Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman Page A

with its enormous mansions. They are on the stretch of the Ring near Parliament, diagonally across from the lights of stately Café Landtmann. They stand there and discuss the future. I have been on the Ring dozens upon dozens of times, crammed onto trams, talking with friends, walking late at night when the weather turns warm. It is much the same as it was then, and I can see Karl and Valy there, beneath the glorious statues of the parliament, the imposing marble, alongside the electric streetcars with their peculiar distinctive smell of sweat and wood, I can hear the strange way the tram creaks and bends, like an arthritic elbow, the Austrian-accented nasal German of the recorded station-stop announcements, Stadiongasse/Parlament, Rathausplatz, Schottentor.
    They stand there together, basking in the glory of her degree, and she catches her breath, she has something important to say, she musters her courage: she wants to ask him to stay with her, to be with her, to marry her, to have a life together. But then she doesn’t say any of that; she hesitates. The moment passes. She loses her chance.
    Four days later Hitler annexes the country, and crowds fill Vienna’s Heldenplatz, a pulsating mob with hands held high, palms out. Swastikas fill the city, overnight—there is a run on the flag, there aren’t enough to go around.
    The crackdown begins immediately. Jews are forced to scrub the streets; the local newspapers run headlines, “Are we German? YES!”Their precious Augarten is taken from them within six weeks. They can no longer sit on benches; they can no longer enter parks. My grandfather joins the endless lines searching for visas, he writes to cousins for an affidavit. Does he try for Valy, too? Does she want him to? “Not all of you have to go!” an acquaintance tells my Aunt Cilli. She scoffs. She says she knew they all must leave.
    Violence tilts the city. Jewish stores are sacked. The wealthy students my grandfather tutored are looted; their fathers are arrested and sent to Dachau. Some don’t return. Jews are paraded for humiliation. My grandfather pins a Polish eagle to his cap and pretends to be a Pole. He can speak just enough Polish to render his disguise believable. Where did all these Nazis come from? Five years of what had been incrementally imposed anti-Jewish legislation in Germany was put in place in Austria all at once, in a matter of weeks. Restrictive measures were only part of the mortification of the community: the Nazis quickly began to confiscate Jewish property and art, shipping it all immediately into the Altreich , the heart of Germany, businesses are “aryanized,” taken over by racially pure business owners.
    And as my grandfather knocks on doors and cuts the lines at the consulates, Valy takes the train three hours northeast to Troppau, Czechoslovakia, leaving behind her adopted city, and her lover. She can’t abandon her mother, in another town, another country. Even if he’d asked. And it does not appear he asked. Plus—at first—returning home was an escape. Czechoslovakia was not yet occupied, was ostensibly out of immediate danger.
    Somewhere in those weeks of plotting for freedom, my grandfather began to morph into the hero who enabled his sister, brother-in-law, mother, and nephew to escape Vienna in the nick of time ; the hero that I knew. Valy began to write to him from the moment he set foot on the boat—first from her mother’s, and later from Berlin.
You should know that I bought myself a flute because I am always so dreadfully lonesome. While I don’t think that my musical productions sound very good at this stage, I am really enjoying it.
And I am practicing an awful lot so I will be able to play really well once you and I are reunited again. You love music so much! And even though it cannot be piano which you would have wanted—I don’t have the sufficient means for that in more than one respect—one can make beautiful music on a flute, as well, don’t you