Lost and Found

F or more than seventy years, my grandmother Lilly’s diary sat untouched at the bottom of a cardboard box stuffed into a tiny closet in my family’s home. The dark green leather notebook gathered dust, the pages—beginning to yellow around the edges—unread.

Although I knew much of my grandmother’s life, the years between 1933 and 1945 were a void. I understood the general shape of things—how she had arrived in America in 1939, fleeing the Nazi death machine—but knew little of the details. Her mind and memories had already vanished by the time she died. I was eleven years old.

The pieces of her life seemed to me like rocks stacked one atop the next: spare and certain. She grew up in Vienna. She escaped to England. She came to America, had her children, and died. Details beyond these basic facts were muddled, recounted to me second- and third-hand over the years. Her feelings and thoughts about these events in her life were now unknown, forgotten.

After my grandmother’s death, her diary was packed away with a lifetime of papers, photographs, letters, and other belongings. Though I was curious about the diary as a child, I had always been rebuffed by my grandmother’s prose, written in her native Viennese dialect of German and utterly inaccessible to everyone in my immediate family.

I was eighteen when a German-speaking aunt visited us. With her help, parents, siblings, and cousins crowded into our small kitchen to translate my grandmother’s diary, to hear her story in her words. To recover those lost years of her life.

As a little girl, my grandmother led a happy life in Vienna. She was her parent’s only child, a rarity in those days. In the summers, her parents rented a cabin in Hungary for vacation. Lilly spent her days talking to Hungarian boys by the pool, returning home with delicious gossip for her friends.

In 1936, when she was twelve years old, Lilly’s parents went out for a game of cards. Only her mother came home. Her father had fallen across the card table, clutching a hand to his chest as he died.

Things changed after that. Lilly and her mother moved out of their apartment and into an unpleasant little place with her father’s three sisters. The three old women nagged and scolded her for even the slightest infraction. She hated it, but there was nowhere else to go.

At the same time, the Vienna of her childhood faded into a nightmare. She was fourteen when Nazi Germany annexed Austria. Police officers banged on doors and demanded Jews come outside to scrub the streets. They shuttered her uncle’s cabaret club, along with all the other clubs that were once considered the soul of art and culture in Vienna. People disappeared, committed suicide. Her mother at last secured her passage on a train that would take her to Amsterdam and from there to England by boat. Only children were permitted. Her mother would stay behind. Lilly had only a few weeks in her beloved Vienna before she would be sent away.

Vienna, 20 October 1938

My mother said she put my name on a visa list. If I’m lucky, she says, I’ll be able to go to England. I don’t feel lucky about it. I don’t want to go. Yesterday, I walked down the Alten Donau with Lazlo. He was saying that he wants to go to Palestine. I didn’t say anything, but secretly I don’t want him to go. Of course, I want him to leave and go somewhere safe. But if he goes, I’ll probably never see him again. I want him to stay here with me. But maybe that’s too selfish.

I’ve been walking with Lazlo almost every day recently. He’s very cute, of course, but also clever. He laughs at my jokes, and he never tells me I should be more friendly and sweet. I’m really worried for him. Right now, he’s working downtown, posing as an Aryan to make a good salary. I know he’s very smart, and he tells me he’s being careful. But what if they find him out? I don’t know what I would do.

I was not close with my grandmother. When she was alive, my family would visit her. I rarely said more than “hello” or “how are you” before running off to play games with my siblings. I never cared to talk to her for long or listen to her stories, which were fragmented by dementia. But looking back, I regretted not taking advantage of the time I had with her.  I felt guilty for not knowing more about her life. She was almost a stranger to me.

So when we discovered the diary, it seemed like a miracle.

I went in with hopes of redemption, but found that the diary was a much more entertaining experience than I had expected. Hilarious, even. Like many young teenage girls finding their way in the world, my grandmother was full of wit, drama, and flirtation.

“What in the world is a fratz?” my cousin wondered aloud as we scoured the internet for a good translation.

“Whatever it is, I doubt it’s anything good,” my aunt replied. “She wrote ‘Martha called me a stupid fratz.’”

“Hussy!” I announced, barely containing my laughter. I turned the screen around to show everyone the translation I had found. It took a long time before any of us could find the will to stop shrieking.

In the beginning, almost every entry commented on the boys my grandmother fancied.

“There are lots of cute boys at the beach,” my aunt read aloud from an entry when my grandmother was on vacation with her family. “I’d like to start something with one of them.”

My aunt closed the diary, amused and slightly embarrassed by these revelations about her mother. “Oh my god. They really don’t need to keep this at the Holocaust Museum.”

The diary contained lots of entries like that—scandalous and endearing.

In some ways, what we were doing was tough work; translating words from a foreign dialect written by a child nearly three-quarters of a century ago is no easy task. But for the most part, it brought us joy. We filled in the blanks with speculation. We traded jokes across the kitchen table, looking over our shoulders and imagining what she might say if she caught us laughing.

As we read further, we came to care about the characters like we knew them ourselves. We found ourselves enamored with this boy named Lazlo (or Laci, as she often called him). Over dozens of entries, we watched her fall in love with him. She wrote passionately of her crush and her secret hopes that their friendship would become something more.

By the time we reached the midpoint of the diary, we were all rooting for Lazlo (ignoring, of course, the fact that she married another man in the end, my grandfather). We cheered when my grandmother wrote joyfully of their first kiss. She described her growing feelings for him, how she felt overwhelmed. How she could not stop thinking about him. It all seemed so romantic.

Vienna, 1 November 1938

Yesterday, Lazlo and I kissed. He’s really a good kisser. I want to be with him so much. He said he wants to be with me too, but I’m not sure if I believe him. What if he doesn’t really mean it? Today, I asked his sister to see if she can find out his real feelings for me. I like Iren and I think I can count on her to help me.

One thing I know for sure: those kisses I got from Lazlo were not the last. I love him so much. Sunday he gave me a photo and wrote on it: “with lots of love so you won’t forget me. Signed, your Lazlo who will not forget you.”

If only he were serious.

When we arrived at the entry on November 11, 1938, my aunt read the first sentence aloud. “Lazlo is …” She stuttered and stopped. Her smile evaporated. “Fuck. He’s in Dachau.”

The romantic mood transformed in an instant. We all had heard of the Dachau concentration camp; it was a place where my grandfather had spent many months. With heartbreak, my grandmother wrote of how Lazlo was taken during Kristallnacht, arrested with thousands of others that night.

Vienna, 11 November 1938

Lazlo is in Dachau. I was wrong. Those kisses may have been our last. Lazlo was arrested that horrible night, and no one knows how he is. That Sunday was the last time I saw him. I’m desperate to talk to Iren and ask if she has any more information, but mother and the aunts said it’s too dangerous right now to go visit her. I hate that they’re right. Most Jews had their homes and businesses taken away that night. People are being forced to scrub the streets. I miss my friends. Greta and Erna still come by to visit, but the others are afraid to be seen with me.

Mr. Zweik confirmed that I will leave for London in two to four weeks. I wish I was gone already. Everything I love here seems to be disappearing. Maybe a new place will be good for me.

Mr. Zweik said mother might be able to come to England too- he found her a position as a “kosher cook.” As if she knows the first thing about keeping kosher or cooking! Hopefully everything will work out. Hopefully Lazlo is safe. I pray that the first kisses we shared won’t be our last.

My grandmother wrote of Lazlo often in the following years, frequently with longing or despair, but sometimes with hope. While Lazlo remained in Dachau, my grandmother fled to England with a group of refugee children.

The transition was hard. She was placed in a girls’ home with a strict matron who scolded the children often, although Lilly couldn’t understand what she was saying. English seemed to Lilly an ugly language, one she had no desire to learn. She did not get along with any of the other girls. She didn’t need anyone else, she wrote in the diary. She would embrace independence until things changed for the better.

Yet even as she dealt with her own struggles, a refugee child alone in a strange new country, she clung to the memory of Lazlo. The loneliness she felt was palpable. It grew. Whether love or mere idealized fantasy, she longed to be with him. To her, Lazlo seemed the last glimmer of something resembling joy.

Eventually, she heard through friends that he’d been released from Dachau. Then nothing more.

Burgess Hill, 19 March 1939

There are rumors here that all of the camps, including Dachau, will be closed soon. I don’t believe them one bit. It’s so boring here, all I do all day is worry about my poor Lazlo and think of the times we spent together. On last All Saints Day, Lazlo and I were riding on the street car. He told me cemeteries scare him and he doesn’t like them at all. But later, when I told him I was going to visit my father’s grave, he insisted on accompanying me. Maybe he really does like me. I hope so.

Yesterday was a beautiful summer day, reminding me of one evening in Vienna with Laci all those months ago. Back then, I didn’t think that fate could be so cruel. But now I think it would be best if I had just dreamt the whole thing.

Burgess Hill, 7 April 1939

I hate it here at the girls’ home, and I don’t think I can last much longer without going insane. Because I’m one of the oldest girls here, I’m minding one of the little ones, a tiny Hungarian girl who’s only six years old. The Hungarian girl is sweet, and I do have some friends here, but I feel too much like a stranger. Wherever I go, I get the feeling that I don’t belong. I’m so homesick I could die. Last night I cried almost all night.

Thank God, my mother got passage to America. Last week she left on an Italian ship, the Vulcania, and will arrive in New York soon. As soon as she gets there, she will begin arranging for me to join her. I’m anxious to go.

I miss my mother, my Laci, and my Vienna.

After arriving in America, Lilly’s story grew more pitiful. She moved into a small apartment with distant relatives who resented her “foreignness.” She began dating a man twice her age, who subjected her to insidious manipulations and abuse. She fought with her mother. She felt totally alone in America, that ugly, unfamiliar place.

Through all of these hardships, she never stopped thinking about Laci. In diary entries, she mourned her love for him, recalled a memory of him, or regretted that they had ever met. For my grandmother, the memory of Laci melded together with her memory of Vienna. He became more than a girlhood crush, transfigured into a symbol of a happy childhood, a beautiful home, a time before isolation and misery. Laci was hers, just as Vienna had been hers, even as both the boy and the city slipped from her grasp. Vienna lost to German annexation in 1938. Lazlo lost in 1941, to the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Now those memories survive only in her diary, as shadows of her experience. After leaving Lazlo and Vienna behind, she went on with her life. She married a nice Viennese boy, another Jewish refugee who had made it out alive. She had children. Although she still made them Sachertorte and schnitzel, she vowed never to teach them her native tongue. She died in a convalescent home, much like the girls’ home she hated as a child. Through all of this, she kept the memories in her heart and her diary alone, never speaking a word of it out loud.

Part of me believes she never spoke of Lazlo because she wanted to keep him a total secret as a way of preserving the purity of that memory. Her Vienna had been destroyed. She returned to visit only once, but it was not the same place it had been. It couldn’t have been—it had betrayed her when it embraced the Nazis. But her fond memories of Lazlo were one thing from her youth that remained untainted, pure.

Yet the existence of her diary makes me think otherwise, that maybe these secret memories were not intended to be kept secret forever. She kept the diary all these years, through marriage, through motherhood, through old age. She did not throw the diary away, but placed it among her belongings. She had to know we would find it. She placed it where, one day, someone else would read it.

Revealing painful and personal struggles may seem an odd thing for my grandmother, who I’ve learned was mostly a very private person. But one more theory I’ve mulled over is that she left the diary intact and conspicuously placed for Lazlo himself, for his memory. Lazlo’s entire family was killed in the Holocaust. He did not live to have children. She was the sole heir of his memory, and perhaps she chose to preserve it, even if it meant exposing her own private pain.

For a long time after reading the diary, I thought about my grandmother’s love story, wondering whether she ever shared her loss with anyone. Did she ever mention Lazlo to my grandfather? When I think of her reputation for having a private, withdrawn air, despite the vulnerability of her writing, I find it easy to believe that it was a secret she kept completely to herself.

My own chest feels tight when I think of her holding the memory of Lazlo all these years, sharing her grief with no one. I think about how, without her words, that sweet boy from Vienna would have been forgotten forever.

Now that I have read the diary, I feel closer to my grandmother. I know what she was like. As a young girl, she was flirtatious and unapologetic, loved her home fiercely, pretended to be brave in the face of fear. Love to her was a passionate thing. She wasn’t always sure she was worthy of it. She held onto her memories of love like treasures, bringing her comfort on her hardest days.

Although I’m glad to know my grandmother better, it seems odd to call that feeling happiness, knowing all that Lilly suffered. But it’s fair to say I feel satisfaction, a sort of peace, to know and understand her better. She doesn’t feel like a stranger to me anymore. She was my grandmother, my family. Her story is a part of my own.  

There is a photograph we found, tucked into the yellowing pages of the diary, black and white, of a roguishly handsome young man. Lazlo. When I look at him, I see not just one anonymous face among millions, the way you might at a museum. Rather, I saw a memory, a relationship, an individual who managed to profoundly touch another in his tragically brief life. I can picture him and Lilly strolling down the Alten Donau at sunset, talking about cemeteries and their futures and far-flung places like Palestine and London.

“Look, there’s a note on the back,” my aunt said. She flipped it over to show us. Scrawled in a clumsy cursive hand: With love, so you won’t forget me, from your Laci who will not forget you.