Paper Love

by Sarah Wildman

  Hanna’s tragedy disguised as happiness underscores something that has hovered with me these many months: The stories of these survivors were not happy stories, there were no neatly tied-up endings, and often, there were no endings at all. Survival alone did not equal happiness—unless happiness was the path that survivors chose, obstinately, like my grandfather did.

  “Correspondence, Patients A–G” offered dozens more stories from the end of the war. There are the many, many letters from the Binder family, close Vienna friends, stuck in Shanghai from 1938 to 1949 and desperate to leave for America or Palestine. They ache and scream, these letters; they are poor. Terribly poor. And they, too, want help from my grandfather: they want him to bring them to America. As awful as their experience may have been, these letters have a happier ending than some: they are scattered—a son to Palestine, a daughter to San Francisco—but they are not dead.

  These postwar letters come from my grandfather’s entire old Viennese world; hands that reached out to him from cousins and half siblings, friends and acquaintances, the remnants of a Viennese old guard of the 1920s and 1930s, a population that would never again reassemble. Angry, bewildered, tentative, weary, they wrote.

  September 18, 1946

  Dear Carl,

  I got your address from your sister Cilli, and I’m delighted to hear about you and to know how you are!

  I heard you’ve gotten married in the meantime and have a little boy. Please accept my warmest congratulations.

  If you feel like writing, I’d like to hear from you in person and learn what you’re doing and how you are. After you left, nobody heard from you, you never thought of finding out what was happening or had happened to your relatives. Don’t take this as a reproach, because even if you would like to make up for it, it’s already too late.

  Unfortunately, we had a great many victims. Our dear parents died in concentration camps, and our dear brother Alfred in Palestine passed away a year ago.

  You see, things don’t seem so jolly in our family, and that’s why I’m asking you to write to Regina and to me, so that we don’t feel so alone in the world. You know, when husband and wife are together, you can bear everything much more easily, but Regina’s husband unfortunately was traumatized by the war and is incurable. You can imagine what pain this causes my dear sister. My husband was deported three years ago, and now we have lost our oldest. Believe me, Carl, it is terrible, and I don’t know whether you can understand me. That’s why I’m asking you again to write us once in a while, it will make things easier for us.

  I would like to have some pictures of you and your family.

  With my regards and kisses to you and your dear wife and child,

  Lotte

  P.S. Write to Regina, she’ll be glad.

  Regina Hirschfeld, 17 Chesney Court, Shirland Road, London W9

  Lotte was the daughter of my grandfather’s half brother Manele. My great-grandfather was married twice; his son from his first marriage was thirty years older than my grandfather. Lotte was somewhat younger than Karl, but she was his friend and contemporary. When they were all in Vienna, surely, given her age, she looked up to him.

  My father was the boy born that Lotte mentions, and such a thing is strange for him to know—that six months after his birth, the world his father left behind was reaching out to chastise; to implore. When I read it to him, my father is fascinated but perplexed. He knew Lotte, but not that there was a rift between her and my grandfather. By the time he met her—in the mid-1950s—any rancor had long since been set aside; he remembers warmth. He certainly never knew about all that she had lost in the war.

  In 1950, Lotte settled in Lyon, France, married again, and had another child. His photo is in a subsequent letter, a small boy in a tub outdoors. “Georges” is written on the back. The next letters are far more cheerful; they speak of family and visits, and they talk of meeting in Europe—my grandfather and grandmother, at that point, had begun their biannual sojourn in Europe, and they saw Lotte in France, in Switzerland, in the United Kingdom, where her sister Regina had settled. The boy in her photographs, I realize, must be about sixty now. He has the same last name that Lotte took in her second marriage—Sudarskis. I track him down and e-mail him, this Georges. He is a money manager in Abu Dhabi, he has a home in Venice. He has done well. It takes him, literally, years to respond.

  But when he does, it is amazing. He is thrilled to hear from Karl’s granddaughter. He remembers my grandfather well—he himself went to university in Montreal—and he would come south to swim in the lake by my grandparents’ house in Massachusetts. His mother loved my grandfather very much. “I remember the tenderness with which she would speak about Karl,” he says, as we chat over Skype, echoing my father’s memory. He remembers once, maybe in the 1970s, meeting a son of my grandfather’s who spoke French. That would be my father, I say.

  He tells me his mother never spoke of the war, but as a fifteen-year-old he stumbled upon papers that suggested she had once had another name, another life. Even this is a memory he cannot quite conjure. He describes finding out she had a past husband in the way we describe events of our childhood—it is like a dream; he cannot quite remember how he knew, or what he knew, and when he knew it. He knows he confronted her, and he knows she offered only the most basic response: Yes, she said. There was another marriage. She did not invite further questioning. He thinks the first husband told her to leave Vienna without him. She traveled through Germany, to the Netherlands, and on to Paris sometime in 1939, all on her own. This much he knows for sure, it is the only thing he knows with certainty: for a very long time, she was alone.

  Later I’ll see that in the Yad Vashem digital database of victims’ names there is that of one man, Eugene Stryks, born in Vienna in 1916, whose last name is the same as Lotte’s first married name: Stryks was deported from Drancy, the transit camp outside Paris, to Majdanek, on March 6, 1943. I wonder whether this was Lotte’s first husband; if it was, he made it as far as France with her when they ran.

  Georges never pressed his mother about her wartime experiences. On some level, he says, perhaps he was too afraid of what he’d hear. More: he was too convinced she didn’t want to speak.

  “Look,” he says, “you were born in America,” and years after the war. “But in 1950, when I was born, it was only five years after that war, after that terrible war. And I would never ask questions, and my brother didn’t ask—all the children of this generation that I know never asked questions of their parents, during this period. In a definite sense they felt it was unspeakable. And I agree. In all senses of the term—it is terrible . . . it is unspeakable.” Georges, too, has never heard of Valy, never heard her name, never heard his mother mention her, though surely, in Vienna at least, Lotte and Valy would have known each other.

  So then I ask about that line—the “oldest one,” a boy—perhaps a son?—who seems to have died, and Georges is startled. He has no idea what I’m talking about. I read him the letter. He is shocked. Overwhelmed. I say that if Lotte lost a son—if that’s what that line means, unless she is referring to her older brother—perhaps she felt it was too much of a trauma to share. He is horrified by the idea. Completely shocked. We hang up uncertain, both intimates and strangers. I have a hard time reaching him again. I’m not sure he wants to hear from me. I feel terrible about having disclosed this information to him, about having made him consider the possibility that there was something even more devastating his mother had never wanted him to know. Who was I to insert myself into this narrative? This wasn’t even my story to tell.

  Yet despite this transgression, I press on. I want to know—because I know Lotte and my grandfather were close—I want to know what her sons know. When I find myself in Israel for work, sometime after that Skype call, I arrange to meet Georges’s brother, Gilbert, who made aliyah many years ago, from France. Gilbert explains that his father was one of a large Polish Jewish fa
mily that moved to France just before the war—a half-dozen brothers and sisters, leaving their parents behind. Those paternal grandparents, just like Lotte’s parents, were murdered. He thinks Lotte and his father met sometime during the war, that she found work with his father.

  I then tell this Israeli Sudarskis about Lotte’s first postwar letter, and that strange, melancholy line we have lost our oldest—and the child I believe Lotte lost. He, too, does not quite believe it; he has never heard anything like it; his mother certainly said nothing. I tell him, too, that since my conversation with Georges, I have been able to discover more of what happened to his immediate family. But perhaps because we have just met, or because our meeting is rushed, a breakfast in the center of Jerusalem, a civilized moment of poached eggs with asparagus in the upper-middle-class posh neighborhood of Rehavia, or perhaps because he is so very happy that I reached out, I don’t tell him that I have a letter from his grandparents, accusing my grandfather and great-grandmother of not helping them. It was one of the letters I first read when I began looking for Valy; it was so shocking—so devastating—my neighbor, a German journalist, who read it with me shook as he helped me decipher the impossible handwriting.

  Vienna, June 19, 1941 To Sara Wildmann

  [my great-grandmother]

  Dear Aunt,

  . . . It is directly a story from heaven, how you left me here, sick. . . . You don’t think about asking us if we are still alive. I am ashamed when other people are asking if I received letters from you to say I haven’t heard anything from you. And I don’t get any sign of life.

  . . . I had to sell everything I have so that I can survive. . . . I am here with my family and I have no clue and I am completely helpless. Dear aunt. The only thing I cannot understand is that you once had a good character. And now you have forgotten us. I am now desperate. And God should forgive our bad thoughts. And so dear aunt I ask you . . .

  It is written in a manic scrawl, with ink that bleeds through the paper. The author is my grandfather’s half brother Manele, and, accusations aside, I now know he actually had a chance to leave but didn’t take it.

  Manele’s file was among those that were found by the Viennese Jewish community—the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, or IKG—at the turn of this millennium: a collection of hundreds of thousands of pages, a strange, dusty, moldy assemblage of notes, abandoned and forgotten, in a downtown Vienna attic—desperate requests to get out of the trap that Vienna had become, official questionnaires filled out by frantic would-be émigrés, looking for exit visas and for financial assistance to leave. For over ten years, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the Jewish community of Vienna, worked to organize, preserve, and microfilm the material. In the summer of 2012, I was finally able to peer inside the holdings in the Austrian Jewish Archives and inquire what they had for the Wildmann family. Sure enough, there is a clear request filled out, stamped September 5, 1939, from Manele, almost exactly one year to the day after my grandfather left for New York.

  Manele, I see, when I go over the file at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with the help of an Austrian-American researcher named Anatol Steck, was a grocer, a merchant. Some months later I will go to visit the home address he lists on his questionnaire. The apartment is in the heart of Vienna’s posh first district, in a massive, dove-white marble building, carved with cherubs; the shop itself is nearby, on Bäckerstrasse. The grocery is now a mountaineering shop. Across the way is the Kaffee Alt Wien, which opened in 1936 as a coffeehouse. These days it is dark and smoky, with red banquettes, the walls plastered over with posters advertising past music concerts; it’s a scene of cheap beers and a crowd of late-night drinkers (it stays open well into the wee hours of the morning)—but when Manele ran his shop across the street, the deep wood of the bar would have been for ein grosser Brauner—a large espresso—and he would have had the chance to drink there, each morning, until Jews were forbidden to enter Aryan establishments. The IKG file makes very clear what would have happened to my grandfather had he not fled when he did:

  MANELE WILDMANN #38,016

  Did you learn a new trade? No.

  Do you speak other languages? German and some Hebrew.

  What is your current economic position and income? Not good. I’m destitute.

  Are you in a position to get all the necessary documents for the emigration? Yes.

  Where do you want to go? To Palestine.

  What means do you have to facilitate your immigration? Keine Mittel. [No means at all.]

  What relationships do you have abroad, especially in the country where you want to emigrate to? Ephraim Wildman, living in Petach Tikva. Son. Working in gastronomy—a restaurant— Worked at an orange plantation since 1932.

  Do you have a valid passport: No.

  Relatives?

  Daughter: Lotte Wildmann born in Vienna; profession Sales.

  Blanka born in Vienna; also in Sales.

  Then there is Josef Moses Wildmann born in Vienna, cobbler.

  Wife: Chaja Sarah Wildmann. Housewife.

  In his own words he continues:

  I have a son in Petach Tikva who has written me that he has applied for me as well as my wife and my fourteen-year-old son to come; he believes that in October he will get the permission. But considering the fact I also have two daughters age 18 and 20 whom he cannot apply for, I am now forced to approach to ask the help and advice of the emigration department and then . . . as I’m asking the emigration department for their advice because it would only be an option if we could all go together and then my son can help us with advice and action.

  I had on Bäckerstrasse a small grocery store. And that helped us to basically feed ourselves . . . but now we are able to feed ourselves only barely with a lot of distress. I have nothing to sell. I do not know whether there will be any income that might be used for the passage. We are living off our own provisions.

  On the next page it is decided: Manele and Chaja have elected to send their young son, but they will not go with him.

  Name: Josef Moses Wildmann

  Number of persons to destination: One person to Palestine. One ticket from Vienna to Palestine

  Money provided by applicant: Zero

  Still to be provided: Zero

  Current living conditions: one room, one cabinet, one kitchen. Living room bedroom and a kitchen.

  “That is where the whole family is living for 33 Reichsmark per month. That’s the rent. It says they have sublet part of it,” says Anatol, who is reading to me from the document.

  Family relationships: To remain behind: the parents and one sister.

  Paid by: Hachshara Mizrachi

  Notes by the community: [Josef] Has an elementary and basic schooling Hauptschule [trade school] and then Gymnasium. He has not earned a living yet. Father of the applicant had a small grocery store until October 23, 1938. The store was closed due to lack of stock/produce. They ate it all. The father of the applicant receives 15 m every month from the Jewish community in support and receives food from the soup kitchen for the last 8 months

  6 September 1939

  He [Josef] has luggage, and one bicycle.

  Connections to abroad: Certificate comes from the brother.

  The Jewish community interviewer of the Wildmann family—who it so happened was the same Wilhelm Reisz who commits suicide in Doron Rabinovici’s book—then adds an aside:

  Information supplied is believable. Applicant makes a good impression. The need and the precarious situation are established by the above information. Approved 6 September 1939.

  All this means, I realize: Manele and his wife, Chaja, believed they would be able to leave, but they would have only been able to take with them Josef, the youngest one. “He was applying to the immigration department for the whole family to travel together,” says Anatol. But in the end only Josef was sent to Palestine, alone. The girls, too, eventually fl
ed. But their parents were, by then, stuck. “Often the older generation was left behind,” he explains.

  My grandfather probably never knew exactly what happened to his half brother and his wife. But I do: in the last few years, all of the Gestapo files of Vienna have been scanned and placed online.

  Manele and Chaja were arrested on the thirtieth and thirty-first of July 1941. In the end, they were not even granted the dignity of dying together: Manele was sent to Auschwitz, where he died in November; Chaja to Ravensbrück, where she lived until the following June. Their Gestapo files, and mug shots, are on files placed online by the DÖW—the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. They look ravaged, worn, far older than their years; a long metal pole holds their heads up, like specimens. Chaja’s hair is messy, undone from her bun. Manele’s face looks bewildered, shot with exhaustion. Their life until deportation would have been complete misery.

  For his part, in 1950, Karl went to Vienna to see what—who—was left. The city was still digging out from war destruction. Did he look for Valy on that trip? I have no notes, I have no messages from him to say what he did or with whom he met, or even what his impressions were of the city he had left behind twelve years earlier. I only know that he then went to Israel and met the surviving cousins. Of that leg of the journey, I have photos; Israel looks dusty and hot; large areas of land I know now as suburbs of Tel Aviv look expansive, unbuilt.

  He began to patch up old relationships, reconnect with childhood friends. By this point, he had become the successful doctor Valy had believed him to be in 1941; by 1946 and 1950, he was flush enough to be able to give out small loans and donations to relatives—including money to Josef Wildmann, the son of Manele, who was still living in Tel Aviv. Affidavits were sent from one side of the globe to the other. There was contrition, there was redemption, there was, if not forgiveness, some resolution.