On January 18, Ernest crept back to his parents’ apartment for provisions. There he ran into an elderly woman from his old building. She told him that deportation vans were on Hans and Valy’s block.
It was a bitterly cold day in the bitterest month of the year. Ernest bundled up and raced over to Brandenburgische Strasse. The furniture van used to collect Jews like a dogcatcher’s vehicle was parked right in front of number 43. There were, Ernest knew, many Jewish apartments in that building, both in the front house and in the back. He knew Hans was at work, but not Valy. He had to try to reach her—otherwise, how would he ever be able to face Hans?
The apartment was on the fifth floor. He ran up the steps and rang the bell. When the door opened, a Gestapo officer stepped out. He demanded Ernest’s identification papers and began questioning him. From the door, Ernest could see no one in the apartment. The officer pocketed his papers and told him to leave, but to come and see him at Gestapo headquarters the following day. Ernest tried to look past the officer—the doors were open, but he saw no one, not Valy, not her neighbors. He was sure she was out.
Back on the street, Ernest positioned himself on a corner where he could spot anyone coming or going. He planned to intercept Valy. But an hour and a half later, the van had left and there was still no sign of her. Panicked and half frozen, he ran to catch Hans on his way back from the S-Bahn train, having finished his shift for the night. The two men jogged to the building, sheltered by darkness; it was now night.
They entered the courtyard and looked up; a thin band of light beamed out from under the blackout shades of Hans and Valy’s apartment. Valy, they agreed, relieved, must have come home after the vans had left, after Ernest had left his post. Together they sprinted up the stairs. At the fourth floor, suddenly, Hans paused. Let me go on alone, he told his friend. Wait for a signal. Then he continued, mounting the last flight of steps alone.
From his vantage point on the stairwell, Ernest saw Hans put his key in the door. But, before he could turn it, the door opened, and a tall, older man in civilian dress was in the doorway, backlit. “Who are you?” he shouted down to Ernest.
Ernest flew down the stairs three at a time, out the door, into the street. He didn’t look back; he just ran and ran and ran and ran. Panting and spent, when he caught his breath, blocks from Brandenburgische Strasse 43, he realized what had just happened. He was free. No one was chasing him. And he was completely alone.
Twelve
WHAT REMAINS
Hans and Valy had the foresight to buy fake papers. They married in time to save her from the liquidation of the Babelsberg old-age home. But they waited one day too long to go underground. The Gestapo agent waiting at 43 Brandenburgische Strasse took Hans with him.
Together, Hans and Valy were held under atrocious conditions at the transit camp on Grosse Hamburger Strasse, with hundreds of others, until January 29. The deportation process had been stripped of any vestige of humanity by then. There was no longer any furniture in the building at Grosse Hamburger Strasse. Now there were only fetid mattresses on the floor, and straw for those not lucky enough to have a cushion. There were bars on each window; floodlights illuminated the grounds; armed guards with orders to shoot escapees kept constant watch. Privacy had disintegrated; doors had been removed from the few toilets. It was here, on January 27, that Hans and Valy were forced to sign over the rights to all of their property to the German Reich, a bizarre formality that would set in motion a slow-moving but well-orchestrated dismantling of their home and the careful looting of their remaining worldly possessions.
From their transit camp, Valy and Hans were taken not to Grunewald, where so many of the rest of the city’s Jews had been sent before them, but to the Putlitzstrasse train station, in the Moabit area of Berlin, now known as Mitte. On January 29, along with 1,002 others, they were shoved aboard a closed cattle car bound for Auschwitz. The records the Gestapo kept of that day are very precise. On board were sixty-four children age twelve and below, fifty teenagers between ages thirteen and eighteen, 348 men and women between ages nineteen and forty-five, and 386 people between forty-five and sixty years old. The rest were the elderly and infirm. The train left at 5:20 in the afternoon and traveled for seventeen and a half hours through the German and then the Polish countryside. It arrived “on time” at the Auschwitz train station at 10:48 the following morning. Upon arrival, those who survived that terrible journey—and many died in transit, their bodies dropped to the floor beneath the feet of their former neighbors, their fellow Jews—were pushed onto what was called the Alte Judenrampe, the Old Jews’ Ramp, at the Oświęcim freight station, between the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, for the selection. (The Birkenau selection ramp so often depicted in Holocaust movies and testimonies had not yet been constructed.) The group was then marched, in columns, to Birkenau.
On the morning of January 30, 140 men and 140 women were chosen for work from Valy’s train. Striped prisoner pajamas replaced clothes; hair was brutally shorn; arms were crudely tattooed with a number. Those were the fortunate. The other 724 men, women, and children who left Berlin on the 29th of January did not receive a tattoo, or camp number, or uniform. Those who had survived the journey were merely methodically stripped of their remaining earthly possessions and then immediately murdered by gas.
Memorial at Grunewald Station, Berlin.
Toward the end of my first stay in Berlin, still pregnant with Orli, I took the S-Bahn train to Grunewald. The station serves the eponymously named pretty suburb-within-the-city known for its large park. The S-Bahn 7 train rushes through every ten minutes. There is a third track, or Gleis, that is easily overlooked. As you descend from the S-Bahn lines, you see signs indicating Westkreuz, back toward town, or Potsdam, in the other direction, and then there is Gleis 17. As you ascend the stairs for 17, you see two long metal lanes and a track that seems, at first, no different from any other. But the platform is cast from steel, and every two feet is a date, a number, and a direction. It looks like this:
12.1.1943 / 1190 Juden / Berlin–Auschwitz. 12.1.1943 / 100 Juden / Berlin–Theresienstadt. 13.1.1943 / 100 Juden / Berlin–Theresienstadt.
The tracks stretch out into the distance, covered with vegetation in places but still totally visible. The memorial covers every deportation from this city; it lists the numbers sent and the days on which each of the fifty-five thousand Jews deported from Berlin was sent away. More Jews left from Berlin than from all of Belgium.
I was completely alone there that day, save for the little Jew inside me, and through the trees I watched the S-Bahn trains rushing back and forth a few yards away, the distance between normal life and terror just a few feet and sixty-five years.
But that sunny late September afternoon at the S-Bahn station in Grunewald, I didn’t yet know that, as alone as Valy had been, she was not nearly as alone as I’d once believed. For twenty-four days before that train trip, she was married. For twenty-four days, she had lived with a man who cared enough to try to rescue her, who didn’t want her to be alone in this pitiless city, who couldn’t let her be sent away. On the twenty-fifth day, they were deported together.
After the war, when the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen was first set up, when Europe was still smoldering, and buildings in nearly every major city across Germany were still in ruins, Jews, weary, nearly destroyed, across the Continent, in America, from Palestine to Australia—they all tried to find one another. Valy’s world, too, began to reconnect, asking if anyone knew anything about where she—or her mother—might be. Hope, tentative, uncertain, not quite crushed, remained.
At this point my grandfather was finishing his own tour of duty—he had enlisted, hoping to serve in Europe; after all, he spoke several European languages. Instead, he was sent to the Pacific theater, where he served in a MASH unit at the front. I have photos of him, standing on a temporary wood platform, afloat in a sea of mud, a pistol on his hip, outside
army tents. He spent a year overseas, working as a surgeon; he wrote a paper, “Active Immunization Against Malaria.” It won the Henry S. Wellcome Medal for 1946, from the Association of Military Surgeons, as the best paper on the contributions of the World War to the advancement of medicine. Dozens of letters poured in from around the country, congratulating him and asking for reprints of his scientific work. The medal, and the notes, were together with the original box marked “C. J. Wildman, Personal.” I found it the same night I discovered the letters. But, like everything else in that period of my grandfather’s life, his time in the service was very vague, all broad strokes, all bright—he enlisted, rose to the rank of major, served in his own profession—medicine.
Karl and Dorothy Wildman with Cilli and Carl Feldschuh, my grandfather’s sister and brother-in-law, around 1946.
Working in a frontline hospital as a surgeon must have been grueling. There were always rumors he had been very ill at some point, though no one knew exactly from what, or where he recovered. Instead, we heard cheerful stories, like one about how he saved a young (Jewish) soldier’s life in triage who turned out to be my grandmother’s best friend’s brother (really—the thank-you letter was also in the box). I write to the National Archives requesting information about Karl’s military service and I am told my grandfather’s files were burned in a 1973 St. Louis fire that destroyed thousands of army records of the era. They can offer me nothing, other than proof that he served.
As his time in the service ends, he was starting to hear from—and reach out to—his European world once again.
The letters in my “Correspondence, Patients A–G” box that came as the war began to wind down are often just as terrible to read as those that arrived as the war began. Some are angry; some are supplicating. Bruno Klein, once my grandfather’s closest friend, writes thanking him for an affidavit and letters of support he has provided; he shyly inquires whether the embers of their youthful brotherhood can be fanned into adult friendship.
Most of all, the tone of your letter pleased me very much: it brought back memories of young friendship—despite everything. I am sure that I will feel at home in the US much more quickly than I ever did in Switzerland. Do you still have contacts with “the old guard”? Probably, one has the wrong impression of the distances involved—Zwicker in Los Angeles, Bobby Weiser in New York etc.
He sounds so tentative, so formal—but then again, it is twelve years since they have seen each other. A lifetime. They left each other as twenty-six-year-old recently graduated students, and here they were thirty-eight-year-old men; they had lived through war, they had lost everything they had ever known, they had started their lives again, and again. My grandfather had been to the Pacific and back; Bruno had remained a refugee in Europe. Bruno will spend his life shuttling between New York and Switzerland, never quite at home anywhere. They will rebuild their friendship—I have their letters stretching until the 1980s, where the two men, at that point well into their seventies, joke about Kurt Waldheim, the Holocaust, American Jews, pathos, and memory.
But Bruno’s hopeful overtures are nothing compared with the letters of those who knew Valy and searched for her, back in her hometown.
“At last peace has arrived after 6 difficult war years,” begins one, mailed October 25, 1945.
In spite of the beautiful word “peace,” there still is no peace, the innocent and guilty equally being subjected to terrible suffering. I keep waiting for our beloved Valy and her Mama. Knowing that she is alive would be the happiest day in my life. I would be happy to give her the items, which I safeguarded and remained intact throughout the Russian occupation. Also, there is one of your pictures, which I safeguarded together with the rest of the items and pictures. It was painted by Professor Morino. I would be delighted to hear from you. . . . 2 years nothing from Mrs. Scheftel and Valy. Now I have let you know what’s most important.
This was Maria Richterova, author of a half-dozen letters, written in Sütterlin script, an old-time written German that I have to track down special interpreters to read. She is a Sudeten German in Czechoslovakia, and a—what? A neighbor of Valy and her mother in Troppau? A former maid? It is unclear, never explained. Maria writes, increasingly anxiously, about her uncertain future: she is about to be expelled, along with twelve million other ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere; they are all about to be resettled, brutally, outside the only country they have ever known. She claims to have held on to all of Valy’s possessions that were not taken along with her to Berlin.
Her letters are wrenching, lamenting her lost neighbors, and ruing her current situation. “Foreign items safeguarded by locals are not supposed to be confiscated, but everything is seized anyway, and nobody will ever see any of them again,” she writes in another letter. “Therefore I am asking you, Venerable Doctor, to help me to continue safeguarding these items and also put in a word in favor of our things. After all, the British and Americans are in power.”
They are so sparse, her letters, and yet so full. It is as though she wants to argue to someone—if anyone will just listen!—that she did well by Jews, she tried, she hoped, she prayed, she kept their things, she did not loot! she plans to return them! Was she telling the truth? Had she really done these things out of altruism? Could Valy or her mother—or their neighbors—have truly believed they would really return to Troppau after the war? Of this I don’t know.
Maria wants to know from my grandfather what she should do, and if he can help her. “To be able to hand those over to our beloved Valy would count among one of my happiest hours, because she was the best and noblest human person whom I have ever known.”
She writes again and again, her situation worsens. “Yesterday I walked 28 kilometers on foot to the district government agency asking them to release to me the items belonging to our beloved Valy, her beloved mother and you, so I would be able to take them with me during resettlement, but they bluntly refused . . . if the Venerable Doctor were to write to the district government . . .”
Perhaps Maria saw this as her own opportunity—as her letters continue, the only clear thing is her own need:
Dear Venerable Dr. Wildmann,
I just got word that the families have been informed, how much they will be allowed to take along for resettlement. It is so little, that one can carry it with one’s bare hands. Dear Dr., I would be forever grateful, if you could put in a word for us and our relatives with the powers that be belonging in the victorious countries, as all of us were opposed to fascism, after all, and I would be very happy not to leave here like a pauper and be allowed to take along enough for minimum household needs.
Her naïveté put too much faith in my grandfather’s abilities to negotiate, on her or anyone’s behalf, with the new Czech authorities, with the occupying Allies; but her anxiety was totally justified. There were death marches of Sudeten Germans; some three million of them were not just expelled but vigorously, aggressively persecuted in the months following the war, a stain on the Czech relationship to Europe that extended until the early part of this century. Thousands died on the marches away from their homes that Maria describes. I can’t find any further information on her—and her last name, I’m told, is so common as to make it nearly impossible that I ever would. Her letters are a microcosm of the Sudeten German postwar experience, a mini drama that unfolds from 1945 through 1946 and then fades away.
So I know this: in 1945 into 1946, Maria let my grandfather know that Valy had not, at the very least, returned to Troppau. But then again, no one was going “home”—if home was Troppau or Vienna. Perhaps my grandfather still held out hope that Valy and Toni were in a displaced persons camp somewhere in Germany. There were so many who were.
When I first started to think about Valy and Karl, a Holocaust historian directed me to watch an episode of This Is Your Life broadcast in 1953. The honoree was a young and beautiful woman named Hanna Bloch Kohner. She
has a slight accent, is dressed gorgeously, like a sketch of a 1950s Chanel model, with a fitted jacket, white gloves, and full skirt. At one point in the broadcast, the announcer intones, in that distinctive voice, “Looking at you, it’s hard to believe that during seven short years of a still-short life, you lived a lifetime of fear, terror, and tragedy!” At the end of the broadcast, there is a special guest—“your brother, Hanna . . . The last time you were in touch with Gottfried was in a Nazi concentration camp nearly ten years ago. Now here he is, from Israel! Your brother, Dr. Gottfried Bloch!” And Hanna begins to weep and weep, overwhelmed with an emotion well beyond the show’s normal scope.
It was the first time anyone had seen a Holocaust survivor on television. The brother is the most extreme, but actually, all of Hanna’s “long-lost” friends hail from her seven years of internment—in Westerbork, in Theresienstadt, in Auschwitz, in Mauthausen—and the period just after the war when she wandered Europe, stateless and in shock, until an old boyfriend, who, like my grandfather, had fled Europe in 1938, shows up at her door, in a U.S. Army uniform, a knight in shining armor. Eventually, they marry.
It is shocking to view the show now, in part because she was so very young, so lovely. Our survivors had always been wrinkled and old. But in the early 1950s, they were still young, even though terribly, terribly scarred. Hanna Block Kohner had lost so much that This Is Your Life did not remotely touch—her first husband was murdered, she terminated a pregnancy to save her own life. Who is assembled here for her, really? Who could the producers produce to represent her past? It is a weak, random group of the strays who survived. Not her parents, murdered in camps. Not her other friends—all are dead. And yet they describe her time from camp to camp—You were down to seventy-three pounds!—as though it were a time in finishing school.
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