Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
Audiobook12 hours
Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind
Written by Sarah Wildman
Narrated by Tavia Gilbert
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
5/5
()
About this audiobook
Years after her grandfather's death, journalist Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a cache of his letters in a file labeled "Correspondence: 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 remained behind when he fled Europe six months after the Nazis annexed Austria.
Valy's name wasn't unknown to Wildman-she 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 to answer any other questions. But 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.
In the course of discovering Valy's ultimate fate, Wildman was forced to reexamine the story of her grandfather's triumphant escape and how this history fit within her own life. In the process, she rescues a life seemingly lost to history.
Valy's name wasn't unknown to Wildman-she 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 to answer any other questions. But 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.
In the course of discovering Valy's ultimate fate, Wildman was forced to reexamine the story of her grandfather's triumphant escape and how this history fit within her own life. In the process, she rescues a life seemingly lost to history.
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Reviews for Paper Love
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
5/5
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The author reconstructs years of the life of Valerie Sheftel, a young Jewish woman, trained as a physician in Vienna, as she navigated survival in the Reich’s ever tightening control and oppression of Jewish people, and as she seeks a way out. The author uses Valerie’s letters to the author’s grandfather (and others) as eyewitness accounts of the ever tightening oppression in the Reich, even before those inside knew about concentration camps, but also painstakingly uncovers bits of information hidden in Nazi records and conversations with people around the world whose own stories unexpectedly crossed Valerie’s. The book brings home that each of the 6+ million murdered, and millions more tortured and terrorized, by the Nazis was a human being, with a life story of joy and sorrow, who was loved and treasured by friends and family. You will want to keep reading as this story comes together in unexpected ways.