Gertruda's Oath: A Child, a Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II (12 page)

“But … my wife and child … I can’t leave them there alone.”

“Unfortunately, I can’t help you.”

A new idea suddenly popped up in Stolowitzky’s mind. “I could hire a driver and get to Warsaw with him,” he said. “Maybe it’s not too late.”

“You’re endangering your own life,” the ambassador warned him. “The Germans would arrest you at the border and you probably wouldn’t get out alive.”

Jacob Stolowitzky believed the ambassador was right. His life would indeed be in danger if he went to Warsaw. Nevertheless, he wasn’t willing to give up so fast. He took a cab to the office of his Paris agent to discuss the possibilities of sending a chauffeur to Warsaw to try to get Lydia and Michael out. The agent immediately called in his private chauffeur and suggested he do it. Stolowitzky gave the man a suitcase full of money to bribe whomever he needed to, and promised the chauffeur a big sum if he came back with his wife and son. The chauffeur agreed, wrote down the address of the mansion in Warsaw, and set off.

In the next days, Jacob spent most of his time in his agent’s office, waiting for the chauffeur to come back. Meanwhile, he learned that, because of the German invasion of Poland, the French railroad company worried that a period of uncertainty was in store for Europe. As a result, the terms of the contract would be frozen until the situation was cleared up.

But the contract was the last thing on his mind. He was already imagining his wife and son arriving in Paris safe and sound. That was what he wanted most right now.

It took four days for the chauffeur to return, alone. He said that he had been stopped at the Polish border by German soldiers and not allowed to continue. Stolowitzky felt that his world was collapsing.

He had a bad premonition.

The slim hope that the Polish army would block the Germans before they reached Warsaw dissipated like a light cloud in a storm wind. The news from the front was bad and the Polish government’s attempts to calm fears failed to convince anyone. Alarm sirens wailed day and night, cannon thunder approached the city, German planes dropped bombs on apartment houses and residential areas, and the streets were filled with people and vehicles trying to get out of the city.

One by one, the servants in the Stolowitzky house on Ujazdowska Avenue disappeared. First the cook ran off, then the gardener, then all the others. Only Lydia and Michael, Gertruda and Emil the chauffer remained.

Lydia felt her self-confidence draining away. At any moment, she expected her husband to come back home and take charge. He had promised her to come back in a few days.

The roar of the bombs terrified Michael, and Gertruda couldn’t dissipate his fears even when she sat at his bedside every night. For whole days he didn’t let go of her hand or let her out of his sight. Her cool head, solid body, and firm step served as an indispensable support for the child.

Lydia, who had never made a dinner by herself in her life, was helpless when the cook left her, so Gertruda took over. She bought food in the black market, cooked, set the table, and washed the dishes. She gladly got up early in the morning and went to bed late at night. She took care of Michael and his mother, kept the house clean, and even trimmed the rosebushes in the garden.

Emil clearly lusted for her. His boss’s absence from Warsaw left him a lot of free time and idleness frayed his nerves. Ever since Gertruda had come to work there, he had dreamed of the moment
when she’d be his. She inflamed his imagination, her refusal of his advances didn’t discourage him, and now he felt emboldened. Lydia was nervous and yearned for her husband, the servants had disappeared, and Gertruda had become an easy prey.

She was standing at the stove in the kitchen, making dinner. Night fell and cannon shells shook the walls of the house. Gertruda was tasting the soup when a strong hand grabbed her waist from behind. She shrieked in panic and tried to remove the hands gripping her. Emil laughed. “What happened, you don’t like that?”

“Don’t touch me!” she shouted. “Lydia will fire you when she hears about this.”

He continued laughing and didn’t let go of her. “Lydia can’t do anything to me,” he said. “I’m the only man in this house. You all need me. She wouldn’t dare stay here alone with you and Michael.”

Gertruda twisted but he was stronger than she was. When she tried to shout, he put one hand over her mouth and raised her dress with the other. Her legs kicked him in vain. Emil laid her on the floor and attacked her with his full weight. She groaned in despair and prayed.

The voice of a frightened child was heard on the kitchen stairs.

“Gertruda, are you here?” called Michael.

She couldn’t answer. Emil froze. “Don’t move,” he whispered in her ear.

“Gertruda,” Michael continued. “I can’t fall asleep. I need you.”

He came into the doorway and he looked for her. Emil cursed, got up, and slipped out of the kitchen. Gertruda lay on the floor, her body aching. Michael bent over her.

“Are you sick?” he asked.

“No, darling, I just fell down. Help me get up.”

The little boy held out his soft hand to her and she got up slowly.

Trying to cover the rips in her dress, she walked to Michael’s
room, put him in bed, and then hurried to her room to change her clothes. Tears fell from her eyes.

The group of Berlin children sailed from Italy and reached the Land of Israel on a cold rainy day in October 1939. The group numbered a dozen boys and girls aged thirteen to sixteen who had attended Jewish schools in Berlin and knew a little Hebrew. They were stuffed into crowded cells in the ship’s hold, hurled on the waves day and night, didn’t talk much, preferred to withdraw into themselves, and feared for the fate of their parents. Sad and uncomfortable, they waited in the port of Haifa in a crowded warehouse until they were taken to the kibbutzim. They carried small suitcases and looked often at the photos their families had left with them.

When the representatives of the kibbutzim arrived, Helga and a few other children were taken to Kfar Giladi, where they met with their guides who would tell them about life on the kibbutz. A few days later, the children of the Berlin group received Hebrew names and Helga became Elisheva. She lived in the same building as her traveling companions, studied with the children of the kibbutz, and worked at various jobs. They spent their free time with adoptive families who tried to give them warmth and love. Elisheva was grateful for the way she was treated by the family that adopted her, one of the veteran families of the twenty-three-year-old kibbutz. She liked life on the kibbutz, although she was still bound to her past. She avoided talking about her family, said only that her father and mother had stayed in Berlin, and didn’t reveal the truth about her father to anyone.

She learned to milk cows, pick oranges, and lead goats to pasture in the mountains of the Galilee. She usually walked around bare-foot, her delicate feet quickly adjusting to the dirt paths, the stones, and the thorns. The sun tanned her pale face and her bare arms. In the kibbutz, her long silences and her solitude in the lap of nature were accepted. She took many walks in the field sunk in thoughts of her father and mother, the friends she had left behind. At night, she couldn’t sleep. The winds of war were blowing hard now and she knew that sooner or later, her father would find himself on the front. She was worried about his safety and waited for his letters.

Helga (Elisheva) Rink, seventeen years old. Kfar Giladi, Israel, 1942
.

A few weeks after her arrival at Kfar Giladi, Helga received a letter from her father:

Karl Rink gave the letter to a friend who was going to Switzerland and promised to forward it from there. Since he didn’t know where his daughter was, Karl addressed the letter to Yossi Millman of Kibbutz Dafna who had escorted the group of children from Berlin to the Land of Israel. Millman sent the letter to Helga. She hid it and wanted to answer her father, but the letter she got had no return address.

For years after that, Karl Rink didn’t write to his daughter and she couldn’t write to him.

Jacob Stolowitzky was a strong and determined man who had overcome many difficult obstacles in his life, ones that could easily have brought down other men. But never had he felt so helpless and useless
as in those damp days in Paris in the autumn of 1939. He listened to the radio and read the newspapers, neither giving him any good news. They reported on the rapid advance of the German army in Poland, the great destruction and the corpses littering the road, the collapse of the Polish army.

Lydia Stolowitzky too, had never felt so desperate as in those days. The news from the front was bad. Columns of tanks and personnel carriers loaded with German soldiers were making their way toward Warsaw, villages and towns were conquered with no resistance, planes bombed various areas of the country indiscriminately, and hundreds of bodies of Polish soldiers and civilians were reeking alongside the roads. Lydia couldn’t get in touch with anyone in her family or with friends in the top levels of government who might be able to help. There was a sense of fear and disorder in the air; rumors of the brutality of the conquerors spread.

Most of Lydia’s friends and neighbors had already fled Warsaw. The manager of her summer estate somehow got to the city to plead with her to hide in the isolated farm. She refused, “No place in Poland is safe today,” she said. “The Germans will certainly get to the farm, too.”

She gave him some money to pay the workers and said she was sorry not to go on paying them in the foreseeable future.

“Never mind,” said the man. “We’ll wait for you until the war is over.”

That very day, Isaac Geller, a rich diamond merchant who lived nearby, knocked on the door of the Stolowitzky house. He was a frequent guest of Lydia’s and a close friend of Jacob’s. Michael often played with his son in the diamond merchant’s house at Ujazdowska 15.

“We’ve decided to escape from here,” he told her. “The Germans are liable to enter Warsaw any day. You should also get out.”

“Where should we go?” asked Lydia in a choked voice.

“Vilna. It’s safer there.”

She didn’t know what to say. She knew that she should leave Warsaw. But she was afraid that if she did, her husband wouldn’t be able to find her.

“Have you gotten a phone call from Jacob?” asked Geller.

“No. The lines are cut.”

“Before we go, can I help you with anything?”

“Thanks. I just want Jacob to be here.”

But Jacob Stolowitzky didn’t come and the roars of the cannons grew louder. The Lithuanian city of Vilna, now under Soviet rule, was 375 miles from Warsaw. According to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had been signed a few weeks earlier, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed not to attack each other. Therefore, many Jews saw Vilna as a safe place. After serious hesitations, Lydia also decided to try to get there.

“Pack only what you and Michael need,” she told Gertruda. “We can’t take everything.”

Emil was ordered to prepare the car for a long trip the next morning. He bought gasoline on the black market, got spare tires and tools for car repair, emptied the trunk of everything superfluous, and also packed his own things.

At dawn, when gray mists still shrouded Warsaw and the roars of the cannons sounded closer than ever, Emil loaded the trunk with the overflowing suitcases Lydia had prepared. She took ancient silver, valuable paintings, jewelry, all the cash in the house, and the family photograph album. Gertruda packed the pictures of Mary and the crucified Jesus that had hung above her bed and dressed Michael in a heavy winter coat.

From a hiding place in the house, Lydia took her husband’s gun and hid it in her purse. “I hope we won’t need to use it,” she said in a worried voice. They got to the door, but Lydia didn’t have the strength to leave. She returned, and for a long time she walked around the rooms whose windows were shuttered. Her eyes lingered on the furniture she was leaving behind, feeling as if she would never see it again. In the bedroom, she locked the door and stretched out on the big bed covered with a scarlet velvet spread. At long last, all alone, away from the servants, the nanny, and her son, she burst into tears.