Paper Love

by Sarah Wildman

  It must have taken some time. There are many letters that are so angry, so bruised by what the writers have been through, that they lash out at my grandfather for having the temerity not to have experienced it beyond 1938. And they are still—unlike the letters that come later—they are still talking about the war, what they lost. It is unfair to be angry with Karl, of course, and yet what has been fair for them? And yet still, as much as I scan, no one can tell me if they have heard news of Valy or her mother.

  Tel Aviv, II/XII/1950

  My very dear Karl:

  Finally, after waiting for such a long time, I got your letter. You are making us wait too long. I was sure that you had forgotten about us. In German one would say “Out of sight, out of heart.” It has been four months. . . . I was very angry with you because you were so close to me, not just like a cousin, but more like a brother. As you know well, only little remained of our entire family. Our greatest joy is to know that somewhere, far away, on the other side of the ocean, there are close relatives of ours who show keen interest in what remains of the former large family. . . . Oh, how nice it would be to have you nearby in Palestine. That would be our greatest happiness. My advice would be to everyone to sell and liquidate everything and come to Ha’Eretz, because Israel is the only right place for Jews. . . .

  You are not mentioning anything about dear Uncle Sam and the cousins. Are they not interested in being in touch with us by letter, or do they not recognize us as relatives? After Hitler’s war, the entire Jewish world was trembling, and everybody was looking for relatives and friends. Everybody wanted to know whether they were still alive, whether they needed anything. We are not so lucky to have relatives and close acquaintances who take an interest in how we are living; they are our cousins, and that is very sad. As God is our Witness,—we are not looking for any kind of [financial] support but rather contact by letter with our own family.

  The writer is cousin Reuven Ben-Shem (born Feldschuh; Ben-Shem was a zionification of his name). As a student in the 1920s, Reuven lived with my grandfather in Vienna and studied psychology with Freud. He had spent several years in Palestine, where he had been a founder of the Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim, outside Jerusalem. He returned to Europe in the early 1920s, when he received word his father had been murdered in a Ukrainian pogrom.

  My grandfather was twelve years Reuven’s junior, also orphaned, and they were very close. Reuven went on to work in Poland—as a journalist, as a writer, as an editor. He married a musicologist named Pnina, and together they had a daughter named Josima, who was a piano prodigy. Pnina encouraged them to stay in Poland, even after the Germans invaded.

  Late on a Friday night in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, a few days after I met Gilbert Sudarskis, I find myself at a Shabbat dinner with Reuven’s family. The guests have moved from the table to a sagging leather couch, an array of liquor lined up on the coffee table. Our host, Kami Ben-Shem, Reuven’s son born after the war to his second wife, goes into a backroom and brings out a selection of crumbling yellow paper. The first page, which is kept in a plastic sleeve, is an announcement for a concert. It is dated at the top “15 March 1941”; “Josima Feldschuh,” it says, above the image of a rosy-cheeked girl with a bow in her hair, sitting at a piano, and then, below her photo, in Polish, “11 year old piano virtuoso.” The program promises selections from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, a concert held at Rymarska 12, in the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto.

  Reuven faithfully recorded everything that he saw, everything he experienced, in a diary. “The dead are naked,” he wrote. “When someone had just starved, they cover him in wrapping paper and lay him down on the sidewalk, and at night his friends, or just beggars, walk out, and undress him completely, and leave him all naked with no shoes, no dress or even underwear.” Josima, Kami’s half sister, was smuggled to the Aryan side just before the Warsaw Ghetto uprising took the German army by surprise. Her father had feared for her safety during all his months in the ghetto.

  January 1942. There’s talk recently of the vandals murdering the children and the blood of all the fathers hardens in their veins as they listen to such whispers. . . . I returned home and I am all shaken. My child is sleeping, I am looking at her. My eye deceives me and I don’t see her. She disappears, the bed grows empty. I was frightened. I bent over and held her so forcefully that she woke up, quizzical and afraid. She calmed down as she saw me, and her face radiated with a lovely smile. She sent me a kiss by air, turned over to her side, and fell asleep. Inside me fritters a demon of fear.

  This prescient parental anxiety jolts me. We all sit and watch our children sleep, I think, reading this. We watch them and wonder how to protect them from the outside world, and our world is so much less imminently dangerous, there is no comparison.

  And Reuven’s anxiety was borne out: Josima died of tuberculosis some weeks after she went into hiding; soon after, her mother, Pnina, took her own life. Only Reuven survived. After the war, Reuven never spoke of Josima, but her framed photo hung like a ghostly mezuzah in the doorway to his home, so each member of Ben-Shem’s new postwar family would see her as they came in and as they went out.

  We, the American cousins, knew little to nothing of Josima—although we vaguely knew Reuven had lost everyone, and that he had named his postwar son Nekamiah, “Revenge of God” or “Revenge! God!” His second marriage was to another survivor, with an equally harrowing tale—this was Ruth, who saw her own sister be murdered before her eyes; she herself jumped from the train to Treblinka, leaving behind a half-dozen siblings.

  My grandfather’s Viennese world was so embittered, so angry—at their fate, but also at him for having missed the worst of it. He got off easy; it is the subtext of their letters. It was a bitterness that transcended generations, seeped through to our modern, easier lives.

  I spent a weekend with Kami, as Nekamiah is known, his wife, Shely, and their daughter, Sharon, in Ramat Gan, when I was twenty and Sharon nineteen, she and I lying on thin twin mattresses, plotting ways to meet soldiers and then slipping out to go dancing to American music in Israeli clubs. But then I returned, some weeks later, during Pesach, and I felt the family mocked me, assumed I had no history, no knowledge of Jewish life, because of growing up in America. “Do you know what anti-Semitism is?” Kami asked during the Seder, in front of his guests; then he asked if I understood the Seder plate, if I had been to a Seder before. I didn’t understand, then, that it wasn’t a mocking so much as a real question. I didn’t understand at all—the Israelis were chiding me in a similar way to how Karl’s cohort chided him. They thought we were so smug and secure in America, while they suffered in Europe or in Israel. That we didn’t help, that we had no idea how it all really happened then, what the Israelis had lived through, now, what we benefited from by their very presence in the Jewish state. They pushed me to agree to move to Israel for good, I couldn’t possibly be happy, or safe, in America, as a Jew. It was too much. I went in another room and burst into tears.

  Our family was destroyed, they said. We have no one but each other. But I didn’t hear that; instead, I heard them mocking my Hebrew, I heard their intimations that I didn’t know anything about Judaism, let alone Israel. I felt unwelcome. In my journal I write of my tears, and that I did not spend the night that night, nor would I on any subsequent night. I didn’t want any part of their Israel, the Israel that seemed to look only backward, toward the persecution that had ejected us from Europe. I stopped contacting them.

  But when I meet them now, a decade and a half later, I am chagrined. They are all older, the parents, the children. Sharon now has two girls of her own. It is Shely, her mother, I see first. “I remember you cried,” Shely says upon greeting me, recalling that I fled the table, recalling my tears. “You were homesick I think?” And they all feel so much less threatening, and so much more important, than I had realized so long ago. “Your grandfather was so warm,” Kami says to me, over di
nner. “He was such a presence in my childhood.” He says my grandfather came to see them, again and again, throughout the years. I was wrong in my youthful assessment of him. Kami, like me, cannot fully grasp what these men went through. We have all lived easier lives.

  Sharon is chagrined that my experience with them, at twenty, was so raw. “Maybe this can be a bit of a tikkun, a reparation, a balm,” she says of our meeting now, reconciling over the achievements of her grandfather—we meet so I can write a story about this amazing diary, this unknown document that he smuggled with him from Warsaw to Tel Aviv—and the stories of our past. We are walking on the boardwalk at Namal Tel Aviv, the Tel Aviv port. It is sunny and lovely and the sea stretches out before us. Children are everywhere, running and screaming. I am pregnant, again; it seems every other woman around me is as well. There are balloon-blowing clowns and bicyclists, and dozens of restaurants. We get pomegranate juice squeezed for us, and sit. I tell them about my search for Valy, about the photos and letters that were kept for decades, reminders, painful pressure points. And I ask Kami—was Reuven happy? And Kami takes a breath and looks at his wife and then at the table. He is a big man—I remember this from when I first met him—tall with a mass of curls that have grayed in the years since we last met. But the question seems to cause him to shrink. He smiles slightly when he looks back at me, and says he is not sure that his father—if any of them—was ever happy, that any of them ever could truly be.

  I’m not sure. My grandfather, I think, really did live a happy life. He insisted upon happiness, almost, perhaps, as his own revenge. Nevertheless: he kept the letters that reminded him of when he was powerless. Of when there was nothing to be done.

  As I sit in an open-air restaurant with Kami and Sharon and Shely, I look out over the sea. And I realize one thing is glaringly absent from these later letters, from when the 1940s turn into a new, more peaceful decade and the requests for money and for visits are met with affirmations—Yes, I can help, Karl writes again and again, Yes, I will send money, Yes, I will come to Tel Aviv, to Switzerland, to France. He hears from many, many people. But the name of Valy Scheftel is no longer mentioned anywhere. She simply disappears from the correspondence.

  Thirteen

  VIENNA INTERLUDE

  I am back in Vienna. It’s the summer of 2012 and I have an assignment from Travel & Leisure that fills up my days with tours of restaurants and shops, neighborhoods and activities, but in the spaces in between, it also gives me the latitude to search—and think—a bit more, about the city of Valy and Karl. I set out early each morning, to walk. Crossing the plaza in front of the Rathaus, the City Hall, one day, I am overwhelmed by a tremendous feeling of good fortune: it is a privilege to know this city well, to have close friends here, to feel I—if not belong, exactly, that I feel at ease here, despite everything.

  In the second district, I pause and look out across the Donaukanal toward the U-Bahn station Rossauer Lände; I have photographs of Valy and Karl at this very spot; she is pushing her hair back and smiling into the wind, he is contemplative, their faces smooth, unworried and young.

  I walk once more to the places she mentions in her letters—Heinestrasse, the Augarten. A Saturday farmers’ market bustles in suddenly hip Karmelitermarkt, and I wander through, sampling produce from vendors. I sip coffee in one of the newer cafés, and then head toward my grandfather’s old block on Rueppgasse. For the first time I notice a name next to his apartment number. I debate ringing the bell, then don’t.

  I have a strange relationship to Vienna; I’ve been many, many times now and, somehow, I love it. I love the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings set against the sky when the weather is fresh and clear. I love the endless number of Kinos, the 1960s-era cinemas, and the old coffeehouses. I love wandering the city alone at night, from the glass Palmenhaus outside the Albertina Museum through the first district, by foot or taking one of the rent-a-bikes with my friend Georg, together careening past the Museumsquartier in the seventh district. I love the ridiculous surfeit of cultural venues, the Volksoper, the Staatsoper, the Burgtheater. I have a memory connected to each—this is where I saw the Nederlands Dans Theater with Alice and Ingvild; this is where I saw some strange, avant-garde dance with Karin; this is where I stood in back for the first time, mimicking my grandfather and his friends, at the Musikverein; this is where I went to learn to waltz; this is where I sat until far into the night, over wine and cigarettes, with Sophie; this is where I danced with Andrea. And at the same time my relationship to the city remains, inevitably, fraught. I am constantly swept back up into the drama of this lost love, these lives cut short, and this unresolved pain.

  In Washington, this summer, Anatol Steck, at the Holocaust Museum, the purveyor and translator of the long-lost Jewish community files, connected me to a half-dozen Viennese academics I’d never met before this trip. So, with Anatol’s introductions in hand, I race across Heldenplatz, where Hitler first announced the Anschluss to adoring Austrians. This day it is packed with a beer festival; dozens upon dozens of women are in dirndls, their breasts pushed up high, their Austrian nationalism unabashedly forthright, their hair in braids, their men in lederhosen. I am late to see Doron Rabinovici, whose book Eichmann’s Jews, about the role Jews played, their complicity, or their lack of agency, in their own destruction in this city, has just been translated into English. He tells me about how dour he found it to move to Vienna, in the 1960s, from Israel, where he was born, a bit like going from the Technicolor scenes of The Wizard of Oz into the black-and-white. Then, as we talk about dead Jews, and live Jews, and Jewish life—suddenly, as though we ourselves are in a film about Jewish Vienna—up comes Ruth Beckermann, the best-known living Viennese Jewish filmmaker, to say hello to him. There is a very, very small cast of characters in the active Jewish world of Vienna.

  But it is a young academic whom Steck insists I meet, named Tina Walzer, who leaves the deepest impression. Walzer asks me to meet her at the Währinger Jewish cemetery just past Nussdorfer Strasse, on the other side of the Gürtel, the belt that rings the periphery of the city. It takes me some time to find the cemetery entrance, but when I do I am overwhelmed. I walk in alone—I am early, or she is late—and Währinger is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in person. It has been nearly entirely reclaimed by nature. There are branches and bushes and trees and brambles and a path—is that even a path?—packed with gray mud, cracked and dusty. Things seem to crawl up my bare legs, get inside my sandals—I need boots to be in here. But it is not the overgrowth that gets me: the graves themselves are in various stages of decay and disarray and vandalism, they are broken in two, in twelve, in hundreds of shards of clay.

  There are pieces of bone on the ground—a femur, a bit of skull. There are fully open graves crawling with ivy. There are smashed headstones. Our history is often served to us so sanitized, so clean. This is decidedly unvarnished. This reminds me of a story that sent me with archaelogists in Spain to uncover Spanish civil war mass graves. It is an open wound.

  Despite myself, I am overcome. My eyes, my throat, burn. When Walzer arrives I have tears running down my face. I say, “I didn’t realize it would be so bad,” which I immediately wish I could retract, as she has worked hard to better this space. On my tape I can hear my sniffling, my hurried attempt to pull myself back together.

  Walzer explains that the cemetery was opened in 1784 and closed in 1885—it was open to all Jews, not just prominent ones—and it once encompassed a far larger area—she points to high-rise white buildings a few hundred feet away, public housing, she says, that stands on what was hallowed ground. “There were thirty thousand graves,” she tells me, “but you only see about eighty-five hundred tombstones now.”

  A very prominent garden architect was employed here just after World War I, and this was once a marvelous place, a park. “It was well kept until 1938—until the National Socialists took over. Then the gardener was killed and no one ever showed up ag
ain. No one else was interested. It was totally forgotten.”

  I ask about the desecration—the split stones, the open graves, the bones. Walzer says all this stems from just after the Anschluss. It took place while Karl and Valy were still here. The graves were exhumed, in part, after Hitler spoke to the adoring masses at Heldenplatz; the Naturhistorisches Museum took the skulls from these graves for racial profiling, to display the differences in the Jewish skeleton. Further: this holy land was sold off in parcels when the Jewish community was forced to raise money for their own deportation. Money raised in these fire sales was used to pay for the trains that took the Jews to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, among other camps.

  Walzer points to a building in the distance. Twenty-five hundred graves were once on that land, she says. A bulldozer “went into the cemetery and took the soil—with the bones—and this soil and bones were used to repair the streets of Vienna and around Gürtel Strasse, all in front of Westbahnhof—the train station. I want a marker there, because when you get out of the train, what do you step on? The cemetery.”

  When I marvel that it has remained so overgrown, that the bones and the open graves still stand there, as though we have stepped back in time, she sighs. “In fact it is relatively well kept now,” she says. “I had to clean the whole place on my own. No one was willing to pay for that.” There is not enough money, the Jewish community has struggled with infighting, with what to do with this destroyed space. They are stuck: to totally clean up the desecration will take away the visual impact of seeing the destruction wrought by the Nazi occupation. But to leave the cemetery as it is renders it unsafe for the general public to enter, ensures it will stay hidden, forgotten, forever. Walzer regrets, in some ways, having taken on the task at all, and yet I can see what drew her here, what made her feel someone had to do something.