take me to you? But I know that it will not be possible.
My mother is well, considering the circumstances. She continues in her role as highly competent manager of the home. She is ubiquitous and makes the impossible possible. A few months ago it seemed that our home was filled to capacity. Then, another 10 people had to be accommodated. Over the next couple of days, new people will be arriving. She makes all of this that seems impossible, possible, and is much adored by everyone. I think this is the right place for her, as far as work is concerned, although she, too, yearns to emigrate.
My darling, I will write to you soon, as you did promise me to respond to each of my letters. Nothing could be more precious to me than your letters! You do have so many things to talk about. Please tell me everything you experienced in America. I want to live it all vicariously with you again. How I longed to be with you during all this time!
My beloved, I kiss you many, many times! You made me very happy today with your letter! A thousand thanks. I am sending you a small picture from our garden today. Don’t you have any pictures you could send me?
I love you so much! Farewell!
Your Valy
There is, of course, so much Valy wants to make golden, beyond the gray skies. Her diminished resistance to infection, surely worsened by malnutrition, her daily life “in drudgery.” On Kurfürstendamm, the main thoroughfare in Berlin, shop after shop bears the sign banning Jews. Butchers, bakers, vegetable hawkers—they, too, ban Jews now. Her joy, her desire to live vicariously through my grandfather’s successes, it’s as though she takes it all as a sign, a rainbow: despite all of the restrictions, despite the very colorless life they are leading, there is some hope. And yet even here she chides a bit, recognizes that beneath her fantasy Karl, there was a more complicated relationship—“We were so happy then, or, at least, I was. With you, I never was quite sure how things were. . . .”
Still, as happy as she is that he has recognized her once more, she is starting to believe she will never be reunited with him after all, that it is all for naught—her begging, her hope of emigration, her efforts and his. I go back to her letter from the beginning of the spring: “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. . . . What is really important, however, is that they be reserved and secure places! From here I cannot judge wh
ich 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.” The stalling of the State Department, the constantly shifting requirements, the affidavits, the monies, all met up with the lack of ships, the lack of places to go to, the inability of this group of people to buy these two seats, two berths to get these two women out of Europe. Sold out through February 1942? September 1941 was the last chance, really, to escape legally.
The first group of Jews is deported from Berlin to the Lodz Ghetto on October 18, 1941. The last train left the same day for Paris, with the last group of legal emigrants on it. It wasn’t a secret. Washington knew. An internal diplomatic memo from October 25, 1941, read: “Word has come through from Berlin to the effect that before the end of this month about 20,000 Jews are to be deported from German cities to German-occupied Poland, principally to the ghetto of Lodz.”
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