Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind

She was your grandfather's true love, was the only answer given when Sarah Wildman presented her grandmother with a dozen photographs of a dark-haired, smiling young woman she had stumbled upon in her grandfather's old office. 'True love'? It was stated as fact, and with no further information. Who was this woman? And what was her relationship to her grandfather? When pressed, her grandfather's sister offered a bit more- 'She was brilliant! And so in love with your grandfather.' It was tantalizing, but agonizingly open-ended. Growing up, Wildman could reel off the details of her grandfather Karl's escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna. He was the irresistibly charismatic center of her family, beloved by everyone he encountered. His flight from Vienna six months after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938 was at the center of his myth- Karl was a success at everything. But no narrative is as simple as it initially appears. Years after her grandfather's death, Wildman found a cache of letters writte