Gertruda's Oath: A Child, a Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II (32 page)

Instead of going to the holy sites, the buses turned to the Carmel and the passengers were scattered in various hotels. The
Transylvania
waited a few hours past sailing time, and finally sailed without them.

Isaac Trubovitch, a relative of Michael Stolowitzky had tears in his eyes when Gertruda told him on the phone that Michael had come to Palestine. He went to the hotel in Haifa where they were staying, hugged both of them warmly, and took them to Tel Aviv in his Ford.

Trubovitch was a well-to-do businessman, owner of a cooking oil factory. He owned the house at Weisel Street 6 in north Tel Aviv and gave the roof apartment to the nanny and the now eleven-year-old child. At long last, after years of hardships and wandering, the two of them had found a home: a big apartment, clean bedsheets, lavish meals, and warmth.

On their second evening in the Land of Israel, Gertruda told Michael about the death of his father. The boy burst into tears, hugged his nanny, and said, “Don’t ever leave me.”

“I promise,” she said, and also burst into tears.

The next day, Gertruda and Michael went wandering around Tel Aviv. They walked hand in hand along the boardwalk on the sea, ate falafel in the Yemenite neighborhood, and enjoyed ice cream in Café Whitman on Allenby Street. Michael was interested in what was going on around him and hugged Gertruda every chance he got. She was glad to see the fear gone from his eyes for the first time.

In the evening, Michael sat down at the table and wrote the following letter:

A week had passed since Gertruda and Michael came to Palestine. One morning, Sonya, Michael’s uncle’s wife, called Gertruda for a private conversation. The two women went to Sonya’s room and closed the door.

“You know how grateful we are that you saved Michael,” said Sonya. “From now on this is his home. What are your plans?”

“I want Michael to go to school, learn to speak Hebrew. I want him to have friends, to be like one of the Israeli children.”

“And what about you?”

“I’ll be with him, of course,” said Gertruda.

“Are you sure you’ll feel comfortable here? After all, you’re not a Jew and everybody here is. Aside from that, Michael now has a family; he’ll grow up and won’t need you anymore.”

“I don’t understand,” said Gertruda.

“What I want to offer,” said Sonya, “is that maybe you should think about returning home, to your parents. We’ll give you money, of course, for the ticket, and for your arrangements when you arrive. That will be better for you.”

Gertruda looked at her a long time, trying to digest what she had said.

“I’m not sure that Michael will want me to disappear from his life suddenly,” she said.

“He’s a child; he doesn’t know yet exactly what he wants.”

Gertruda stood up.

“Thank you, Mrs. Trubovitch,” she said. “But there’s one thing you might not have taken into account. Ever since Michael’s mother died, I’ve been his mother. I never left him and I won’t leave him now.”

She had absolutely no doubt that, to her dying day, she wouldn’t desert her child.

There was something Gertruda thought she had to do. She wanted to locate SS officer Karl Rink and send him a letter of thanks for saving their lives. For months she met with survivors of Vilna and Kovno ghettoes and heard testimony from them about Karl Rink’s various rescue acts. From one of them, Moshe Segelson, she learned to her surprise that Rink had been married to a Jew and that his daughter lived in a kibbutz in the Galilee.

Trying to locate Elisheva-Helga Rink, Gertruda went to the diplomatic representatives of the United States, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union in Israel, with the same letter:

One morning in the summer of 1949, after months of trying to locate her, Gertruda and Michael took a bus to Kfar Giladi to meet with the daughter of SS officer Karl Rink. Elisheva Rink was a charming twenty-four-year-old woman married to Mendel Bernson, a Palmach fighter from Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’akov. A young mother herself, she worked as a nurse in the kibbutz children’s house and none of the members of Kfar Giladi knew about her parents. She never talked about them. The wounds of the war were still fresh and she feared that it would be hard for the kibbutz to accept the fact that her father had served in the SS. So she received Gertruda and Michael without telling anyone about it.

Gertruda and Michael sat in her room after she finished working. A cool wind brought fragrances of flowers, and children were heard shouting with joy in the distance. Elisheva told them that correspondence with her father had stopped at the beginning of the war and had resumed only recently. She read them a letter from her father sent through Switzerland just before the end of the war, in February 1944.

Elisheva talked at length about her father, his pleasant nature, and his devotion to his family. She talked about the disappearance of her mother and her own travels until she reached the kibbutz.

After the war was over, she said, her father began writing to her regularly. Karl Rink managed to avoid being arrested and tried. He found work in a dye factory in Berlin and lived alone in an old one-room apartment.

As he wrote his daughter in one of his last letters:

Gertruda gave Elisheva a copy of the letter she had sent to the diplomatic representatives in Israel. “I’m willing to testify for him,” she said emotionally. “I very much want your father to come here so that Michael and I can thank him in person.”

“I’ll write him about that,” said Elisheva. “He’ll be very happy.”

Gertruda wasn’t content to simply send letters about Karl Rink to the embassies. She went to the Ministry of Justice in Jerusalem to make sure in person that the visit of former SS Rink would take place without any glitches. The officials listened to her story in amazement, wrote down her testimony, and told her explicitly that she could tell Karl Rink he would be a welcome guest in Israel and that he could come and go in peace as long as he liked.

Elisheva wrote to her father and soon got a letter from him:

Gertruda was very excited to hear from Elisheva about her father’s expected visit. She promised to bake a cake and come with Michael the day after Karl Rink arrived.

Elisheva hoped that when her father came to the kibbutz, the members could hear from him about what he had done during the war, especially about saving Jews. For the time being, except for her husband, she didn’t tell anyone about the expected visit.

In another letter Karl Rink wrote his daughter, on November 4, he said that he had already ordered plane tickets to Israel and would come on December 24. “You can, of course, imagine how excited
I am to see you,” he wrote. “I’m counting the hours to my flight to Israel.”

She wrote him that she would meet him at the airport and that her husband and little daughter would also come.

On December 20, Elisheva Rink received a telegram from Germany:

Life in the Trubovitch house was comfortable, but Gertruda wanted to live independently, find her own apartment, and pay her own and Michael’s way. In time, she and the child moved to a small apartment in Jaffa. She worked cleaning houses all day long to support herself and to pay his tuition. After a while, she sent him to a boarding school in the youth village of Ben Shemen. He was the only light in her life. Every Saturday, she went to visit him and bring him the chocolate he loved; she would sit next to him and listen eagerly to his stories of school. In the youth village, where they called him Mike, the principal and the teachers treated her as his mother, called her to parents’ meetings, and reported to her on his academic progress. She didn’t miss a single class party or graduation and Michael’s friends were sure she was his mother.

Gertruda and Michael. Ben Shemen, Israel, 1949
.

Every Sunday, she went to church in Jaffa and met for coffee with the new friends she had met in Israel. Like her, they spoke German or Polish, and to the end of her life she didn’t learn Hebrew. She had a widower suitor her friend introduced her to, a poor clerk, educated and well-mannered. Gertruda enjoyed his company, but when he proposed marriage, she turned him down. She had gotten used to being single and didn’t want to bring anyone into her life except the child she had saved from death.

But Gertruda worried about Michael’s future. It seemed to her that as time passed, it would be more difficult for her to work so hard, her income would decrease, and her ability to support the boy would diminish. She was haunted by the idea that, in Poland and Switzerland, there was a large fortune waiting for Michael, big sums
left by his father. She wanted to appeal to a lawyer to restore Michael’s rights, but she didn’t have money to pay him. Finally, she recalled the diamond merchant Isaac Geller, the neighbor of the Stolowitzky family in Warsaw. She hoped he was still alive, and she wrote him at his home address in Warsaw, Ujazdowska Avenue 15.

A month later, she got an answer. Geller wrote that he had escaped from Vilna to Siberia and back to Warsaw after the war ended. His wife had died from a serious illness and his children were living with him. Because of the economic distress he had encountered under the Communist regime in Poland, he would apparently be forced to leave his house soon and move to a modest apartment.