Gertruda's Oath: A Child, a Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II (4 page)

Mira Rink was fired from the Ministry of Justice with a brief announcement. “The law doesn’t allow us to employ you any longer,” said the manager of her division. “We expect you to leave today.” She received no payment when she was dismissed.

Ashamed, she went home and made lunch for Helga, who was about to return from school. When the eight-year-old girl came in, she was surprised to see her mother home at that hour. “I don’t feel so well,” Mira blurted out as an excuse. She noticed that her daughter was unusually nervous and tense. “My teacher told us he couldn’t continue teaching,” said Helga. “Tomorrow we’ll have a new teacher.” The Jewish teacher lived nearby. He had a sick wife and three children.

Mira calmed her daughter and kept her company while she ate lunch. She then helped her do her arithmetic homework. In the evening, when Karl came home from work, Mira told him that she had been fired, and so had her daughter’s teacher.

“I told you,” she said painfully. “Your Nazis won’t rest until they finish with all the Jews of Germany.”

He stroked her head affectionately and ignored the danger signals this time, too.

“I understand your concern,” he said. “But this is only a show of strength. Hitler doesn’t intend to make a big deal of the Jews. It’s clear to him that he has to prove himself mainly with economics. Besides, you see how good it is that I have a steady job. How would we manage now without my salary?”

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In the following days, Karl came home early, usually with a bouquet of flowers. He took Mira to the theater and the movies, bought her new books to read. It was important for him that she calm down and get used to the situation as fast as possible, that she be optimistic like him.

But Mira looked at reality with eyes wide open. Attacking Jews, narrowing their options, and destroying the sources of their livelihood continued at an increasing tempo. Jews were also fired from private jobs, the newspapers were filled with slander against them, Jewish products were boycotted, and her parents’ grocery store lost all its customers. On November 14, 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, stripping Jews of German citizenship and canceling all marriages with Jews.

“In terms of the law,” Mira said bitterly to Karl, “you’re no longer my husband and I’m not your wife.”

As usual, he waved his hand in dismissal.

“You’ll always be my wife,” he said in a solemn voice. “Nobody can separate us.”

Lydia and Jacob Stolowitzky learned, to their grief, that money can’t fix everything and even the wealthy sometimes need much more than what’s in their pocket to make them happy. After a few years of comfort and love, their joie de vivre disappeared. They began moving around the mansion sadly, withdrawn. They stopped organizing parties and concerts, seldom invited friends. Many nights, Lydia wept into her pillow because, despite her efforts, she couldn’t get pregnant. Her doctors were devoted and did all they could to help her, but eventually they had to admit that there was nothing
else they could do for her. They doubted if she could ever have a child.

She tried all that was available to her. When the best doctors in Warsaw couldn’t solve her problem, Lydia went to famous experts in Zurich and Vienna and tried the latest treatments. Sometimes they were painful, sometimes she had to stay in a private hospital in a foreign city far from home, but nothing stopped her. Her husband supported her all the way. “Money’s no object,” he said. “We’ll pay what we have to just so we have a child.”

Despite the big sums of money paid to them, the doctors couldn’t help. But Lydia refused to despair. She began frequenting the courts of rabbis and miracle workers, spending a lot of money on charity, consulting fortune-tellers, and filling the house with amulets against the evil eye. When none of these worked, she finally felt she was about to collapse. The family doctor pleaded with her to take sedatives. Her husband took her on a cruise on the Danube and sent her on shopping trips to famous couturiers of Paris. But nothing could restore her emotional forces. She moved from place to place like a rag doll, depressed, barely talking. She often entertained thoughts of suicide. Deep in her heart she had already accepted that she would never have a baby. Close friends suggested she adopt. Her husband, Jacob, also supported the idea. But Lydia couldn’t bear the thought. She wanted only a child of her own.

To the amazement of the doctors and herself, one day, after twelve years of fertility treatments, Lydia Stolowitzky discovered that she was pregnant. From that moment on, she stood straight, the light returned to her face, and she brightened up. She hired a nurse to stay with her throughout her pregnancy, and demanded that her doctors examine her every single day.

The daughter of Lydia and Jacob Stolowitzky was born in the mansion on the river on a cold, snowy day—and died only a few days later. Determined to bring another child into the world, the couple once again consulted their doctors, and in mid-February 1936 their son was born. The delivery was easier than Lydia expected and she was happier than she had ever been.

The parents named the baby Michael, after the angel of God, symbolizing grace, youth, and especially protection from the evil eye.

Jacob hurried to the synagogue to thank the Creator for the miracle and contributed a considerable sum to the poor. Lydia sat at her son’s cradle for hours, weeping and laughing in turn, looking at him as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. She furnished a nursery for Michael with toys and hired a nanny day and night. “He’s my prince,” she said to the nanny. “Don’t take your eyes off him.”

Like an excited child playing with his favorite toy, twenty-nine-year-old Emil stroked the wheel of the white Cadillac with his strong hands. He wore a black chauffeur’s uniform and a white visored cap. He was a Polish Catholic, tall and dark, the private chauffeur of the Stolowitzky family. His loyalty was rewarded with what was most important to him: a good salary, a heated room, and three meals a day.

The Cadillac rolled over the pocked road from Warsaw to the village, the soft springs blocked the jolts from the potholes in the worn pavement, and Emil glanced now and then into the rearview mirror at his employers in the backseat. Jacob Stolowitzky, a short, high-strung thirty-six-year-old, in a hunting suit and leather boots, was smoking a thick cigar; his wife, Lydia, thirty-four years old, beautiful as a princess, in a dress as white as snow, was pleading with him to stop smoking; and their two-year-old son, Michael, rosy-cheeked and silent, in an immaculate tailored suit, was chewing
on a piece of chocolate. In the front seat, next to the driver, sat the nanny, Martha.

Martha was thirty years old, short and thin, with a stern face. She took good care of Michael, imparted knowledge, and taught him obedience, manners, and courtesy. His parents were satisfied with his education. They raised him with love and didn’t want him to lack anything. Not an hour went by that Lydia didn’t come to see how he was, to hug and kiss him. She knew she would probably not have any more children. The doctors agreed that she would almost certainly not get pregnant again. She and her husband were sure that Michael would be their only heir.

Lydia and Michael Stolowitzky. Warsaw, May 1938
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Happy and carefree as they delighted in thoughts of the vacation in store for them on their summer estate, the Stolowitzky family sank into the soft leather seats of the American car and waited patiently for the trip to end.

The road went through sleepy towns and poor villages. Farmers looked in amazement at the magnificent car, the only one of its kind in all of Poland. Jacob Stolowitzky glanced at them with a cursory indifference, his wife rubbed French cream on her hands, and Michael glued his eyes to the window to look at the people in shabby clothes who gazed at the vehicle as if it had come from another world. Michael never saw people like that on Ujazdowska Avenue in Warsaw, around the four-story mansion. They weren’t part of his world; he wasn’t part of theirs.

Like his father, Jacob Stolowitzky was an experienced businessman, calculating and clever. He expanded the family business empire, acquired coal and iron mines, land, and houses, signed partnership agreements with companies all over the world, employed hundreds of workers, and deposited most of his money and gold in secret Swiss bank accounts, deducting part of it for charity. Emissaries from the Land of Israel who came to Poland were entertained generously in the home of the Jewish tycoon and always left with contributions, even though they could never extract a promise that he would ever settle in the Land with his family. “What will I do there?” he responded to their attempts to convince him. “I’m just fine here.”

Poland was indeed good to him. Abundantly wealthy, the Stolowitzky family led an enviable life. They employed as many servants as they liked, bought clothes and jewelry in the capitals of Europe, and sailed on the Adriatic every spring on a luxurious yacht, once even with the Duke of Windsor and his lover, Mrs. Simpson. They hosted dinners in their mansion for the elite of Poland and entertained famous guests from abroad, hired well-known artists to perform in the grand ballroom on the second floor of their house, and spent their vacations on their summer estate two hours away from Warsaw.

Jacob Stolowitzky. July 1929
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It was a large estate in a picturesque region. A thick forest and fruit and vegetable gardens covered a considerable part of the land, and at its edge was a clear, beautiful lake. Some of the wooden cottages in a clearing of the forest were for the family and their guests, and others for the workers who maintained the estate off season.

At last they arrived. Two armed guards hurried to open the big iron gate and bowed to the Cadillac that stopped at the central wooden home. As always, Emil carried Michael on his shoulders and galloped with him to the house. After he put Michael down in the big vestibule, Emil went to the garden and picked a bunch of flowers, came to Lydia, and gave them to her. “You never forget,” she said. She smiled at him indulgently and her husband tapped him on the shoulder affectionately.

“How could I forget,” replied Emil in a flattering voice. “You’re like a mother to me.”

The aged housekeeper of the estate greeted the family with obsequious bows and hurried to move their things from the car to their rooms. The rooms were furnished with expensive simplicity. On the beds were white sheets and soft down comforters; from the open windows overlooking the forest came pungent smells of pine trees and a symphony of chirping birds and animals. The weather was nicer than usual. Cloudless blue skies stretched overhead and flowers bloomed in the well-tended garden.

Throughout the day, many preparations were made around the estate. Close relatives, friends, and business partners invited to share their vacation were brought in carriages from the railroad station or arrived in cars driven by their private chauffeurs. Roars of laughter and pleasant conversations accompanied the abundant lunches served in gold dishes on a dining table that had belonged to the royal family four hundred years earlier. Children ran around and played on the lawns; babies and their nannies sunbathed.

Dinner was just as extravagant as lunch. When it was over, Lydia gathered her guests in the ballroom and presented a famous chamber orchestra brought especially from Warsaw. After the concert, the men smoked cigars and the women sipped warmed cognac. Servants put candy on pillowcases and prepared to shine the shoes the guests left outside their rooms at night.

At dawn the next day, accompanied by the forest guard of the estate, the family and their guests went out on horseback to hunt and fish. They hunted pheasant and fished for turbot and then sent them to the kitchen to be cooked for dinner. During the afternoon break, the servants spread white cloths on the banks of the lake and set them with various delicacies and bottles of wine. Lydia read her son a story and Martha, the nanny, went for a horseback ride.