Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind

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 €œCorrespondence: 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 out: 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. €œShe 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.