Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind

by Sarah Wildman

One woman’s journey to find the lost love her grandfather left behind when he fled pre-World War II Europe, and an exploration into family identity, myth, and memory.Years after her grandfather’s death, journalist Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a cache of his letters in a file labeled “ Patients A–G.” What she found inside weren’t dry medical histories; instead what was written opened a path into the destroyed world that was her family’s prewar Vienna. One woman’s letters stood those from Valy—Valerie Scheftel.   Her grandfather’s lover who had remained behind when he fled Europe six months after the Nazis annexed Austria.Valy’s name wasn’t unknown to her—Wildman had once asked her grandmother about a dark-haired young woman whose images she found in an old photo album. “She was your grandfather’s true love,” her grandmother said at the time, and refused any other questions. But now, with the help of the letters, Wildman started to piece together Valy’s story. They revealed a woman desperate to escape and  clinging to the memory of a love that defined her years of freedom.Obsessed with Valy’s story, Wildman began a quest that lasted years and spanned continents. She discovered, to her shock, an entire world of other people searching for the same woman. On in the course of  discovering  Valy’s ultimate fate, she was forced to reexamine the story of her grandfather’s triumphant escape and how this history fit within her own life and in the process, she rescues a life seemingly lost to history.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Memoir, World War II, Holocaust, Biography, Jewish

387 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 30, 2014

About the author

Sarah Wildman has reported across Europe and the Middle East for The New York Times, Slate, and The New Yorker, among other publications, and is a former New Republic staffer. She is the recipient of the Peter R. Weitz Prize from the German Marshall Fund of the United States, “for excellence and originality in reporting on Europe and the transatlantic relationship,” for the series in Slate where Paper Love originated. She has held a number of fellowships in Europe and the United States, including the Milena Jesenska fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the Arthur F. Burns fellowship in Berlin. Wildman lives in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

[Violet wells · Rating 3 out of 5]

The background: Sarah Wildman, the author, has always known her grandfather as a happy go lucky man, a successful doctor who escaped to America with his family from Vienna in 1938. It isn’t until his death that she discovers he left his girlfriend behind. Wildman’s quest is to discover what happened to this girlfriend, Valy. She’s starting a dangerous journey because there’s quickly the suspicion her grandfather isn’t going to come out of this very well. Among his possessions Wildman finds a number of letters from Valy to her grandfather, all of them pleading with him to help her get out of Nazi occupied Europe, all of which apparently fall on deaf ears.

There can be no question that it is among the most admirable and potentially beautiful challenges to bring back to life someone who died in the holocaust. And early in the book you share Wildman’s longing to bring Valy back to life. The first problem Wildman faces is Valy’s letters themselves. They aren’t very revealing. She tends to repeat herself and every letter is like a photocopy of the last. She continually reaffirms her love but never quite succeeds in bringing herself or her predicament to life in these letters. They’re strangely flat. Perhaps this is due to her fear of censorship, the enormous stress she was under but as personal documents they conceal more than they tell. It’s like Valy is already a ghost.

There must have come a moment in her research, just as there comes a moment while reading this, when Wildman realised she only had fragments of a story rather than a story itself – that all her admirable efforts to hew a narrative from the letters she found among her grandfather’s things were going to be frustrated by a lack of material. That basically she was attempting to tell a story about the lack of any story. You feel she should have grasped the irony of this and then structured the book around this discovery. Instead she continues to write it as a treasure trail narrative – but the treasure has long ceased to exist as a possibility and so the book becomes increasingly lacking in focus and rambling. By the end of the book Vara becomes, if anything, even more mysterious.

[Gypsy36 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the premise of this book and was really looking forward to reading it. I admire the author for her tenacity and depth of research. However, the book suffered from a lack of editing. The story meandered and at many points repeated itself as if relaying new information (the fact that Jewish people were prohibited from using public transit unless they were 7km from work was mentioned at least seven times). It was distracting. Also, I found that the conclusion to the ultimate question - what happened to Valy ended up getting lost.

[Sharon Hart-Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an outstanding book which I would highly recommend for all those who are interested in WWII history and the tragic fate of the Jews. In fact, I found the book so compelling that I had to force myself to stop reading it at night, or I would never be able to sleep! This is both a meticulously researched account of recent history as well as an emotionally charged memoir--a true tour de force!

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike some who commented, I think the meandering and repetitious structure of the book effectively conveyed the fragmented nature of the search and the inevitable limitations of trying to reconstruct a human life, especially a life that chillingly efficient Nazi bureaucrats and complicit citizens were so single-mindedly intent upon erasing. I found the repetition illuminating, since when I reread fragments of the letters in later pages of the book, my frame of reference had expanded, and this affected my understanding of the letters.

A more traditional, linear, narrative approach would have rendered the people and events two-dimensional, an overly neat and tidy representation of lives that were endlessly complex. Ms. Wildman addresses that very problem in the introductory chapter.

I found this book to be fascinating, challenging and illuminating.

[Candace · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite book of 2014. I’ll skip the explanation and simply say that it is gripping, suspenseful, heartbreaking and a fitting tribute to the people whose names it remembers.

Thank you, Sarah Wildman, for having the patience to follow Valeria Sheftel’s story for so many years, seeking to find out what happened to the girl her grandfather left behind when he fled Vienna in 1938. There are points when Sarah hits a dead end, then a year or so later another clue pops up and she is off and running in a new direction. Although we imagine from the start that Valy vanished in the great maw of what the gypsies called the Devouring, Wildman points that nothing is a given. She could have survived and been trapped behind the Iron Curtain, she could finally have gotten a visa to Chile and have built a life there or she and her mother could have gone to Palestine like her mom wanted to do. She could even have survived in Berlin, in hiding.

Wildman visits the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, where the concentration camp files on those murdered by the Nazis reside. There’s a photo on the book—rows metal shelves with piles of manila folders and disintegrating sheets of paper. It was closed to outsiders until 2008, for reasons no one seems to know. She gets to be part of the first group of researchers to visit the archive. She notes that the archive is being digitized, at last.

Most poignant if all are Valy’s letters describing her hopes, her fears as life becomes more and more restricted. Every day the vise is tighter, with fewer options, more anxiety, and dwindling hope. The tension is almost unbearable.

Read this book.

[Ayelet Waldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ambitious, accomplished. Terrific.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

"'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... In a definite sense they felt it was unspeakable. And I agree." An explanation by the child of two Jewish survivors to the granddaughter of a Jew who was able to escape to America before Kristallnacht.

I have always had a hitorical fascination of the how and why of the rise of the Nazi party and those who defied and survived. In the last year I have discovered a new genre in this history; books by "Generation X", grandchildren and other family members who are learning that their family history is not what they had been told. One aunt was a not in the French Resistance but was a collaborator, another previously unknown aunt was a Jewish survivor that her surviving family branded as a collaborator or, in this book, a grandfather who skewed his life history and tales of true love. When reading these updated histories it is important that the author nor the reader judge. Seriously, what would you have done to survive as a Jew or a regular citizen in Berlin, Vienna, Paris or any occupied town? I can only hope that we would be as heroic as our safty allows us to imagin.

In Paper Love, journalist Sarah Wildman discovers some letters and photos in her deceased grandfather's files from a lovely woman, Valerie 'Valy' Scheftel. When asked, Sarah's grandmother and aunt admit she was the grandfather's true love. The previous two updated histories I have read were from regular folks who told a fascinating tale. But Sarah is a master, a talented writer, good journalist and tenacious researcher. I stayed up many nights following her as she sought to learn the truth of Valy and those in her circle.

This is a fascinating  and well written history; no stone is left unturned. I enjoyed her work to research and visits areas in Europe whose history I only knew in broad strokes. When you are lucky, you encounter books and/or experiences that make you better for having taken the time to show up and be open to the message. This is one of those books for me.

[Kelly Haggerty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer I received this book as a reader for Penguin's First to Read.

A true 5-star read! A books that change your life nominee... Wildman strikes a perfect balance with Romance and History lovers by including her research story along side that of Valy's creating the ever desired nonfiction work reading like fiction. Through a synergistic serendipity of the research community and her own, Wildman is able to bring the reader on the journey from Yours, Valy- at the close of a letter toward Valy- the loved one left behind to Valy- whose life should be important to every person on the planet. Perhaps being so involved does not allow Wildman to recognize she even answers the question about what the next generation or generations should be told in the future about WWII both leading up to and after the end of the European Theatre on both sides of the Atlantic. Those who read this remarkable work may soon recognize the perfect answer lies in the words you place in your book Ms.Wildman. Thank you for the 2014 book that changed my life. If there is only one book you read this year, let this be your choice, is my recommendation.

[Kiersten · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was sadly un-enamored of this book. In fact, I've been reading others' reviews for the past 10 minutes, trying to figure out why it's so highly rated. Don't get me wrong: it's not terrible, but it's also not that great. It didn't work for me anyway.

I thought this book would be about Valy, the former love of the author's grandfather who was left behind when the grandfather fled Europe during the buildup to WWII. However, it was about the author's search for the former love of her grandfather, and I really just wish that the author would have stepped out of the way and let us focus on her grandfather and Valy. Ugh, just thinking about all of her angsty, philosophical, what-is-my-place-in-history musings makes me want to throw the book across the room.

And I'm sorry, but I just COULD NOT with this author's writing style. She never met a sentence that she didn't turn into a paragraph. Like this sentence on page 303 has TWO, count 'em, TWO colons in it. In ONE sentence: "They set up an underground salon, in essence: after the factory shift, the older Jews gave lectures to the younger ones: an architect; a former epidemiologist, who had run the city of Berlin's epidemic response team from the city hall before 1933." That sentence structure was just so completely unnecessary and so purposefully obfuscated. There is no reason that it couldn't be written as two sentences. I assume that, in the second half of the sentence, she's describing two of the older Jews who gave lectures to the younger ones, and that one of the older Jews was an architect and the other a former epidemiologist, but her weird sentence structure and punctuation makes the whole thing unnecessarily confusing.

In addition, she has this love affair with commas. Here's one example, on the very next page from the Case of the Crazy Colons: "They were exhausted, constantly, and the companionship was as much motivational as it was practical. At Siemens, they were hustled into packs of Jewish workers, separated from their Aryan counterparts. Jews were not allowed to be sprinkled among the other workers, lest they perform sabotage, undermine the effort. All movement was strictly patrolled. Jewish workers ate lunch standing, at their workspace--Aryans could use a cafeteria--and bathroom breaks for Jews were at nine a.m. and one p.m., in a group, led by a foreman. Hans and Ernest riveted commutators, the rotary electrical switches for motors. It was long and boring work, always on their feet." There are seven sentences in that passage, and six of them use dependent clauses. Dependent clauses are fine, but they need to be used sparingly. She uses them in almost every single sentence in the book, which makes the book unbearably tedious to read.

And then she almost immediately follows that chunk of text up with this little gem of a sentence: "But of course, he said, there were kids who were too old for the Kindertransport, or whose families had not been able to get their children on a transport (there was a strict, limited number of spaces) or had simply not opted for it, as they couldn't imagine separating themselves from their children; there were those whose entire families had tried to emigrate, but were unsuccessful, especially those who tried to leave after Kristallnacht, when the consulates were mobbed and the chances were dim."

Oh my goodness. I appreciate the semi-colon as much as the next person, but when your sentence is already five lines long, maybe it's time to consider a little thing called the period. End. the. sentence already!

Again, yes, I know it's stylistic, and I am aware that sentence structure like this can be used to great effect to add emphasis. But when it's every single sentence, it starts to lose some of its power and just becomes INCREDIBLY annoying and, dare I say, pretentious. And seriously, although these examples were from just two pages of the book, the entire thing is written like this.

[Jeanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Search for a grandfather's past in Vienna, Austria during the 1930's before his escape to Massachusetts. That's the crux of this non-fiction account of a very interesting and fun-loving doctor named Karl (changed to Carl in USA and later life).

The first half was good and then without finding the answers for her grandfather's "love left behind" girlfriend, Val, her outcome or fate? Not finding much but dozens of dead ends, the minutia of the search and redundancy of reaction become barely tolerable. The love for her grandfather comes through. You get to know him and his conflicts of choices more than you get answers for Val.

I got the feeling about 3 times in this book, that she did not "know" her grandfather as much as she believed she did. IMHO, her love and "fun" with and for him colored any true objectivity to focus of objectivity or his disingenuous quality.

[Stefanie Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paper Love is the story of a woman who comes across some documents and letters that belonged to her grandfather after his death. She had once found photographs of a woman that her grandfather kept. When she asked about the photographs, her grandmother had told her that the woman in the photographs was her grandfathers true love. Now, the documents and letters she found added fuel to her desire to uncover the whereabouts of this woman, who had stayed behind in Europe when her grandfather fled the Nazis.

This was a very moving journey about self-discovery. I think that anytime you learn more about your family members, their pasts, and their connections, you learn more about yourself. Sometimes, it explains a lot about why people were/are the way they were/are. I know what it is like to make a life with someone who is not the love of your life because that person is no longer around, so this book kind of hit me in a more personal way that I would have thought. I enjoy mysteries and investigations, so this was a real page turner for me. I shouldn't have picked this book for my car book, because it took me a whole week to get through it by only reading it in the pick up line, when I normally could have had this finished in one or two days. I loved the way that this author told her story, and I am glad that I finally got around to reading this book that has been on my shelf for at least two years.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was going to give this book two stars, because it does have some effective moments. But then I wondered: if this wasn't about the Holocaust, would the author have been able to create those effective moments? The answer is an emphatic no.

This is a book about an obsession. The author finds out that her grandfather left a lost love named Valy behind in Europe when he came to the United States in 1938. She goes on an obsessive search to find out what happened to this woman, and what life must have been like for her. There are quotes from the letters Valy sent to the author's grandfather, but Valy doesn't reveal much about her experiences and instead spends a lot of time talking about their relationship. Wildman then fills in the gaps for us, in part through her travels, discussions with scholars, and visits to archives.

The basic narrative structure, which moves us from the discovery of Valy through all of Wildman's years of research, as well as Wildman's parallel exploration of her own relationship to the Holocaust and its survivors and of her grandfather's originally sunny story, is well done. It allows Wildman to explore a lot of themes and ideas, including memory, generational issues, the place of the Holocaust in the narratives of different countries, and the search for happy Holocaust stories when none of them are really happy at all. But I found myself struggling to get through the book. In part it is because the book is in dire need of an editor. Wildman's journalistic style shows, and does not work well in book form. She loves run-on sentences, which would have worked well in a stream-of-consciousness setting but in this case make the book hard to read and its ideas difficult to absorb. There is also a good amount of repetition and a terrible amount of unnecessary information. The reason most people don't write about searching through archives is that it isn't terribly interesting to read about.

The Holocaust is difficult to write about, but it comes pre-loaded with certain themes, imagery, and emotion. Wildman's subject allows her to write a book I likely would not even have finished had it been about something else. It allows her to evoke strong emotions despite the book's overall poor quality. The book also came briefly alive when Wildman began to discuss one particular person, but that was only because the person seemed interesting and likable. And that highlights, for me, part of what made the book bad: I didn't like almost any of the people involved. I didn't like the author, I didn't like her grandfather, and I didn't like Valy, mainly because of how they come across through Wildman's eyes.

If you're looking for a book about finding an individual's story in the enormity of the Holocaust (or about the documents and research involved), I recommend Gotz Aly's Into the Tunnel instead.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

When my friend picked this book for our book club, I thought, Oh no, not another holocaust/WWII book. Years ago WWII used to be one of my subjects. However, I guess due to the aging and disappearing of the members of the greatest generation, there has been in recent years an influx of books on this subject. Despite this, I find there are still things to learn about the subject, even more ways that this atrocity affected people. I found the book informative, if somewhat repetitious. The most interesting part to me was difficulties that educated emigrants found in their new countries, and the attitude of those who did not escape towards those who had escaped. There is not just the sigh of relief that they made it out. As to Ms. Wildman's research, I felt the book would have been more to the point had she followed up the more recent leads first than last. I also did not like Ms. Wildman's inserting herself into the story. She was whiny and unlikeable and I didn't care how uncomfortable her journey was at times; particularly when comparing it to the journeys of those she is writing about.

[Sam Pearlman · Rating 5 out of 5]

In part about the Love, Valy, that her grandfather left behind, and in equal measure about her own search for Valy's fate. Paper Love illuminates well the impossible choices that European Jews had to make - both those who made it to safety, and those unable to escape.

[Karyl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read so many books about the Holocaust and about the effects the Holocaust had not only on the survivors, but also on family members and even subsequent generations. As Wildman mentions near the end of her book, your grandmother or great-uncle might not be who you think he or she is. You may think you've been raised Catholic or Protestant, but really your mother and your grandmother were Jewish. By definition, this means you are as well. It's mind-boggling, but it happens. Some people's reactions to the horrors they witnessed was to never speak of it ever again. And how can one blame them?

Wildman brings up an interesting point that perhaps not a whole lot of people have picked up on regarding the Holocaust. Yes, American Jews were insulated from most of the horrors of life under the Nazi regime, and from being deported to extermination camps. But that doesn't mean that the 1930s and 1940s were a cakewalk for them either. The US and much of the Western world shut down immigration during those years, and were unwilling to take on too many refugees. There was concern that the Jews of Europe would be dirty, unwashed, uncultured, and a drain on American resources. Imagine knowing that something horrible was happening to your friends and family back in the Old World, but not being able to do a damn thing about it. There were too many hoops to jump through to get an exit visa from Germany, and even with one, so few countries were willing to take Jews that were fleeing for their lives. Even with ridiculous sums of cash, it might still have been completely impossible to rescue your friends and family from the Third Reich. So there you sit, in your American home with your American friends, knowing that you cannot even begin to rescue your loved ones, that it's utterly impossible.

That doesn't mean that people gave up. Wildman's grandfather Karl tried so hard to rescue his girlfriend Valy and her mother from the terror, but was ultimately unsuccessful. He had no money, being, in fact, hounded by relief associations to repair the small loans they had made him, and he still had to support his mother when her money ran out. It's not easy, even as a doctor, to start a new life in a new country.

The journeys Wildman takes to attempt to figure out who this Valy was, and what she meant to her grandfather, are fascinating. Yes, it is a bit meandering, but it goes to show how hard it is to try to hunt down information when the survivors are now so old and fragile, if they're even still alive. I was glad she was able to visit Vienna, and see where her grandfather and Valy might have strolled together, young and in love before all the horror started.

If there's one thing I could have wished for, it would have been a slight more remove of the author from her material. It was a little confusing because then the question becomes, is this a book about trying to find Valy, or is it the author's memoirs of her journey to try to find what happened to Valy? And those are actually two different things.

At any rate, a fascinating book, and one I am glad to have read, even if I can't get out of my head how impotent Jews in America must have felt, to be receiving letters from their desperate loved ones to attempt to get them out, and to try so hard but to no avail. Such a tragedy.

[Ching · Rating 3 out of 5]

The preview was so very enticing. Found secret love letters tucked away for more than 60 years, who were these star crossed lovers and what happened to them?

I got suckered in by the promise of a rich and romantic fiction but instead got the switch and bait into more nonfiction history of the Halocaust and the Anti Semitic policies preventing early Jewish émigrés from establishing their medical practice in the US. The author's constant traveling to unearth the truth of this love story reminded me a bit of the meandering of Eat, Love, Pray but I enjoyed her "voice" as she retold the story of the great true love of grandfather's. I also couldn't help but feel rather uneasy at the underlying premise of the book: why on earth would someone root for another woman to succeed with your grandfather? It feels a bit disloyal to her grandmother to whom without the author would not exist. But the real fascination of this book was to piece together who her grandfather was as a young man, who was quite different than the man she knew as her grandfather. I just wish the author went further into extrapolating what her grandfather felt as a human being with his relationship with Valy. It wasn't enough for me. This book missed out on really humanizing the suffering. However, I, as a Gentile, learned a whole lot more about how and what the survivors of the Halocaust went through in the aftermath of WWII.

[Liz Harmath · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book, but I couldn't. The historical content was good and the specific examples of daily indignities for Jewish people in Nazi Germany really fleshed out the broad descriptions we usually read: life was restricted, people were scared and wanted to emigrate, etc.

The history was fascinating, but the author's voice was horribly annoying. Another reviewer said "whiny" and that is right on target. I am happy to hear about frustration with the process, roadblocks, etc. But complaining about accommodations? Please move on. If you don't like where your tour guide is taking you, communicate that like an adult and find a different one if the problems continue.

I was also surprised that a researcher would insist on "following the trail" first, instead of trying to directly communicate with the few survivors to which she had access. "He died four months ago." Tragic and frustrating to the story -- and I'm sure to the author -- but it felt like many times it was an avoidable problem. I wanted to scream "Change your plane ticket!" Yes, tacking on more time to long trips can seem exhausting and undoable, but when dealing with extremely elderly people it seems prudent. Particularly when talking about transatlantic flights, not a quick car trip.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those nonfiction stories that stick with you. The story of one young woman, Valy, that gives you insight to the larger machine that was 1930-40's Anti-Semitic Europe (hell, world) and the Holocaust. And to hear this young woman's voice in her letters to the author's grandfather; who deeply cared for each other before the nightmare began, priceless. It was an informative, heart-wrenching account of the author's thoughtful, respectful and winding discovery of what could be found about one women's life in millions loss during that time. I appreciated her scholarship, her frankness that it was not as black & white as we see looking back, and the respect for those she did encounter who wished to share or not share their story with her. Thank you for introducing me to your grandfather, Sarah Wilderman and those left behind whose stories are given respect and a name, Valy.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a free galley copy of this book from Penguin First to Read program. The book is about Sarah Wildman's search to find out what happened to her grandfather's first love during World War II and the Holocaust. Sarah comes across some papers belonging to her grandfather after his death, and among those papers are pictures of a woman she has never seen before, Valy. Her grandmother informs her that the woman is her grandfather's, Carl Wildman, first love but will not say anything more on the subject. This sends Sarah off on a journey to Europe to find out who Valy was and what happened to her after her grandfather fled to America as Hitler moved into Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Sarah uncovers a lot of information about how immigrations were handled for European Jews wanting to flee Europe as Hitler and the Nazi Regime took control of countries and spread anti-Semitic discrimination. Sarah's research leads her to several different cities and she meets several interesting people along the way, who help her decipher the documents she finds and answer burning questions she has about life in 1939 and 1940, leading up to the execution of Hitler's Final Solution. As Sarah follows the clues about Valy and the life she lived in Europe, she learns more about the kind of life her grandfather was living in America, about his own struggles and his determination to work hard enough to bring more family and friends, including Valy, to America. By the end of the book, Sarah has a clear understanding of her grandfather's life, but she also has managed to figure out what may have happened to Valy, as the path grows cold and there's no definite answer. Sarah can only assume what Valy's fate was.

I enjoyed this book and learned a lot of things about the immigration process for European Jews to the United States, including the limits the US government put on the numbers of European Jews entering the country during a time when being Jewish was not safe. Not only does Sarah learn a lot about her grandfather's life before her own father was born, but she learns a lot about how dangerous day to day life was in 1939 Europe. She talks about Kristallnacht and the Anschluss, about the businesses Jews lost as Nazi support grew, the work Jewish leaders did to keep track of Jews within their own communities and possibly provide them with useful jobs that would bring them food and water. As she journeys to find Valy, Sarah is very open about her feelings and her hopes for a happy ending. I think Sarah does an excellent job of giving a voice to Valy, making her real for the reader and bringing closure to her grandfather's own love story. This was a well written story and I'm pretty glad that I was fortunate enough to receive a free copy.

*I was not compensated by the author or Penguin books for this review*

[Joshua S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with what many reviewers have already said. The author inserted herself too fully into the book, repeated herself and information too many times and just isn't that great a writer overall. The story, however, is extremely moving and I agree with people who have remarked how important it is that this story has been published. The more the horrible experience of life under Nazi Germany and the holocaust can be told in stories about individuals and families, the better.

The contents of the book that detail the predations of the Nazi party on Jewish citizens and the impact these had on the book's characters was very well-researched and expressed in the book. It was also extremely moving and very saddening. Being a secular Jew myself and fortunate enough to have not been alive during this whole period of history, I closed the book with a VERY heavy heart. There's no doubt that despite its flaws there is much in the book that is impactful. It's too bad it was not better written/edited than it is.

[Kathie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically, the story of a journalist's search to find the fate of the young Jewish woman who her grandfather loved but had to leave behind in Germany at the beginning of WWII. The beginning was incredibly powerful story and I couldn't put it down at first. The ending was also wonderful. However, the middle of the book, the research was less story and more textbook. The author seemed to lose focus, telling too many other stories and too much information about her research to keep me interested. I almost stopped reading, but I wanted to know what happened to Valy (Valerie) so I slogged through about 200 pages. Those 200 pages dropped my rating a couple of stars. This book could and should have been beyond amazing.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It took about 1/2 way through to really get my attention. Then is was really good for a while and then went downhill. 80% of this book is so boring, use it to get to sleep. Maybe if I was Jewish it would have been more interesting but her describing endlessly every street she walked down, every coffee shop she visited.....boring boring boring.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting story, but it bothered me that the author interpreted intent and underlying emotion into the letters from people now deceased - and seemed very biased in her interpretation. She's very defensive of her grandfather and never acknowledges that maybe he could have made mistakes too (like not writing back).

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really devastating, but a unique perspective on what Jews experienced during the Holocaust: both those who were trapped in Europe and those who were able to emigrate. Feels particularly relevant now given the situation with the refugees from Syria. Highly recommend.

[Jordana Horn Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, so glad to have read this book.

[BB · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found it slow going, not a non fiction fan, and her travels/research were a slog. But the actual story of Hans and Valy was heart breaking, just too small a part of the text.

[Sally · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everyone loved this book, but I couldn't get used to the author's style. I guess I like my historical narratives less peppered with reflection-- but still an excellent piece of journalism and memoir.

[Maya · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was pretty good, and I would have probably given it 5 stars if it was the first story I had read about the Holocaust. I liked the writing style because it was rich in good vocabulary and descriptive language about emotions. It portrayed the people who survived the Holocaust(and those who sadly didn't) in a human way; as people who have high and low points, who make mistakes. However, in reading this, it was hard not to compare it to other books about WWII, and in that comparison, it fell a little flat. "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank also portrayed this time period in a realistic manner but was told from the fresh perspective of a young girl rather than a journalist who had done copious amounts of research on the topic. While I appreciate the time and effort spent in this, it did give parts of the story a dry/boring feeling. Overall, good story, but I've definitely read better books about WWII.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of the book was very intriguing, and the core story kept me interested. However, the long-winded side stories made it difficult to keep track of the main plot and were often more confusing than helpful. While I appreciate that the author's goal was to give a voice to survivors, I think that these stories and that of Karl and Valy would be better served by some editing down. Overall, the main story was very powerful and gave a different point of view to many of the narratives and histories about the Holocaust that we all know. However, in the end the resolution of what happened to Valy was lost, sandwiched between other plots which were only loosely tied to the main question.
I would recommend this book if you are looking for multiple insights into Jewish experiences of the Holocaust through the generations. However, if you are interested in the romantics and question of what happened to the girl left behind, you may be disappointed.

[Anne Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is typically a journalist book, not a writer book. The author did a great job collecting information, but the synthetic work needed to digest it and restitute it to readers in an interesting and true-to-facts book is not totally here.
Some numbers are misused, or not not to their most eloquent potential. Yes, the second world war caused around 50,000,000 deaths, but don't forget that UdSSR lost more than 10,000,000 men and German Forces close to 6,000,000. Add 3 to 4,000,000 for China, 2 to 3,000,000 for Japan. If you want the total number of soldiers killed, you have to add a lot of smaller numbers, French, British, American and Canadian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish and Yugoslavian soldiers were among the victims too. Plus smaller numbers for a lot of countries.
Then we enter the lot of civil victims, huge. More than 15,000,000 in the Soviet Union, close to 1,000,000 in the Philippines, 3 to 4,000,000,000 in the Dutch West Indies, more than 5,000,000 in Poland, 15,000,000 in China, 1,000,000 in Japan, 2,000,000 in India, 1,500,000 in French Indochina, 1,500,000 Germans, and lots of small amounts attached to each country. But weirdly, the numbers are not what you expect. The Jews who suffered the most were Polish, the German ones a lot less, like the Austrian ones. The question is not to diminish the impact it had and will keep for long on history, but to notice that a good number of German Jews survived, probably because they left the country. The Polish ones, trapped in the ghettos under Judenrat were not that lucky.
That her grandfather's heart was broken when he left behind so many people he cared for is easy to believe. Now... as soon as he made some money, in 1940, could not have helped more, or appealed to richer Americans? that he loved Valy, knowing what happened -or did not happen, is harder to believe.
Anyways, Valy will stay in Germany and die in a camp. It's a very sad story, as she might have found someone to finance her if she had understood earlier Carl would not/could not do anything. During part of the war, you could still try and go to Switzerland and wait until better times came. You had smuggle conductors who would show you the path for Switzerland, or took a train with you, you could get false papers... You could for a while go to France and if lucky, get to the free part where things were a lot easier and help possible. But, no, she was meant to die there.
I understand Sarah's desire to learn more about her family, but I am amazed she grew up in such a world of lies and never guessed. And I cannot help but be disappointed in her grandfather. If he had at least told Valy the truth, i.e. that he could not do anything, she might have found another way.
I have not understood a lot of small things, but they all end up with the same problem : Valy loved Karl and would rather have died than accept a life without him. Everything turns around that, like why not go to France in 1939 or 1940 or why not marry an Aryan, to improve her condition; why not try to go to China ( there was a young general consul of China in Vienna who gave visas to thousands of Jews and saved them. Ho Feng-Shan, the consul was told to stop as soon as he began but kept on until he left Vienna, in May 1940. He managed to get 18,000 Jews to Shanghai, among them friends of Karl's family, as quoted in the book ), or why not go to Palestine? She turns down all the possibilities until it is too late...
Other unanswered questions: how did Karl or Valy get enough money to go to medical school? even if universities were free, it still means long years of studying without earning money. and the worst one... how could her lover, Sarah'grandfather not be able to tell her the truth? The author wants to believe it was to cheer her up with a few letters, but I think he kept silent for months as a way to break up without having to face his decision and write a "Dear John", sorry, "Dear Jane" letter. That works with the walls of silence for the rest of his life and that killed Valy, who believed in love for ever.
More than 70% of the Austrian Jews managed to emigrate. Why not her?
This book upset me because of the naivete -real or fake?- of its author, her total lack of knowledge about Europe in the 1930s and about even her family's history when she begins her quest. When Sarah speaks with Inge Deutschkron, she is told repeatedly the truth, "the Americans did not help". But some other ones, whether German, French, or else did.
Many people during her journey try to remind her that the important thing is what happened to Jewish people, not only to Valy, but she perseveres and won't get the answer she wanted -that Valy would have been safe and lived a happy life. No, Valy died during the holocaust, like many, many other persons.
Fata Morgana, kismet... but cowardice, too.
The research behind the book is thorough. I wish more dates were quoted in the book, it's hard to know when the author did this or that but it seemed it took 15 years to obtain the information she uses in the book.
The result is a very sad book, well written and often quite interesting, which shifts partially the responsibilities on a lot more people, from the U.S.bureaucrats to human natural selfishness, or self preservation and maybe does not speak enough of the help many survivors found. You had some civil servants creating false papers to protect whomever they could, you had farmers who hid Jews for months, you had people like Schindler... Even Ernst survived underground, meaning he got enough help to have food and shelter.
Think of Valy, receiving a letter from Karl telling her he has two practices and plenty of money when she is deprived of everything... think of him not willing to get a bank loan for her to emigrate... but answering once "Beloved...". How sad she fell in love with a weakling and paid it with her life.