Gertruda's Oath: A Child, a Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II (3 page)

Mira, a plump, fair-skinned girl of twenty-one, was starting out as a clerk in the Department of Wills in the Ministry of Justice. She wore a white dress and stood arm in arm with Karl before the municipal clerk who performed their marriage.

Mira Rink with baby Helga. Berlin, 1926
.

Karl was a Christian and Mira a Jew, but their differences didn’t diminish their love. Karl’s father was a truck driver and his mother was a housewife. They seldom went to church and loved Mira like a daughter. Mira’s parents owned a grocery store and were observant Jews. Even though mixed marriages were common in Berlin, Mira’s parents strongly objected to her marriage with a Christian. Karl tried at length to convince them, and Mira also made considerable efforts to persuade her parents to let her marry her fiancé. In the end, they were forced to agree.

The young couple received a few wedding gifts, mainly glass and china dishes. Karl’s colleagues collected a small sum and his manager gave him a week’s salary as a present. The couple’s parents threw a modest reception and bought them a new double bed.

Happy and in love, Mira and Karl went on a two-day honeymoon to a small town in the Black Forest. They rode bikes on winding paths among the trees, ate blutwurst, and danced to the music of a rustic orchestra in the local beer cellar until the wee hours of the morning. When they returned to Berlin, they settled in Karl’s apartment, and at the end of the year they had a daughter, Helga. They brought her home from the hospital, put her in a cradle, and looked at her with loving eyes.

After everything they had been through, their life was calm. They loved each other and their baby daughter and pushed her stroller in the green parks on warm weekends. Mira was promoted in the Ministry of Justice, and Karl believed he would finally find the work he dreamed of. They both faced the future with confidence. They believed they would have prosperity and professional satisfaction, pure bliss.

They were wrong.

In the spring of 1931, after the snow and rain of the passing winter ended and sunbeams started breaking through the clouds, Karl Rink was called to a meeting in the Nazi Party office. He knew that the sport club of his firm, like many sport clubs, worked under the aegis of the SS, the brutal senior arm of the party. But he had little interest in politics. He wanted to ride a bike, win races, set new records, finally find work he liked. The Nazi Party interested him in only one context: it poured money into the sport club, encouraged its members, and distributed prizes. He had never been in the party office and he was curious about this meeting.

A stocky man in an SS uniform greeted him, shook his hand warmly, and introduced himself as the person in charge of sports teams. He gave him a friendly smile and a silver-plated trophy for his achievements in the annual bicycle competition.

“Continue to excel,” he told him. “The party loves men like you.”

Karl Rink was pleased with the attention he had won in the SS office. On the first Sunday after that, he took Mira and their little daughter, Helga, to a café on the shore of the lake. It was a nice warm day and people in their Sunday best filled the cafés, licking ice cream, sipping coffee, and eating cakes, while others were sailing leisurely. Times were hard and the economic situation was getting worse, but those enjoying the lake shore in this charming corner of Berlin pretended things couldn’t be better, as if all around them businesses weren’t collapsing one after another, as if the rate of unemployment wasn’t rising every day. Karl thanked his lucky stars that he had a source of income, that there was someone who appreciated his achievements in sport, and that the wife and daughter he loved most were sitting beside him.

But the delusion was short-lived. One morning, Karl was called to the office of his supervisor. He hurried there with the hope that he might be offered a transfer to a new and more important position. His happiness, it turned out, was premature. “You must know, Karl,” said his manager, “that the economic depression has hit our firm hard. The number of orders has fallen a great deal, our losses get bigger from day to day, and in these circumstances we have no choice but to fire some of the workers. I’m sorry to say that you’re on the list.”

Being fired, after ten years of working, left Karl speechless. He rolled up the envelope with a small sum of money as recompense by the management, picked up his coat, left the building, and headed home.

When he opened the door of his apartment, Helga, then six years old, fell into his arms with a shout of joy. She wasn’t used to seeing him come home so early. Mira was also surprised to see him.

“What happened, Karl?” she asked anxiously. “Are you sick?”

“No,” said Karl in a gloomy voice. “I was laid off.”

Mira turned pale. Even though unemployment rose from one day to the next, and the economic distress grew worse, she didn’t want to believe that they, like many others, would lose their livelihood. Day after day, they met men in their neighborhood who had been laid off. They trudged along, avoided meeting the eyes of passersby They seemed to envy anybody who was luckier and could still support his family. Now her small family had joined the ranks of the desperate. They would have to live on her modest salary, and both of them knew that wouldn’t be enough.

“What will you do now?” she asked with dread.

“I’ll look for work,” said Karl, but in his heart he knew that wouldn’t be easy.

They stayed up late, whispering about what was in store for them, thinking of acquaintances who might help. Karl said he would go to them the very next day.

In the morning, he went out to look for work, any work as long as it had a regular salary. Karl wanted to believe he would soon find somebody who would offer him a job. He knocked on the doors of people he knew, was answered politely, but didn’t make any progress. For hours he wandered from one business to another, offered himself for anything, but returned home that evening empty-handed.

For whole days, he stayed out of the house to avoid his wife’s muted painful looks. Over and over, impatient employers turned him down. The number of possibilities he hoped for quickly diminished. Since he didn’t dare return home before nightfall, he often went to the neighborhood movie theater and watched the same film over and over, sunk in the seat, alone and crushed, gazing at the screen but not seeing a thing.

One day, after he left a failed job interview, he passed by an auditorium where a Nazi Party meeting was taking place. He went inside, met a few members of his sport club, and heard fiery speeches promising to improve the nation when the party rose to power. They called on the unemployed to join them to prepare a new order and restore Germany to its glory. Karl listened intently. A new hope was kindled in his heart, and when the audience was asked to join the party, he gladly signed up. In the following days, he didn’t miss a meeting, was recruited to help the party, and learned to admire Adolf Hitler, the leader who could inflame his listeners and give them the confidence they needed for better days. With all his heart he wanted to help the rise of the new regime that would guarantee the nation and himself a better economic future.

The Jews of Germany watched the rise of the Nazi Party with growing concern; like a giant octopus, it sent out choking arms in all directions. Hitler ruled the party with an iron fist. His declared purpose was to come to power by any means: destroying political enemies, kindling fear, and inciting the masses against the Jews of Germany, claiming that they were the main cause of the economic debacle, corruption, and unemployment.

Joining the party cost Karl Rink dearly. It created a widening rift in his relations with his Jewish friends, mainly with Mira’s parents and family. Many of Mira and Karl’s friends broke ties with them. Her parents refused to accept him in their house.

More than once, Mira tried to persuade her husband to resign from the Nazi Party. They talked about it for hours.

“Your friends are people without a conscience. They murder in
cold blood whoever opposes them,” she said. “They’ll do everything to get rid of the Jews.”

“You exaggerate,” he said, dismissing her. “Attacking the Jews is just a means of winning the support of the people before the elections.”

He believed naively in the purity of Hitler’s intentions and said that as a member of the party, he had to work to promote the Nazi ideology. “You’ll see how good it will be here when Hitler comes to power,” he promised excitedly.

Mira looked at him sadly. “You’re wrong,” she said. “With Hitler, it will never be better for the Jews. The opposite.”

“What do you understand about politics?” Karl cut her off.

They stopped arguing. Mira saw no point in trying to persuade him that she was right. She fell silent, but her heart was heavy.

Blind to the gloomy reality, Karl expanded his activity in the party and was soon asked to join the SS, which had become the elite organization of German security services. He was accepted with open arms and given a thorough medical examination by a doctor who wrote a positive report on his health. A psychologist questioned him about his parents, his childhood, his education, his friends, his family, his profession, and his hobbies. In almost every way, Karl was a perfect match for the SS. He was a pure Aryan, strongly motivated, and physically fit. There was only one problem: his wife was Jewish, but the SS commanders wanted him and believed that the problem would be solved sooner or later. He received a good salary and was sent for a three-week training course to a small, remote camp not far from Berlin. The course included memorizing
Mein Kampf
, Hitler’s credo, strenuous physical exercises, weapons training, and harsh endurance tests. Students learned methods of interrogating and torturing
detainees. They had to wring the necks of dogs and cats with their bare hands, lie in foxholes while vehicles passed over them, wrestle comrades to victory, do without food for three whole days in a row, be whipped and live in solitary confinement in a tiny cell underground. Karl sailed through the training.

At the end of the course, Karl swore loyalty to the Führer and pledged “fidelity and obedience” to his dying day. The SS symbol, two parallel lightning flashes, was tattooed under his arm. He received a black uniform, new boots, an armband with a swastika, and a personal dagger he attached to his belt.

When he returned home in his new uniform, Helga burst into frightened tears at the sight of him and Mira looked at him in horror.

Karl Rink. Berlin, February 1938
.

“That’s scary,” she said.

“It’s just a uniform.” He tried to calm her. “A lot of Germans are wearing it these days.”

She sighed. “I’ve got a feeling this won’t turn out well, Karl.”

“You have no reason to worry, Mira.”

“Do they know you’ve got a Jewish wife?”

“I never hid that.”

“And how did they react?”

“That really didn’t seem to bother them.”

She looked at him and turned pale. “It doesn’t bother them now, but one day it will, believe me,” she said.

“Nonsense,” he protested. “They’ll have to come to terms with it.”

“In the course they must have taught you everything about their theory of race.”

“They did.”

“Which means that, sooner or later, they’ll demand that you leave me or leave the SS. What will you tell them then?”

“I’ll persuade them that there’s nothing wrong with you,” he said confidently. “I’ll tell them that you stand by my side.”

She sighed. “You’re naive, Karl,” she said. “You’re so naive.”

As soon as Hitler came to power in January 1933, the writing was on the wall, flagrant and prophesying evil. It was supposed to demonstrate to the Jews of Germany that, from now on, nothing would stand in the way of the Nazi leader’s intention to undermine their social, cultural, and economic position. And that is indeed what happened. Jewish officials in government offices were soon fired, along
with Jewish lecturers in the universities and Jewish managers of public institutions. They were replaced with pure Aryan Germans.