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

philosophers and historians and sociologists. We are in love with our lives and our luck; money for nothing; money to sit and think and write. I have a small office in the Institute’s building that faces the Donaukanal. I am giddy with lack of sleep and intellectual pretention. My grandfather, I think, would have been proud. In fact, in part, I wonder if I am performing for him, or his memory, when I take the train to Budapest in the snow, when I fly to Paris for a week of reporting, when I walk the streets of Vienna, alone. I have conversations with him in my head; I long to introduce to him my adult self, long to be able to say I am following his model, loving his city.
    I’ve had this feeling before, this sense of performing to his memory. It was in Paris, at the end of my twenties, a different fellowship. An acquaintance introduced me to Jean-Marc Dreyfus, a young historian with a bald pate and an impish mien, who, with sociologist Sarah Gensburger, had just finishedan extraordinary book about three forgotten slave labor camps in the heart of the City of Light. One night, over dinner, he explained: The Gestapo wanted not just to eradicate the people who had been sent away, but to erase them, to blot out all memory of these Jews and ensure that no one could reconstruct theirlives going forward. Each camp, tasked with the gruesome responsibility of sorting and redistributing all the useful material goods of the Jews being sent to their deaths, and burning their personal belongings, had been fully absorbed back into the city and then, eerily, themselves forgotten. The task of erasing, of wiping clean the histories of those who had been here, had been remarkably, horrifyingly, successful.
    I returned to Paris again six months after I first learned the story and sought out for myself each camp—Lévitan was now a gorgeous advertising agency building in the tenth arrondissement; Bassano was now an haute-couture atelier near the Champs-Élysées; Austerlitz had been housed alongside the eponymous train station (and is alluded to in the book by W. G. Sebald)—now it was a massive construction site—and listened to the stories of those who had been forced to sort through the detritus of the deported. Dreyfus’s discovery asked a question I had never thought to ask and now contemplated endlessly: What happened to the goods of regular people, the Sarah Wildmans, if you will, who were deported? Not wealthy, not poor; Jews who didn’t own great art but certainly had a home filled with the appurtenances of modern living: A dining room table and chairs. Beds. China. Cutlery. Notebooks. Photos. Clothing. Cribs. All gone.
    The survivors of these Paris camps all had lived out the war under duress, but protected—most were married to non-Jews, a class of Jew that, oddly, stymied the Nazi machine, and so were set aside for later—and when they discovered the truth of the other camps, the death camps of the east, they settled down to live with a deep shame, a shame they shouldered as penance for that protection. That modesty about their own experience—that pudeur , as they called it—created a silence that they broke only at the very last moments of their lives. And yet within that pudeur there was also humanity. One man told me he was just twenty-four the year he spent in one of these camps; he was selected to help the Gestapo move the pianos stolen from deported Jews. And he would plot to meet his Catholic wife—not to escape, but for sex.
    There was something about that story—that furtive sex, fast, under the pianos—that seemed so normal. So young. “Come to see me as a human, not as a Jew, as a man,” that survivor said. It was a comment that made me think of my grandfather. He, too, had been so young when he left. And what do we want most in life, really, especially as we start out? Intimacy, love. We can’t think beyond that. Each man I interviewed—and they were all men—reminded me, in some way, of my