Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind Read Online Free

the world?
    Either way, what the box showed me didn’t square easily with his public persona—which was one of luck and joy and endless good cheer. His photos are cocky and insouciant; he looks, at times, like he is running for office. But this is uncharitable. As I researched his story, and the history of those he had left behind, I came to understand it was not fake, his happiness, his outlook. It was not a veneer. It was the very thing that kept him alive.
    That first night, spreading the letters out on my parents’ dining room table, I pulled out a folded, crumbling, yellow piece of paper. “Dr. Valerie Scheftel born 4 November 1911” was typed at the top, along with an address outside Berlin: “Bergstrasse 1. Potsdam.” Below that, my grandfather’s office address, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It was dated 1943. Stapled to the top corner was a small square of white paper, with my grandfather’s scrawl. VALY was written across the top and, beneath it, HIAS ,the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, an organization, I knew, that helped Jews immigrate, and that later searched for survivors and tried to arrange family reunifications.
    Two photos emerged out of another envelope. They were stagedfor a photographer. The woman in them was clear-faced and smiling slightly, a modest gap between her front teeth, hair cut at her jawline, wavy and thick. Her eyes, in one, looked directly at the camera, under thin, natural eyebrows; she had on what appeared to be a nurse’s cap. She wore no make-up, no jewelry, had none of the overly stylized look of other women’s photos of the era, and yet had clearly taken care with her appearance. In the second photo, she was bareheaded, looking into the corner away from the camera, her eyes creased like she’d been told a joke. She looked lovely, pretty, without affect, without adornment.

    Then a letter:
Berlin, July 6, 1940
My beloved only one, my boy!
You will be with me in this world! This one sentence in your last letter stays with me all the time, wherever I am; I can hear it, see it and feel it. Always! When I am doing what I’ve been doing all these days, when I am dressing the children’s wounds, when they call out to me at night, when I cannot go back to sleep afterwards and when I am sitting by the window, sick with longing. Always your words—“you will be with me” are comfort and torture at the same time, because of the question: WHEN will I be with you? Please tell me, beloved, when? I do not know the answer, and the consulate has only a vague idea of 1–2 years, meaning an eternity, unimaginable, inconceivable—equal to a hundred years to me, who must be with you within the shortest imaginable period of time, right now and immediately. Now the third summer without you begins.
    She was the girl from my grandfather’s photo album. Valy. The two pictures—like the funny folded photo note—were taken when he was already in America; she was writing to him from Germany, she had left Czechoslovakia and made it as far as Potsdam. She was the girl he’d left behind.
    My grandfather had kept these papers and photos and letters, mislabeled, away from my grandmother, close to him, a reminder, a memento. Why? Who, really, was this woman? Had she found her way to safety with his help? Or without it? Had he kept her words out of love? Out of guilt? Both? As a quiet means of remembrance?
    And then I wondered: Could I find her? Would knowing her explain something of my family’s story to me, fill out the myth of my grandfather? Or if I could not find her, if she were lost, murdered among all those murders, could I rescue her from obscurity? Grandiose as it sounded, it also seemed, strangely, achievable in the face of the enormity of the horror. If I could bring one person’s name back, wasn’t that a small victory? In that moment I decided that, of all the people of the box, it was Valy I wanted to find, Valy I would search for—that I would begin a journey to understand her