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.
“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.
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?”
• • •
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.”