Ruth Schnell
1002 East 17th Street
Brooklyn, N. Y.
And then, suddenly: silence. My letters—her letters—end abruptly. After Pearl Harbor, when the United States enters the war, communication between Germany and the United States comes to a halt.
I wonder if I will ever find out anything more about where Valy went after November 17, 1941. Did she hide? Did she go underground? Or try? How hard was it to do?
Eight
BURGFRÄULEIN
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States entered the war, it became all but impossible to send letters between Germany and the United States. “Some tried [to write], via Switzerland,” Barbara Scheib tells me; Scheib is a researcher of quiet do-gooders, the Germans who helped, those who fed the Jews who went underground, or who hid Jews, or who found Jews hiding places—those we commonly call “the Righteous.” Mail service, she explains, along with borders and diplomatic relations, was cut off. We are sitting in the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand—the memorial to Nazi resistance, on the street named for Claus von Stauffenberg, the German army officer who was part of the plot attempt to assassinate Hitler toward the end of the war; it is the very building occupied by the German High Command during World War II. The building was preserved and it still feels, vaguely, like walking onto the set of a Nazi film, but creepier, as it is real.
Scheib and her colleague Dr. Beate Kosmala spent years working on the Silent Heroes Memorial, a project devoted to those who hid or assisted Jews in hiding. The women are of a certain type, not quite as old as my mother, but closer to her generation than mine; this material is the work of looking into their own parents’ generation. Kosmala is blond and bespectacled, she walks lightly, speaks softly; her presence is unobtrusive to the point of nearly being absent. Scheib wears her dark hair short, with blunt-cut bangs. They both wear tasteful silk scarves. It is a contrast, their work, with the building we meet in—the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand is all about the big stories, heroic tales of high-ranking military brass, aristocrats, diplomats (all men), many of them disappointed Nazis, most of them anti-Semites, who tried to kill Hitler in a coup on July 20, 1944. Scheib and Kosmala are more concerned with the silent heroism of “ordinary Germans,” the quiet righteous, who were just as often women.
“In the end,” Scheib continues, “post was only possible through the International Red Cross. Only twenty-five words were allowed. It is a poem.” Even “Aryan” Germans were annoyed by the difficulty in communicating with friends and family abroad after the war began, she says. I ask about telephone calls and they both, vehemently, shake their heads. It was prohibitively expensive to call internationally, for one, but price was secondary: Jews had been barred from owning or using phones for some time. Telegrams, too, were dearly priced. Charged letter by letter, the telegram Valy sent in the spring of 1941 would have cost her nearly a month’s salary. When I look at the telegram again, I notice something I’d overlooked before: at the bottom are the words Hilfsverein, Tzedakah—a likely reference to the Reichsvereinigung’s emigration department. The Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden was an organization created at the turn of the twentieth century to help poor and persecuted Eastern Jews who arrived in Germany escaping eastern pogroms—Hilfe means “help.” But by the early 1930s, it was helping German Jews to emigrate, providing subsidies for tickets, and paying for everything that led up to getting passage to another—safer—country. The organization aided some ninety thousand Jews in fleeing the Reich; eventually its work was folded into the Reichsvereinigung. Valy’s Uncle Julius mentions it in one of his missives, in 1940, when he and my grandfather were hoping to get the women visas to Chile. By 1941, charity was needed not just for tickets, but also to send a simple telegram. The desperation was that great, the need that strong.
Kosmala and Scheib tell me that while we—we Jews; we Americans; we American Jews—are obsessed with the who, how, and why of going into hiding, Germans have a flip side to that: the who, how, and why of helping; of eluding the system, fighting Nazism from within, of simply aiding those underground. Kosmala and Scheib want to explode the myth that it was impossible to do so, that repression was so great, the consequences so dire, that it was life threatening to step forward on behalf of Jewish neighbors. In fact, there were not always mortal consequences to aiding Jews; whereas in Poland those who aided Jews were shot, in Germany some of those who assisted their Jewish neighbors were sometimes barely punished at all. But the fear of punishment was enough to keep many out of the business of aiding their former neighbors.
At the same time, Scheib and Kosmala are quite clear that they don’t want anyone left with the impression that a large percentage of the population helped—Silent Heroes is not only a project of unearthing the righteous, but also exposing the casual cruelty of bystanders who assumed helping was out of the question. Nor do they want anyone to believe that those Jews who did survive did not suffer. Indeed, they were often the worst off, psychologically, once they emerged and realized they were totally and completely alone in the world. Nor, as well, do they want me to believe it was easy for those who managed to slip into the underground system to survive day to day, let alone until the end of the war. This last, they emphasize, is important in the case of Valy. Who would have been her support, after all, given that she was a newcomer to Berlin? Who would have come to her defense, given how often she moved and how shallow her roots? Often those below ground were aided by a dozen or more people. Whom did Valy have in this cold, frantic city?
As 1941 turned into 1942, the deportations to the east picked up pace and cruelty. But first the German manufacturing world used this slave labor, drove it into the ground, complained that this skilled labor force, so cheaply acquired, so annoying to lose, was necessary. With deportations increasing in frequency, more and more people considered hiding.
For those who were successful in going underground, the stories highlighted in the Silent Heroes memorial are not remotely, let alone universally, happy. Like Alice Lowenstein, who went from hiding place to hiding place with her two daughters, aged four and six, in an exhausting run made more so by her younger girl, who had a dangerous habit of telling strangers about the men who had come to take away her father. Alice decided to get the girls as far from Berlin as she could, and in 1944, she finally found them a place on a farm, in Weimar, about 175 miles southwest of Berlin. Alice was able to write to her children for some time, but then the war and the world began to disintegrate around her and services like the mail no longer functioned; for six months or so, there was no correspondence. Alice didn’t know it, but during that time the girls were denounced and the Gestapo brought them back to Berlin, back to their original home, to determine if the kids were Jews. All the tenants in their old building said they did not know the girls; that is, until the Hausmeister, the building superintendent, ran after the Gestapo to confirm: these girls were Jewish. With that, the Lowenstein girls were sent to Auschwitz, just months before the war ended. When their mother came to claim them, she discovered, instead, that they had been murdered.
And yet, as wrenching as Lowenstein’s story is, as crushing as it reads even just on paper, her experience is considered a success. And therein lies the complexity and incomprehensibility of survival. Thousands tried to do what Alice did. Of half a million Jews living in Germany at the beginning of the war, some 270,000 to 300,000 were able to emigrate. About 180,000 Jews were deported from Germany; the remaining 15,000 or so included those in mixed-race relationships who were “protected” from immediate deportation to the ghettos and camps of the east. In Berlin itself, once a thriving center with some 160,000 Jews, some 5,000 to 7,000 Jews went into hiding and about 1,400 survived. When we think of the millions dead, of course, we include the swath of east and south—Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Greece. But Germany itself, the heart of the Reich, had, ironically, far fewer Jews at the outset.
> But before I continue to investigate what happened to those who ducked beneath the waters of legitimacy, disappearing in plain sight to blend into the world around them, those who were able to survive despite losing food rations, and beds, and family members, before I can dig deeper to see if Valy was among those illegals, before I can even ask how she might have been a part of that system and what it would have taken to survive under false identity, I am still wondering about those last years aboveground. Especially for those who, like Valy and her mother, worked for the Reichsvereinigung—work which, for a time, protected its workers.
Endlessly bothering me was this: I knew that, like many women her age, Valy did not try to flee immediately. Instead, she remained in Europe, largely, I suspected, for her mother—whose name, at first, when I found Valy’s letters, I did not know, and whose life, at first, I had no clue how to penetrate beyond the small details. Unlike Valy, after all, I didn’t have her mother’s testimony. Over time I gathered pieces: she had been a young mother when her marriage dissolved, and then a successful businesswoman, and later the competent, caring manager of an old-age home. Perhaps, I thought, if I knew more about her, I could better understand Valy’s motivations, better know Valy’s story. Her name, at least in Valy’s letters, was “Toni.” It was clearly a nickname. It got me nowhere in official databases of the dead.
In the Yad Vashem victim database, there are 177 names of the murdered that are linked, in one way or another, with the surname Scheftel: there are alternative spellings, two f’s, an a instead of an e; there are children, including one born in 1940; there are the elderly. But as, finally, I turned my focus to Toni, I kept coming back to one listing: Hanna T. Scheftel, born on December 27, 1885, in Borszczow, Poland, and deported on March 12, 1943, to Auschwitz, on the 36th Ost (East) transport, from Berlin. The age of this Scheftel seemed closest to correct, and though she was deported from Berlin, not Babelsberg or Potsdam, she seemed the most likely to be the woman I wanted to know more about.
In the Gedenkbuch Berlins: Der Jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus—the remembrance book of the murdered Jews of Berlin—there she was again, Hanna Scheftel, née Flamm. Flamm! This was the same last name as the “Uncle” Julius writing to my grandfather. This must be her. Still, there were no clues about who she really was, let alone whether she was the woman I truly sought, how she went from Troppau to Potsdam to Berlin—and how she avoided the deportations from her own old-age home in January 1943. I wrote once more to the ITS archives at Bad Arolsen, requesting any files they might have on this Hanna or Channa Scheftel. Within a few days, I receive an e-mail with these details: “SCHEFTEL née FLAMM, Chana, born on 27.12.1885, last address: Berlin N 4, Auguststrasse 14/16.” (This building, I knew, had long been controlled by the Jewish community of Berlin, and hosted various social service agencies.) “Deported from Berlin to Concentration Camp Auschwitz by the ‘Geheime Staatspolizei [Gestapo] Berlin.’ Category: ‘Jüdin’ [Jewess].”
The e-mail continued: “Apart from the transport list we mentioned, we also hold one index card made out by AJDC Berlin”—this was the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the organization survivors once called “the Joint,” formed in the 1910s to help Jewish refugees, and which worked, financially at least, to save Jews during the war—“and another made out by the Reichsvereinigung. Unfortunately, we have no information available on Mrs. Scheftel’s further fate.”
Toni’s Reichsvereinigung card has a typed note indicating her address is Babelsberg, Bergstrasse 1, Altersheim (old-age home)—this is the address Valy wrote from, this was where she was the Burgfräulein. I am correct! This is Toni. I write to Jean-Marc, jubilant that I have connected Uncle Julius to Toni to Valy to the old-age home—I nearly shout out loud with my discovery.
On the Reichsvereinigung card, I note that under Toni’s name it first says “Kaufmann” (merchant) and then “Heimleiterin” (house manager); the Babelsberg address is crossed out, and below it, on January 16, 1943, the Auguststrasse address was written down in pencil. This was the day her old-age home was disbanded, the day when all these elderly men and women were rounded up and sent east to their certain deaths, all these Germans who could well remember a time when Jews were high-standing members of society, war heroes, not pariahs. The home, by then, had become overcrowded, but Toni, Valy writes even before the vise has closed on them, had valiantly tried to keep each member feeling cared for, honored even, until the end. But there is no mention of Valy in the International Tracing Service notes on Toni at all.
Auguststrasse 14/16 is a few doors down from Clärchens, a still-working 1910s-era dance hall once frequented by Nazi officers, with a large beer garden I often biked past. It would have been a strange source of camaraderie and boisterous activity given the tragedy and desperation just a few doors down. Built in the middle of the nineteenth century as a part of the Jewish Hospital, during the Nazi era, while there were still Jewish children in Berlin, Auguststrasse 14/16 housed a Jewish day-care center. Marion Kaplan, in Between Dignity and Despair, lays out the scene:
Mothers doing forced labor brought their children to the center around 5 a.m. The children played in the courtyard, took baths, and ate their meals at the center. “They were serious children. . . . They laughed less than others, they also cried less. It was as though they wanted to make as little trouble as possible for us,” reported a caretaker. They were probably also lethargic from malnourishment.
One day, in February 1943, the mothers returned to collect their children after their day of backbreaking, soul-destroying labor, and discovered their kids had been deported, without notice, without their knowledge; there were just the empty prams and scattered toys, the hurried detritus of a group of children gathered up willy-nilly and spirited away. The wailing of the mothers went on for hours.
Auguststrasse 14/16’s day care was called Ahawah—“love” in Hebrew. It was one of a number of day-care centers the Nazis methodically liquidated; the old and the young were useless. Jews, despite themselves, had continued to have children, though far fewer than before the war, and, of course, there was no avoiding getting old. I stand there on the street, listening to the laughter of bicyclists commuting home from work, the sounds of a nearby gallery opening its doors for night visitors, and wonder at the incomprehensible pain this street has seen.
Auguststrasse 14/16 also served as what was then called a Siechenheim, a boardinghouse for the old and infirm, as well as a way station for those factory workers who had already been listed for deportation but were deemed too important for the factory to be sent yet—a Judenhaus filled, I imagine, with dread and despair. The building has long been in a state of disrepair, enormous, decrepit, seemingly haunted, though recently it began to be rehabilitated, a project funded by the Jewish community.
When I realize that Toni lived here for some months, I head back to the building to look up at it. I go home just after, on the tram, riding through the busy streets of former East Berlin. I am not feeling well at all. I go straight from the train into bed, where I remain for hours, with my head aching and my eyes crossed from the lights I see when I have migraines.
The headache began from my pregnancy, but the idea of the abandoned toys of those long-ago deported day-care children did not help, especially as my little Jew tossed and kicked inside me. Pregnant women did not survive the roundups. They were deported immediately to the east, where many were murdered immediately, or died soon after. The world shimmered from my migraine auras; the pain closed me in, made me claustrophobic, terrified to be alone and terrified of the lights that made the pain worse. I tried to sleep.
Sleep won’t come. Eyes closed to the swirling world around me, I mull over what I know about Toni, Valy’s mother, her only friend, her albatross: I do not know much. I open my eyes in my darkened room. The Joint Distribution Committee—how did Toni have a JDC card? Did Valy have one that I didn’t find? Did the JDC try to enable her—or them—to escape? T
he organization facilitated the emigration of about 190,000 German Jews from 1938 to 1939, and then worked to help Jews in Hungary and Romania. After the war, the Joint worked to help those who had survived.
The questions keep bubbling back up: The Babelsberg home for the aged was liquidated on January 16, 1943. Neither Valy nor her mother was sent with the group of elderly. Why were Toni and Valy spared that day? What happened to Valy that day? Where did she go? For God’s sake, where is she? How did she survive? Some of the answers about who Toni was, and the work she did, come in the form of a bulky envelope from the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv Potsdam, the local state archive for Potsdam.
The archive has several records for Toni—also called “Antonie”—including a letter that spells out, in her own voice, the crushing weight of her continuous impoverishment and explains her role at the home in Babelsberg.
October 8, 1940.
In reply to your valued official communication, I politely inform you that I possess no assets with the exception of a life insurance policy, which does not mature until 1949. Since May 1940 I have been employed by the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland in the Babelsberg Home for the Elderly, 1 Bergstrasse, and my net monthly wage, in addition to board and lodging, is RM 77.52. In the last tax year, I had no income at all and supported myself from the remaining proceeds from the closing down of my household.
It is signed:
Chane Taube Scheftel, Jewess, Place of identity: Berlin, Identity number: A 438802.
Two pages later there is another explanation of her life. “Chane Taube Sara Scheftel, date: October 7, 1940. I was born on December 27, 1885, in Borszczow, and am divorced.” Her property declarations claim she has no possessions of which to speak.
Paper Love Page 25
