Gertruda's Oath: A Child, a Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II (25 page)

“Do you know where I can get work?” she asked.

“I need a cleaning person,” said the priest. “I can’t pay money, but you’ll get room and board, and Michael can continue to attend our school.”

That was the best deal she could expect in the destroyed city, still licking the wounds of war.

“Thank you very much,” she said. “I’ll be glad to work here.”

That very day they got their own room and Gertruda immediately started working. Michael went back to the church school.

“How much longer will we be here?” Michael asked Gertruda a few days later.

“A few weeks, no more,” she estimated.

But it took more than six months for the Red Army to enter Warsaw, liberate Poland, and start the trains running again.

Gertruda and Michael went to say good-bye to Father Gedovsky She thanked him over and over for his kindness and warmth. He took a few bills out of his wallet and placed them in her hand.

“Good luck,” he said to them and watched them until they disappeared, walking hand in hand to the railroad station.

The platform in the Vilna railroad station was packed with civilians and Russian soldiers. People stormed onto the freight cars of the first postwar train to Poland. Gertruda and Michael were crushed among hundreds of men and women who filled the filthy car. They waited for hours in the stifling heat until the train moved, and for whole days they went without food. They divided one bottle of water between them and had to stand up most of the time because there was no room to sit or lie down and get some rest.

The dejected passengers, with their share of hardships, including several sick people, didn’t dare leave the car when the train stopped in stations on the way. Most of them were silent throughout the journey. One woman who did speak was a Jew with a worn face, a survivor of Auschwitz who was going to Warsaw to look for what was left of her family. She told Gertruda that camps had been set up in Germany for Jewish displaced persons who wanted to go to Palestine.

Early on a rainy gray morning, the train stopped in Warsaw. Gertruda looked at the ruins of the city stretching beyond the railroad station. Her heart stopped when she thought of the good years she had spent there. “Come,” she said to Michael with sudden resolve, and she pulled his hand. “We’ll get off here.”

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“To your house.”

Men and women in rags walked around aimlessly in the city that had been hit hard by the bombs. They burrowed in the smashed rocks, broken doors, and twisted water pipes scattered on the hills of ruins of destroyed houses, as if they still hoped to save something valuable from the abandoned piles. Gertruda and Michael walked on paths between heaps of rubble. No signpost remained to indicate where they were, but Gertruda walked to the nearby river. From the river, she thought, she would easily find the house.

To Gertruda’s amazement, Ujazdowska Avenue wasn’t damaged. The mansions stood exactly as they had on the day she had fled with Michael and his mother from the approaching Nazi army. They went to number 9. A metal board still waved above the entry-way with the German eagle and swastika on it. The door was wide open. Inside, the floors were covered with shreds of documents that had been hastily burned. She saw desks, abandoned typewriters, and some of the family furniture now broken and overturned. Pictures of Hitler still hung on the walls.

Michael stood among all this, perplexed, but he remembered where his room was, went up to it, and found pieces of toys that reminded him of his childhood.

“Will we come back to live here?” he asked.

“No point. Your mother wanted me to take you to Palestine and that’s what I will do,” she replied.

“And who will live in the house?”

“I don’t know. For the time being, it’s impossible to live here, but you must remember that this house now belongs to you. Someday, you’ll probably take it over.”

They inspected the house for a long time. Every valuable item—
the statues, the paintings, and the ancient books—had vanished. All that remained was filth and a slight smell of smoke from the burned Nazi documents.

In the yard the trees had withered and the flower beds had disappeared. A military Mercedes convertible was abandoned in the garage, its motor exposed. A military motorcycle was lying on its side.

They went to the street on their way back to the railroad station. Even though all the houses nearby weren’t damaged, they were abandoned as in a ghost town. On the sidewalk, Russian soldiers were stretched out dozing or chomping on food. On the banks of the nearby river lay batteries of German machine guns that could no longer be used and in Chopin Park the peacocks had disappeared from the lake, which itself had turned into a turgid swamp.

“Will we have a house in Palestine as in Warsaw?” asked Michael.

Gertruda stroked his head. “We’ll have a house, maybe not so big, but a real house.”

The train that took them traveled all night, until it stopped in the small station of Starogard. Gertruda and Michael got off and walked to her parents’ house. She didn’t know any of the passersby she met. Her parents’ house badly needed fixing up. The flourishing flower garden around the house and the kitchen garden were deserted and full of weeds. Gertruda went inside, dreading what she would find. Her parents weren’t young when the war began, and she feared they were no longer alive.

But both her parents were still there. The house was more meager and poorer than she remembered, and her father and mother had grown very old. Her mother was sick in bed with a fever, covered
with a torn blanket. Her eyes filled with tears and her voice broke when she saw her daughter. “I didn’t think you were alive,” she said.

Gertruda’s father said that her mother had fallen ill a few weeks earlier and the doctor had diagnosed pneumonia. He advised hospitalization, but the hospital was full of sick and wounded refugees.

“It’s good you came,” said her father. “Maybe Mother will recover for you.”

Gertruda didn’t plan to stay more than a few days with her parents, but her mother’s condition forced her to stay longer. It was hard for her parents to support themselves, let alone a couple of unexpected guests. Her father said that during the war they had eaten only what they found in the fields, and they usually went to bed hungry. Most of the neighbors loathed them. They claimed that Gertruda had sold herself to the Jews and had run away with them.

Gertruda found work as a substitute teacher in the nearby school and was paid a meager amount, barely enough to buy food. Michael usually stayed home. The neighbors refused to let their children play with him.

Months went by. Her mother’s condition improved. She got out of bed, her appetite returned, and she looked better. One Sunday when they came back from church, they gathered around the dining room table.

“Now that I’m healthy,” the mother said to her daughter, “things will go back to normal. You’ll find real work and I promise you, your father and I will take care of Michael with devotion and love.”

Gertruda shook her head. “I don’t think we’ll stay here.”

Her father and mother looked at her in amazement, unable to understand.

“I swore to Michael’s mother that I’d take him to Palestine,” she said. “And that’s what I intend to do.”

“But,” her mother tried to protest, “you were born here, this is your home. It can also be Michael’s home.”

“I know,” said Gertruda. “But I swore to his mother I’d raise him as a Jew.”

“Then find a way to send him to Palestine by himself. You don’t belong there, in a strange country, among Jews. Did you forget that you’re a Catholic? They won’t love you.”

“They’ll love Michael. That will be enough for me.”

Her parents’ attempts to persuade her continued day and night. They exhausted her.

Finally, she announced that she was leaving.

“Michael and I will go to one of the Jewish refugee camps and from there they’ll take us to Palestine,” she said firmly.

Gertruda gathered their few clothes, thanked her parents for keeping them, stuffed a few bills from her last paycheck in their hands, and parted from them tearfully. They hoped they’d meet again someday, but they knew the chances of such a meeting were very slim.

Gertruda and Michael. Displaced persons camp, Berlin, July 1947
.

Gertruda bought train tickets to Munich, and after a long trip they arrived. She rented a room in a wretched hotel near the railroad station and immediately began looking for people to show her the way to the displaced persons camp. She met some American soldiers who told her about the camp set up near the city, and immediately she and Michael headed there.

The camp was at the edge of a forest. Behind a fence stood dozens of huts, and many people were sitting beside them or walking around the area. Laundry hung on lines and children played with balls made of rags. In the director’s office Gertruda was asked to fill out a routine form and was sent to one of the huts. It was very crowded. Partitions of blankets separated the beds and a heavy smell of sweat permeated the air.

“How long will we be here?” asked Michael.

“Not long, I hope.”

“From here, we’ll go to Palestine?”

“Yes, my son.”

“And there we’ll meet Father?”

“Maybe.”

While Gertruda and Michael entered the displaced persons camp in Germany and waited to be taken to the Land of Israel, a frantic search began for ships that could carry thousands of Holocaust survivors to the shores of their new homeland.

The searches were conducted by agents of Mossad le’Aliyah Bet, established by the Haganah. After several attempts, a gigantic junk heap was discovered in the port of Baltimore, Maryland. The ship was slowly rotting away at the docks of inactive ships. On the prow of the ship, through a thick layer of rust, burgeoned the original name it boasted in its glory days: the
President Warfield
.

It had cost more than a million dollars to build in 1928, as a luxurious riverboat, and provided cruises to those who could afford its high prices. The best bands played dance music every evening in its ballrooms, accompanied by the best American singers.

After World War II, the demand for cruise ships fell off and the
President Warfield
sailed several times, almost without passengers.
The ship was requisitioned by the British navy and refitted as a transport ship. Its decks were covered with thick armor, cannons were fixed to its prow, and the fine wooden cabins were destroyed to make room for vital military cargo.

Veteran sailors believe that some ships are cursed. The
President Warfield
was one of them. To ward off evil, her sailors hung a big crucifix on the prow and put three cats on the third deck with lucky amulets. Nothing helped. In the middle of the war, the ship was hit hard in a German submarine attack, and it took months for it to be repaired and transferred to the American navy, which used it to transport soldiers to the landing at Normandy. In 1946, the navy retired the ship completely and towed it to the junkyard in Baltimore harbor, where it was sold for fifty thousand dollars to the secret shipping company established by Aliyah Bet.

A few tanks wallowed near Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, trucks unloaded soldiers, and jeeps moved around in the big square facing Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which had been partially destroyed in the bombing raids. A strange silence prevailed. No more thunder of cannons, no shriek of mortar shells, no rumble of airplane engines. Hitler and a few of his senior aids had committed suicide. Many of the staff officers had been arrested and imprisoned. The war was over.

Barricades had been erected in the center of the city and Allied soldiers were checking the documents of passersby. Karl Rink wanted to get as far away from there as possible. Even though he was wearing civilian clothes, he was afraid of being arrested at any moment, and a quick check would discover the SS tattoo under his arm.
He slipped into side streets, tried to avoid groups of soldiers, and finally found himself on the edge of the prestigious neighborhood of Wilmersdorf, where many of the houses had been spared the bombings. No soldier or military vehicle was seen in the area, and he hoped to find a safe hiding place there. Only a few dejected people were walking in the streets. The stores were locked and the windows were shuttered. For some days, he had had nothing to eat or drink, and Karl searched in vain for remnants of food in garbage cans.

His hunger and thirst were unbearable, and he was even willing to beg for a few pennies to buy bread.

In a doorway, Karl saw an old man in a wheelchair with a checkered blanket over his legs. He approached him hesitantly.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m hungry. Can you help me?”

The old man looked up at him inquisitively.

“Who are you?” he asked.