Gertruda's Oath: A Child, a Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II (26 page)

“I was a soldier,” replied Karl.

“Do you have a family?”

“My wife is dead and my daughter is abroad.”

“Come with me,” said the old man. “But don’t expect much.”

Karl pushed the wheelchair into a spacious apartment on the first floor. The old man directed him to the kitchen. On the table was a loaf of bread and on the stove was a kettle.

“That’s all there is,” he said. “Make yourself some tea and take a few slices of bread.”

“Thank you,” said Karl gratefully.

The old man looked at him as he devoured the food.

“Where do you live?” the old man asked.

“I have no place to live.”

“You can live with me for the time being,” said the man in the wheelchair. “My wife died two days ago and I need help. What do you think?”

•   •   •

In early August 1945, Helga-Elisheva Rink received a letter from her father:

“Stolowitzky?” asked one of the two young men in amazement, stopping at Gertruda and Michael’s beds in the DP camp. Their eyes looked at the name written crudely on the suitcases at the head of Gertruda’s bed.

She had seen the two of them for the first time only a few minutes before, when the director of the hut allotted them two beds. The brothers Zvi and Joseph Yakobovitch had lost their whole family in Auschwitz. Their parents were taken to the crematoria, but the two boys had miraculously been spared. Joseph was seventeen and Zvi was fifteen. They escaped from the death camp during the turmoil there when the German staff realized the Red Army was approaching. The two hid in the forest until Russian soldiers found them and took them to a military hospital, where their wounds were treated and they were fed.

“Are you Mrs. Stolowitzky?” asked Joseph.

“He’s Stolowitzky,” said Gertruda, and pointed to Michael who was sound asleep. “I’m his adopted mother.”

“We knew a Stolowitzky in Auschwitz,” added the lad. “He lived in the same hut with us.”

“What was his first name?”

“Jacob. He was a charming man. He took care of us like a father until the Germans took him to the gas chambers.”

The awful news made Gertruda shudder. She had still hoped that Michael’s father would come through the horrors of the war safely. Now she knew that only she and Michael were left.

“Did he tell you anything about his family?” she asked.

“Only that he had had a big house in Warsaw and a factory for
railroad tracks. He didn’t know what had happened to his wife and son.”

“Don’t talk about that to the child,” Gertruda pleaded with them. “Jacob Stolowitzky was his father. The child thinks he’s still alive.”

They promised not to tell, and she decided to tell Michael the truth only when the journey of hardships they faced on the way to the Land of Israel came to an end.

Like many of those in the camp, the brothers were still haunted by the horrors of the death camp. At night, they would sneak into the camp kitchen and steal loaves of bread, which they hid under their pillow, and during the day they hoarded every object that looked useful: empty cardboard boxes, ragged clothes and torn books thrown in the trash by the camp inmates, as well as dull knives and used bandages. Gertruda was the only person they trusted, and they poured out their heart to her. They had a faded photo of their parents in their house in Poland. They kept only that souvenir and burst into tears when they looked at it, trying to cling to those happy days when the whole family was alive. They also loved music. Zvi said he had learned to play the violin as a child. One day he found an old violin on his bed in the camp. He shouted with joy and hugged Gertruda when he discovered that she had bought the violin for pennies from one of the refugees.

Zvi played with gleaming eyes and many of the camp inmates gathered to listen to him. In time, a youth orchestra was formed consisting of an accordion, a flute, a piano, and a violin. The camp administration assigned them a corner in the dining hall for rehearsals, and they also organized concerts. At every concert, Zvi reserved front-row seats for Gertruda and Michael.

The two brothers wanted to go to a kibbutz. Zvi dreamed of establishing
an orchestra there and Joseph wanted to work the fields. They were sorry their parents couldn’t come. Their father, who had been a teacher, had planned to immigrate to the Land of Israel but was too late. Zvi composed a song in Yiddish in memory of him:

A week after he started taking care of the sick old man, Karl Rink had his first day off. He got up early, washed and dressed the old man, made him enough food for the whole day, left the house, and went to the eastern part of the city. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were destroyed, street signs had disappeared, and he wandered around for a long time until he was able to find where Reinhard Schreider lived. His commander’s house had also been hit by bombs. One of its wings had collapsed, but the others were still inhabited.

Karl Rink remembered Schreider’s apartment. He knocked on the door of the intact ground floor. No one answered. He knocked again, but in vain. He walked to the end of the corridor and knocked on the door of another apartment. A woman’s voice came from inside the apartment: “Who is it?”

Karl said he was looking for Schreider and would be glad if she could give him some information about him.

“What do you want with him?” the woman asked suspiciously.

“I’m a friend of his.”

The door opened. A woman of about fifty stood in the entrance and behind her shoulder, a man peeped out. His face lit up at the sight of the guest.

“Karl!” the man shouted happily. “Come in, please come in.”

Karl Rink recognized him immediately. Before the war, for many months, the two of them had worked at SS headquarters in Berlin.

“There were rumors that you were killed in the war,” said the man.

He insisted that Karl have a cup of tea and a simple cake his wife had baked.

“Why are you looking for Schreider?” he asked.

“No special reason … I just thought it would be nice to meet. After all, he was my commander and was always nice to me.”

“He had bad luck,” said the man sadly. “When we knew it was all over, many of us burned our uniforms, put on civilian clothes, and went into hiding at home. The Americans caught Schreider when they came to Berlin and took him to a military base for questioning.”

“Is he still there?”

“Yes. It doesn’t look like they’ll let him go anytime soon.”

She walked like a ghost on the paths of the DP camp in Germany. Sixteen years old, her body skinny as a stick, her face long and her eyes sad. On her chest, under her faded shirt, was a word carved in the death camp of Treblinka:
WHORE.
Such tattoos were etched in the flesh of the girls and women assigned to satisfy the sexual needs of the German staff. The forced whores were given a temporary guarantee of life, a passport to the humiliating journey of survival
that left an eternal scar in their heart. They would never forget the coarse, mostly drunken soldiers who behaved with them as they would never have dared behave with the women they had left at home.

Like many inmates of the DP camp, the girl’s whole family had died in the gas chambers. When the Germans fled for their lives from the approaching Red Army, she was caught up in the wave of survivors who went through the open gate, scattered in the fields, and breathed the air of freedom. Her eyes were dry, her heart was sealed, her legs buckled with weakness. On her way to the DP camp, her indifferent eyes passed over German trucks burning and farmhouses whose fearful inhabitants had locked themselves inside. She didn’t know what was in store for her and she didn’t care what happened as long as she didn’t have to go back to that hell.

At the DP camp she was given new clothes and assigned to a bed in one of the huts, but closed places terrified her. She refused to go into the hut and avoided going to the dining hall or becoming friendly with girls her own age. For whole days, she wandered around idly, and at night she stretched out on a bench on the side of one of the paths and had nightmares.

Groups of overworked psychologists worked in the DP camp with the many young people and adults who needed their care. Some were in a state that required hospitalization. The girl from Treblinka was called to a meeting with a psychologist, but fled into a grove at the edge of the camp.

The camp administration didn’t know what to do. All attempts to get to her, talk with her, put her in touch with young people, had failed. Gertruda saw her sleeping on the bench one night, brought a blanket from the hut, and covered her gently. The girl woke with a start and threw off the blanket. Her eyes looked suspiciously at the stranger.

“I’m sorry,” Gertruda apologized softly. “I just wanted to help.”

The two of them spoke Polish.

“I don’t need any help,” said the sixteen-year-old.

“We all need help,” said Gertruda. “All of us came here wounded and desperate. We have to help one another.”

The girl was silent.

“My name’s Gertruda.” She sat down on the bench and very slowly talked about herself, Michael, and the hardships they had experienced.

The girl was silent.

“I live in hut 23 with Michael. There’s an empty bed next to us. If you want to, you can sleep there at night. It will be more comfortable with us.”

The following night, Gertruda passed the bench again. She brought Michael with her. The girl was awake, as if she had been expecting her. The blanket was laid aside, folded.

“This is Michael. I wanted you to meet him,” said Gertruda.

The girl looked dully at the boy.

“Gertruda told me about you,” he said. He broke a chocolate bar in two and gave her half of it. “This is for you.”

She didn’t budge.

“Take it, please. It’s very good,” he pleaded.

When she didn’t hold out her hand, he put the chocolate next to her on the bench.

“Come,” Gertruda repeated her offer. “The bed in our hut is still free.”

The girl shook her head no.

“If you do want to come,” said Gertruda, “remember we’re in number 23. Goodnight.”

She held Michael’s hand and returned to the hut. The sounds of deep breathing of dozens of sleeping people filled the room. Here and there a candle was lit so people could write letters or journals in its light.

The next day, Gertruda again passed by the bench where the girl slept. She wasn’t there, but the blanket was left there. She sensed that something was wrong, and she reported the girl’s absence to the camp administration. A group of workers went out to search for her in the camp but couldn’t find her, so they asked for help from the police.

Gertruda went to the nearby villages with Zvi and Jacob Yacobovitch to look for the girl. They hitchhiked, rode on farm carts and trucks loaded with vegetables, asked passersby and shopowners if they had seen the missing girl, but no one had.

When that failed, Gertruda and the boys went to Munich, walked around for a long time among the prostitutes, money changers, and black market dealers in the alleys near the railroad station, and described the missing girl to them. No one had seen her; no one had heard anything about her.

Two days later, her body was pulled out of the nearby lake. She had left no note, and when she was buried in the old Jewish cemetery in the nearby city, the only mourners were Gertruda and Michael.

Aliyah Bet offered command of the
President Warfield
to various experienced ship officers, but they all refused. They feared the adventure was too dangerous, that the ship couldn’t make such a long trip, that the British would arrest them. The Haganah offered a lot of money to tempt them, but they still refused.

At an emergency meeting in Marseille, the leaders of Aliyah Bet discussed their crisis. Somebody mentioned Isaac (Ike) Aaronovitch, who had attended school for naval officers in Richmond, England.

“He makes an excellent impression,” he said. “Let’s give him a chance.”

The suggestion was accepted, although not enthusiastically, but there was no other option and time was of the essence. The job had to be offered to Ike.

He was only twenty-two years old and lacked real experience in sailing ships. The offer was more than likely several sizes too big for him.

“I’ve never commanded a ship,” he said apologetically.