Gertruda's Oath: A Child, a Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II (18 page)

He returned the priest’s letter to her and let her go back to the city. When she left, she saw a few dozen Jews—men, women, and children—being ordered to get into trucks. Anyone who had difficulty was pushed in there by force.

The trucks left the city and made their way to a thick forest about six miles south of Vilna. They drove along a dirt path into the forest and stopped where the Russians had dug gigantic pits to store oil tanks. The German attack had interrupted the work in the middle and the Russians had fled before they had time to bury the tanks.

The Lithuanians rushed the passengers out of the trucks, concentrated them in the small clearing, organized them into groups of
ten to twenty people, confiscated any valuables they had, and ordered them to strip. Then they shoved every group to the edge of the pits and blindfolded the Jews. Some were stunned, others prayed, women shrieked hysterically; none of them had any doubt what was about to happen.

The Lithuanians’ weapons spat fire and the naked victims knelt and fell straight into the pits. They were covered with stones and tree branches and more groups were brought to the valley of killing. Groans of the dying died out as evening fell.

It took only a few days for the German army to turn Vilna into a fearful and evil city. Plants were closed, businesses went bankrupt, and the number of unemployed increased from one day to the next. Many local citizens were recruited into units that worked for the Germans, and anti-Semitic feelings that had long lodged in broad strata of the civilian public were allowed free rein. Many informants helped the Germans arrest those suspected of sympathizing with the Russians, and the jails were filled with prisoners taken from home or snatched on the street. Dr. Berman lost most of his patients and Gertruda lost her job.

New decrees against the Jews were issued from German army headquarters at a rapid rate. It was a system of cruel tortures planned to make the victims twitch, suffer, and despair, until the final blow of death landed on them. The Jews were forbidden to travel on public transportation, to own a telephone or a radio, to sit in cafés, to attend the movies or the theater, to go to the barber, to walk on the main streets, and to have any contact with non-Jews. They had to wear yellow armbands.

•   •   •

The German occupation office on Zevalna Street, in the middle of the city, turned into a threatening fortress, the symbol of an omnipotent ruler. Long lines of citizens soon twisted at its door, wanting to find out the fate of their family members arrested for interrogation, to get a peddler’s permit, or to offer themselves for work for the Germans. Most of them didn’t speak German. Gertruda, who was fluent in that language because she had grown up in an area with a German majority, thought she could use that knowledge to make money. She went to those standing in line and offered herself as an interpreter. One of the peasants asked her on the spot to write a request for him in German.

“I can’t pay you in money,” he said. “But I can give you fruit and vegetables in exchange for your work.”

She agreed immediately. The man wanted her to write a request for him to get a license for a stand in the farmers’ market. Gertruda knelt on the sidewalk and wrote a letter. He went to his wooden cart and brought her pears and potatoes. That day she wrote two more letters and was paid with a loaf of bread, cabbage, and pieces of smoked fish.

The following days were even more lucrative. She was asked not only to write letters, but also to interpret for people who had a meeting in the offices of the German government. The first meetings scared her. She was afraid that the Germans would want to know who she was, would interrogate her, would get to her Jewish child, and would arrest both of them. But the need to make a living outweighed her fear. She looked directly at the Germans in uniform, spoke with them politely and confidently. To her joy, none of them showed any special interest in her.

She was successful and soon became well known as an interpreter
who could communicate with the Germans. She brought home food, giving some of it to the landlady as rent and selling another part to her neighbors.

Sometime later, she no longer needed to hunt for customers in the street. People who heard of her started coming to her apartment or summoned her to their homes to write requests for them. The pantry filled up and hunger no longer stalked her and Michael.

Gertruda strickly forbade Michael to go into the street without her permission. The Germans often checked the identity of passersby constantly looked for Jews who were passing as “Aryans,” stopped suspicious people, interrogated them with torture, and executed many who couldn’t allay their suspicions. Michael was liable to endanger his life whenever he walked in the street.

The running of hobnailed boots echoed in the street, and orders in German disturbed the night silence. Rifle butts banged on doors. Frightened people crept out of their beds, hearing the order to move immediately to the ghetto. Karl Rink took part in the operation to move the Jews to the ghetto and felt bad at the brutality of his comrades who turned the evacuation into a vicious amusement. He had to accompany the expulsion crews quite often.

In the staircase of the house where the Berman family lived, frightened Jews gathered. They had a hard time understanding the exile order placed on their door. Gertruda met Dr. Berman in the courtyard.

“We have no choice,” said the doctor. “If we want to live, we’d better pack up and move.”

The Berman family loaded their things on a rickety truck. The
landlady stood in the doorway and spat at them. “You lied to me!” she shouted. “You didn’t tell me you were Jews.” In the empty apartments, the warmth of people forced to leave in a hurry dissipated.

The truck groaned on the way to the ghetto and moved along slowly in a convoy of vehicles, next to horse-drawn carts carrying more Jews who had been thrown out of their homes. Sad and terrified faces, lost in the cold night, surrounded the convoy on all sides. No one knew what was in store for them; no one was sure of the future.

The truck stopped in the heart of the ghetto and the driver unloaded the belongings of the passengers on the sidewalk. Armed German soldiers passed by and uttered obscenities. A thin old man fainted in the street and the soldiers kicked him for fun. When they were fed up with their amusement, they left to hunt down more victims. Dr. Berman rushed to help the old man, but he was dead by the time the doctor reached him.

As far as the eye could see, the sidewalk was packed with desperate Jews sitting on bundles of clothes and household goods. Pale mothers took out their breasts for their hungry babies. Sick people lay helplessly in the heaps of objects and prayed for a miracle to put them back on their feet.

The doctor devoted the following hours to searching for someplace to live. The selection of apartments was meager and the prices were high. Finally, he found a one-room apartment and moved his family there.

“What will we do now?” asked his wife anxiously.

Dr. Joseph Berman tried to calm her. “I’m told there’s work in the Jewish hospital. I’ll try to get a job there.”

•   •   •

There was uncertainty in the crowded apartment and oppression had drawn lines on the face of the doctor’s wife. The children ate dry bread and drank tap water. There was only one bed in the room for the four souls who huddled there together.

Soon after getting a job in the hospital, Dr. Berman learned that there wasn’t much he’d be able to do. Long lines of sick people waited at the building on Zavalna Street, which was too small to contain them. Stocks of medicine ran out and all the doctors could do was put cold compresses on the foreheads of the seriously ill and pray for their recovery. The number of deaths increased with every passing day.

Two weeks later, Dr. Berman stopped getting paid because there was no more money in the hospital coffers. He went on working as a volunteer, and his wife sold all her valuables one by one in order to survive. Day after day, she stood for hours in line at the bakery to buy bread. Sometimes she returned empty-handed because the bread had run out. In the small greengrocer shop, there were usually only crushed, rotten fruits and vegetables that weren’t fit for human consumption.

The worst was still to come. Organized groups of Lithuanians, in collaboration with German units, continued a systematic extermination of the Jewish population. They raided the homes of Jews in the ghetto, announced that they had come to take the men for work, and drove them into the nearby forests where they murdered them in cold blood and threw them into pits. Other Jews were snatched as they walked in the street and were executed. A big reward was paid to anyone who brought information about Jews hiding outside the ghetto.

Dr. Berman, who could no longer pay the rent, moved with his
family to the supply cellar of the Jewish hospital. The families of other doctors lived there with them, crowded and in bad sanitary conditions. For the time being, the Lithuanians and the Germans didn’t raid the hospital. They let the patients die slowly, but they all knew it was only a matter of time until the hospital would be destroyed and the end would come for those there.

The Jews of the ghetto vacillated between hope and despair. They wanted to believe that the Germans mainly wanted to use them as a labor force and didn’t intend to destroy them. That was what Jacob Gens also thought; he was a former police officer appointed by the Germans as chief of the ghetto police and later chairman of the Judenrat, the Jewish council. He wanted peace, obedience, and submission and warned against any organization designed to resist the Germans by force. But Dr. Berman and some of his friends thought otherwise. They were sure the Germans had decided to destroy the ghetto, as they had done in other occupied cities. So they established secret cells, amassed weapons, and prepared for battle. Itzik Vittenberg, a friend of the doctor, was appointed commander of the ghetto underground.

Despite the secrecy surrounding its operations, the Germans discovered the existence of the underground as a result of an informant and knew that Vittenberg was in charge. They tried to locate him, but he hid in a place known only to those loyal to him. The Germans finally called in Gens and demanded that he turn over the leader of the underground. Gens appealed to dozens of Jews, asking them to tell Vittenberg that he wanted to meet with him for important talks. He promised that if Vittenberg was arrested by the Germans during the meeting, a bribe would be paid to willing hands for his liberation, as when important Jews had been
arrested in the past. Vittenberg came to the meeting in Gens’s office, but had the area surrounded with his people to provide security. His fear was justified. Before Vittenberg entered Gens’s office, he was attacked by two Lithuanian SS men and German agents, who tried to drag him to their car. Vittenberg’s bodyguards realized that he had fallen into a trap. They assaulted the Lithuanians, got their leader away from them, and fled with him. During the incident, Vittenberg was wounded in the arm. Dr. Berman was called to bandage his wound. Vittenberg explained that he was now more certain than ever that the Germans were trying to capture him in order to weaken the underground and to prevent it from fighting. He was committed to completing preparations for the uprising.

The Germans were furious when their prey slipped out of their hands, and they told Gens they would kill hundreds of Jews if Vittenberg wasn’t turned over to them. Gens issued an emotional appeal to the Jews of the ghetto to locate Vittenberg. “If he goes on hiding,” he warned, “many of you will die.”

In the tense atmosphere of the ghetto, where uncertainty and anxiety overflowed, those words only intensified the fear. Hundreds of Jews—men, women, and children—went searching for Vittenberg. Mothers shouted at every house, every storage room, and every cellar: “Mercy on our children and us. Turn yourself in.”

The rage among the Jews grew from one hour to the next. Everyone talked about Vittenberg’s stubbornness. The few who tried to take his side were vilified.

Vittenberg received constant reports about what was going on. He knew that if so many were searching for him, he would eventually be found. After long hesitations, Dr. Berman was called to the remote room where the commander of the underground was hiding. Vittenberg was as pale as a ghost.

“The Jews of the ghetto don’t understand that their end is near
anyway,” he said in a pained voice. “But I don’t want them to blame me for it when they’re lead to their death. So I’ve decided to turn myself in. Please give me a poison capsule.”

Dr. Berman tried to persuade him to give up the idea, arguing that the underground needed him now more than ever, but Vittenberg persisted. Berman consulted with his colleagues, who agreed that there was no other way out, and he had to fulfill Vittenberg’s request. The doctor brought him the capsule.

The next day, Vittenberg came out of hiding and turned himself in. The Germans took him to the torture chamber where he swallowed the poison capsule and died a few minutes later.

Dr. Berman and the other members of the underground were left without a leader. They were sure the end of the ghetto was near and there was nothing they could do to prevent the disaster.

She didn’t expect to see him again. Mainly she didn’t expect to see him dead.

But it was him. No doubt about it. That mane of black hair, those shiny leather boots, that evil smile on his face when he threatened them with the gun and stole Lydia’s valuables.

Emil the chauffeur was lying on the sidewalk. His eyes were closed and his chest was covered with a big bloodstain. People passed by him, glancing indifferently. Dead people lying in the streets was a frequent sight, ever since the refugees had inundated the city. The sight of them didn’t seem to upset anyone anymore.