Paper love

Sarah Wildman, a journalist, finds a collection of letters left by her late grandfather. They lead her into the family's prewar Vienna, a city that no longer exists in the form he knew. Among the papers is a trail to a woman named Valy, whom he left behind six months after the Nazis took Austria.

Wildman had seen Valy before, in photographs of a dark-haired young woman in an old album. When she asked her grandmother about the woman, the answer was brief: she was her grandfather's true love. Years later, the letters give that remark a name and a history.

This is narrative non-fiction built on a personal search. Wildman writes as both researcher and granddaughter, following the correspondence to learn what became of Valy. Her inquiry also forces her to reconsider the family's account of how her grandfather escaped Europe, a story that had always been told as a triumph.

The book reads as an investigation and a memoir together, driven by a single question about one woman's fate. It is useful for readers drawn to Holocaust history through individual lives, and to anyone interested in how family stories are pieced together from letters and photographs.