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

interior but didn’t bring the building down. So the towers continue to stand, ominous and foreboding, marring the sky in this marvelous park otherwise known for a delicate porcelain factory that sits on its grounds and its neatly drawn paths. That mix of beauty with the sad and ugly seems, somehow, appropriate.
    One afternoon, I walk through the Augarten with Herwig, and we talk about seduction. He persuades me to go on a ride in the nearby Prater amusement park; we pay to be strapped into a swing that pulls us four hundred feet in the air and then whips us around at thirty-five miles an hour. I agree, unthinkingly, even though I have a terrible fear of being trapped. The city beneath us stretches out in each direction, but I can barely open my eyes in the wind. I panic and grip his hand tightly the entire five minutes we are airborne. How could I have agreed to do this? I wonder, breathlessly, upon our descent to earth. “Isn’t that the very nature of seduction?” he parries. It is the very way my grandfather and Valy had spoken to each other, and I find myself blushing, despite myself.
    I search for my grandfather and Valy everywhere; take their path to school, go hear their Philharmonic, grasp at understanding the obsession with the city. I attend an event at a Gymnasium in the ninth district where they invite back old Jews and have the children sing songs they have memorized in Hebrew.  Hashevaynu:  “Return us to you, God, and we shall return. Renew us as in Days of Old.” It is a keening, mournful tune. Do they know what they are singing? It’s meant for God—in fact it is a line from the Tisha B’avservice, Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of the Temple, and it has always felt an almost impudent request on our part—a request that God act first. Return to us so we can return to you.
    But perhaps, I think as I listen, here in Vienna it has a double meaning. I vacillate, sitting on the floor of the old Gymnasium, between boredom and tears. The old Jews, alumni of the school, are asked to stand for applause. “Joseph . . . Escaped in 1938!” Ovation. Relief.
    Hannah Lessing is there, that day in the ninth. I see her in the corner. A former banker, since the mid-1990s she has been the secretary-general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, responsible for the reparations payments to Jews who fled after the Anschluss. Glamorous, and Jewish, she is the daughter of Magnum photographer Erich Lessing, who fled the city himself, as a boy, in the 1930s and returned after the war though his own mother had been murdered in Auschwitz. Hannah stands there with her vibrant-beyond-nature sienna-colored hair; an enormous diamond-studded Star of David around her neck, glittering in the afternoon light. It is a purposeful, aggressive Fuck you to wear such a symbol here, where everyone pretends the state is secular and not Catholic. She made me cry in her office, once—though to be fair, she was weeping as well. She told me how she won restitution claims for lost Viennese daughters and sons, and she read me a thank-you letter she keeps, folded into fifteenths, in her wallet. Later I am told that this is her thing: she brings journalists in and makes them cry. It is successful, it is brutal; it is smart: we want to cry here.
    Hannah has always lived in Vienna. She has always lived in the shadow of death. Her parents insisted she go to the Lycée Français and become fluent in French, lest they need to flee. The Jewish community, after the war, existed here, uncomfortably, quietly, occasionally defiantly. An exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Vienna on the postwar life of Jews in the imperial city is called simply Leben! (Life!). It is a strident imperative, a thumbed nose.
    The history of expulsion and hatred never sat well in the general community of postwar Vienna. The city, and the country, came late to commemorations, came late to the feeling that they were in some