At the Paris railroad station, Jacob Stolowitzky was met by his French sales agent, who drove him to the Ritz Hotel where a suite on the top floor was reserved for him. “The contract is almost done,” said the agent. “There are just a few issues that haven’t yet been agreed upon. I hope we can sign very soon.”
Jacob told him about his gloomy hours in Berlin.
“From the way things are turning out in Germany, I have no doubt that my factory will be closed,” he said. “A lot of money will be lost there.”
“The French are worried about the situation in Germany,” said the agent. “Your factory may not be able to supply the iron tracks. What will happen?”
“I’m in touch with big factories in Britain,” said Stolowitzky. “I can fill every order with them.”
• • •
Despite the optimism about finalizing the French contract, the matter took longer than Jacob expected. The thick file included all the work plans, deadlines, details of personnel that would be recruited. Work on that file had taken more than two years. Now, at the last minute, they were worried that Stolowitzky wouldn’t be able to deliver the goods. Within two days, he had gotten commitments from the British plants, met with representatives of the French railroad company, his agent and lawyers who had negotiated contacts with the French from the beginning, and together they went over all the questionable paragraphs. According to the contract, Jacob Stolowitzky was supposed to create railroad tracks to replace old tracks along many hundreds of miles all over France. In exchange for the work, the French promised to pay him an enormous sum.
Jacob Stolowitzky wasn’t happy about the delay in Paris. He wanted to get back home to Warsaw, to his wife and son, to catch up with his business there. But discussions with his French clients were also important. The deal would be one of the biggest he had ever made, and now, after the blow he had suffered in Berlin, it was even more important.
He called Lydia several times and apologized for not being able to come home sooner. She understood. This wasn’t the first time he had been away from home on business for a long time.
“Don’t worry about us,” she said. “Everything’s quiet here and we’re all fine.”
Wolfgang Erst was a dull-witted thug, a former construction worker who rose in the ranks of the SS with wild demonstrations against Jews and secret murders of opponents of the Nazi regime. He obeyed his superiors blindly and they knew they could count on him not to utter a word about what went on in the inner sancta and torture cells of the organization.
When Reinhard Schreider summoned him to his office, Erst was excited and happy. He had the feeling that his commander would compliment him on his activities and even announce his promotion. But Schreider did neither of those.
He leaned toward the thug and only said: “I’ve got a special assignment for you, Erst.”
“Yes, Commander.”
Schreider pushed a note to him with a name and an address.
“You know who that woman is?” he asked.
“No,” replied Erst.
“Have you heard the name of her husband, Karl Rink?”
“No idea.”
“She’s a Jew married to one of our men. Two weeks ago he promised me to divorce her. I want to find out if he has.”
Erst peeped at the note and gathered it into his hand. For him, such an investigation was no big deal. He had carried out more complicated ones.
“I’ll take care of it right away,” he said. “You can count on me.”
“I know.”
Erst and two of his men set out to find what Reinhard Schreider wanted to know. When Erst returned to Schreider, he told him: “We didn’t find any impression of divorce. Mira and Karl Rink live together as usual. He sleeps and eats at home, and he doesn’t seem to have taken any step toward divorce.”
“Bring the woman to me,” ordered Schreider.
Ever since she was fired from her job, Mira stayed home most of the time. In the morning, after the attack on Helga, she would walk her to school to protect her, then went grocery shopping and visited her parents once a week. When the time came to pick up her daughter from school, she would leave the house again, come back with Helga, and stay there until the next day.
“Tomorrow, when she goes to the grocery store,” said Erst, “we’ll arrest her without a scandal and we’ll bring her to you.”
Early in the morning, Peter and Maria Babilinska boarded the train from their town. Peter was a farmer who grew cabbage and potatoes and also worked in the post office. His wife made jam, which she sold at markets.
The two of them were tense and worried, eager to get to their daughter in Warsaw. They hadn’t seen her in a few months.
Gertruda was surprised when the maid told her that her parents had arrived. She brought them in and made tea, which her parents didn’t touch.
“How are you?” asked her father.
“Fine.” She wondered why they had come. Ever since she had started working as a nanny, they rarely visited her. She herself had visited them only three times since she had started working in the Stolowitzky house.
“Your mother and I are going through hard times,” sighed the father. “You’ve been here more than a year and …” He fell silent in embarrassment. Gertruda waited for him to go on.
“We have come to take you back home,” said her father, and her mother nodded.
Gertruda looked at her father in amazement.
“You’re not young anymore,” added Peter. “And we’re not getting any younger either. Our greatest wish is to see you married and to hug the grandchildren you’ll bring us.”
“I feel good here,” she said. “I don’t think I want to get married now.”
“You’re a Christian,” he tried another tack. “You don’t belong in this house.”
“I take care of a child,” she insisted. “He needs me, especially now. His father is away and his mother is alone. I can’t leave.”
“You can, Gertruda.”
A tap was heard at the door and Lydia came in. Gertruda introduced her parents.
“We came to take our daughter home,” said Maria. “The time has come for her to get married and take care of her own children and not those of others.”
Lydia stared at the nanny.
“When are you going?” she asked.
“I’m staying here,” she answered.
Lydia’s lips trembled. “I understand your parents’ concern,” she said. “Maybe you really should go with them.”
Gertruda addressed her parents. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I want to stay here.”
Maria and Peter knew their daughter’s firmness, her stubbornness. They stood up heavily.
“Think about what we said,” said Peter. “We’ll wait for you at home. Come soon.”
“Thanks for coming all the way here,” she replied. “But I don’t intend to change my mind.”
Her mother burst out crying and let the tears roll down her cheeks.
“You see how hard it is for Mother without you,” said her father. “Don’t break her heart.”
“I love you,” she said. “But I’m an adult. Let me do what my heart commands.”
The mother kissed her, as if they were parting forever.
“Promise you’ll take care of yourself,” she said.
“I promise.”
Dejected and pained, her parents left the room. Lydia said to Gertruda, “I just want you to know that Michael and I are glad you decided to stay with us.”
By the late 1930s, the Nazi Party controlled everything. It sent people to prison and concentration camps who opposed or were likely to oppose its regime; it scattered spies all over the state, passed laws and regulations designed to spew the Jews out of German society and force them to leave the country. The residents of the state quickly got used to the new situation. Most of them still believed firmly in Hitler and his promise of good things to come. For the time being, they turned a blind eye to phenomena they might not have been able to endure in other times. They got used to seeing many difficult scenes: a car stopping at a curb near an apartment house, a few men in black leather coats dashing out of it and pounding up the stairs. A few minutes later, they come down with a frightened prisoner, throw him into the car, take off quickly for an unknown destination, and life goes back to business as usual. This happened to quite a few politicians who opposed the criminal behavior of Hitler and his followers; it happened to writers, artists, intellectuals who criticized the Führer; it happened to many Jews. Mira Rink constituted an explicit stumbling block that had to be removed. Karl Rink was supposed to divorce her, but he refused and thus sealed his wife’s fate. His bosses decided for him.
In late August 1939, Mira went out to buy food in the grocery store near her house. She stayed there a little while and then made her way home, her mind filled with thoughts about the great problem that endangered her marriage. Her love for Karl was unshakable. He was the first and only man in her life, and it was hard for her to accept the fact that he still believed in the Nazi Party and took part in its activities.
She passed by some Jewish neighbors who cast furious glances at her, not for the first time. Some of them, who had been her close friends in the past, broke off with her as soon as her husband joined the SS. It was hard for her to bear it, but she had to repress her grief.
Before she arrived home, three men in black leather coats blocked her way.
“Frau Rink?” asked one of them.
She nodded. Erst and his two men seized her arms without a word and threw her into a brown car that started moving quickly.
“Who are you?” she shouted, even though she immediately could guess.
They clenched their lips.
“My husband is an SS officer,” she tried to explain, but they looked at her with frozen eyes and were silent. For a moment, she thought of opening the car door and trying to escape, but she understood at once that that was impossible. They wouldn’t let her run away.
At an old stone building in the southern part of the city, the car stopped. Mira Rink looked around and didn’t recognize the place. She had never been there in her life.
The three men pushed her inside the building and led her through narrow corridors to a big room. SS officer Reinhard Schreider looked up at her from his desk.
“Leave her here,” he said, and the three left the room.
He calmly offered her a glass of water, which she refused.
“You know,” he said, slowly and seriously, “that the law forbids marriages of Jews and Aryans?”
“I know.”
“You’re a Jew and your husband is an Aryan, correct?”
“Correct.”
“You understand that in your married life you’re both violating the law?”
“I married him long before the law went into effect. We love each other, and we’ve got a fourteen-year-old daughter.”
“Recently, I agreed with your husband that you’d get divorced.”
She pretended to be surprised.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
“I am obliged to inform you that for the sake of order, every one of us must obey the law. You, Frau Rink, had to get divorced.”
Suddenly, she was filled with fear. There was something cold and alien in the voice of the man facing her. She knew that he expected only one answer from her.
“Absolutely not,” she insisted, nevertheless. “We have no intention of breaking up our marriage.”
His face grew furious.
“That’s very bad, Frau Rink.”
She stood up. “Can I go now?” she asked.
“No,” he raised his voice. “You cannot go now!”
He picked up the phone and issued an order. The three men who had grabbed Mira Rink entered the room.
“Take her to the yard,” he ordered them.
By the time she understood where they were taking her, it was too late. The paved yard was surrounded by a high stone wall. They ordered her to face the wall and emptied the magazines of their guns into her body. The sounds of the shattering were blocked in the stones of the wall and Mira collapsed on the ground. The three of them dragged her body to a nearby pit dug to hold victims like her.
Karl Rink was swept away in the flow of the uniformed men to the big SS assembly hall. Under the gigantic swastika flags fixed on poles along the walls, thousands waited for the Führer’s arrival. He came in an open Mercedes that made its way through the crowd hysterically roaring “Heil Hitler.” He entered the hall and climbed onto the stage. Hitler’s talk was electrifying and Karl was hypnotized. Like all those gathered there, he also saw before him a determined savior, and when Hitler shrieked, “Deutschland über alles,” a tremor of excitement went through him. He felt again like a partner in a glowing political plan, a wonderful vision of the future to march Germany into a period of unprecedented flourishing.
Afterward, he got on his motorcycle and rode home. In recent months, whenever he went home, he felt a heavy oppression. It was hard for him to bear his wife’s suffering, his daughter’s piercing questions, the sense that they didn’t understand him. As he rode, he came up with the idea of mobilizing friends and relatives to try to persuade Mira to stop pressuring him until things settled down.
• • •
All the lights were on in the apartment when he arrived. He heard his daughter weeping in her room. When he stood in the door, she looked at him with red eyes.
“Mother’s not here. I don’t know where she is … I called you at the office but you weren’t there.”
He looked at his watch. It was after ten at night.
“Where could she be?” he asked, refusing to share his daughter’s dread.
“She went out this morning to buy food and didn’t come back.”
“Maybe she went to visit somebody?”
“She’s never been out so late … I’m afraid something happened to her.”
He pleaded with her to go to sleep. “When you wake up in the morning, Mother will certainly be here,” he said, trying to calm her.
“Look for her, Father,” pleaded Helga. “Look for her before it’s too late.”
Karl climbed on his motorcycle and went looking for his wife. His first stop was her parents’ house. They were asleep when he arrived. His mother-in-law opened the door and grimaced when she saw him. She and her husband hadn’t exchanged a word with him ever since the attacks on the Jews had begun.
“Is Mira here?” he asked.
“No. What happened?” the mother asked, frightened.
“She left home and hasn’t come back.”
“What does that mean?” Her voice was accusing.
“I don’t know.”
“Find out from your friends, Karl,” she said. “I’m sure those bastards took her.”
Her husband came out of his room and stood aside. He heard the exchange.
“Bring her back home!” he called out angrily. “Bring her back before something awful happens to her!”
Karl visited a few friends. Mira wasn’t there either. He went to the hospitals, checked the police stations, but nothing turned up. He returned home helplessly, and suddenly, his thoughts took him to the SS. No, he said to himself, his comrades in the organization couldn’t have done that. Nevertheless, he phoned his commander. Schreider was still in his office.
“My wife has disappeared,” he said. “Do you know anything about that?”
“How should I know?” Schreider played innocent.
Karl walked around the apartment on pins and needles. His wife’s mysterious disappearance put him unbearably on edge, and the more he thought about it, the more he understood that something or someone had deliberately caused her disappearance. He returned to SS headquarters, asked the help of his friend Kurt Baumer, talked with the commanders of the interrogation division, with those in charge of prisoners, with every senior official he came upon. All of them denied any connection to his wife, but Karl didn’t believe them.
When he arrived home, Helga was still awake, weeping bitterly.
“Did you find Mother?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he replied.
He felt that the chances of finding Mira were getting slimmer with every passing hour. He had no idea what he could do to bring her back home.
Karl Rink didn’t get any sleep all night between the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of August 1939. He thought of his wife who had disappeared and tried to breathe some hope in his heart that she’d soon come back. But even if she did, who could guarantee her safety and the safety of Helga if Karl wasn’t at their side day and night? How could he ensure that the anti-Semites wouldn’t attack them? How could he know that those attacks wouldn’t end in disaster?
In the morning, he put on his civilian clothes, left the house, and rode his motorcycle to the edge of the city. On the second floor of a faded apartment building was the office of a charity organization called “Help for Jewish Youth,” whose task was to get young Jews out of Germany and take them safely to the Land of Israel. There, he had heard, they were sent to agricultural settlements called kibbutzim, where all their needs were met. The SS knew about the organization but ignored its activity, since its purpose coincided with the Nazi goal of getting rid of the Jews as fast as possible.
The director of the organization, a social worker named Raha Frayer, was talking on the phone with some contributors when Karl Rink entered her office. She glanced up and gestured to him to wait. In his civilian clothes, he looked like any worried parent who wanted to send his children out of Germany to a safe place. Raha Frayer finished her phone call and turned to Karl.
“I’m an SS man,” he said, surprising her. She looked at him fearfully and sensed that something bad was about to happen. A sudden visit of SS men couldn’t be a happy event.
But Karl smiled at her reassuringly.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’m here because of my daughter.” He told her everything. “I want to get Helga out of Germany before it’s too late.”
“You came at the very last minute,” she told him. “The day after tomorrow, a group of children is taking a train to Switzerland. From there they go to Italy, and from Italy they’ll sail to Palestine, where the children will be sent to kibbutzim. If your daughter can be ready by the time the train leaves, I promise you we’ll make sure she gets to Palestine.”
She went to the next room and brought back a young man in simple clothes.
“This is Karl Rink,” she said, introducing Helga’s father to him. “And this is Yossi Millman, of Kibbutz Dafna, the leader of the group going to Palestine.”
Karl asked if they knew which kibbutz his daughter would be sent to.
“Not yet,” answered the leader. “That will be decided only after we get there.”
Karl hurried home. Helga was sitting at the window and looking out despondently, waiting for her mother to come back.
“Unfortunately, you can’t stay in Berlin anymore,” said her father. “You’ve got to leave here.”
“And Mother?”
“When she comes back home, I’ll try to persuade her to go, too.”
“I want to wait here for her to come back.”
“That could take time, Helga. Time isn’t on our side.”
“You can find Mother. You’ve got connections.”
“I tried and it’s not so simple.”
She couldn’t keep the tears out of her eyes anymore.
“I can’t go without Mother. I’ve never been alone. Find her and we’ll all go away from here together.”
He hugged her. “I want us all to be together, too,” he said. “But that can’t be right now. If you don’t leave here, things I don’t want to happen are liable to happen to you.”
She sobbed into his chest.
“I don’t know what to decide,” she murmured.
“Trust me, Helga.”
“Where do you want to send me?” She forced the words out of her mouth.
“To Palestine. The war won’t reach there.”
“I don’t know anybody there.”
He gave her a detailed account of his meeting with Raha Frayer and described in rosy colors what was in store for her in Palestine. “You’ll be much better off there than in Germany,” he said.
“And what will happen to you?”
“I’ll stay here. I’ll look for Mother and I’ll try to take care of myself. There are two more days until the trip. You should start packing.”
She hesitated.
“There is no choice, Helga. You have to go. I promise you that the minute I find your mother, I’ll send her to Palestine, too.”
“I want you to come, too.”
“I’ve got obligations, Helga. I’ve got to stay here, at least for a while.”
She wiped her tears.
“I’ll miss you both very much,” she said.
Early in the morning, Karl Rink rode his motorcycle through the still deserted streets of Berlin. Helga rode on the backseat, holding a small suitcase in one hand and grasping her father’s body with the other. This time, too, Karl wore civilian clothes so as not to attract attention at the railroad station, which was packed with uniformed men. The father and daughter hurried to the platform where the train to Zurich was waiting. The group of Jewish children was already onboard one of the cars. Their parents stood on the platform, looking sadly at their loved ones through the windows and wiping away tears.
Karl accompanied Helga to her seat in the car and hugged her, barely keeping himself from crying.
“See you soon,” he mumbled, without believing it himself. He kissed his daughter, pulled some money out of his pocket, and gave it to her.
“Don’t forget Mother,” she demanded.
The engine tooted.
“Have a good trip,” he said. “Take care of yourself.”
“Write to me a lot, Father.”
Karl Rink left the car, froze on the platform, and watched anxiously as the train pulled away with his only daughter. He felt as if one of his limbs had been cut off. His wife had disappeared and his daughter had gone to another country. Deep in his heart he feared that he would never see either of them again.
On August 31, 1939, all the obstacles were cleared away at long last and the contract between Jacob Solowitzky and the French railroad company was signed at a joyous ceremony. In the offices of the train company, bottles of champagne were opened and joyful speeches were delivered. Jacob Solowitzky ignored news of Germany’s intentions to go to war and prepared to return home.
He stayed in Paris one more day to buy gifts. At a famous couturier on the Champs-Élysées, he bought an elegant dress for his wife. For Michael he bought a fleet of toy cars and racetracks. And he remembered to buy small gifts for each of the servants.
He returned to the hotel and asked for a phone line home to tell his family when he would arrive.
“Sorry, sir,” said the operator. “All lines to Warsaw are disconnected. Please try again later.”
He tried to send a telegram, but couldn’t do that either.
He didn’t understand what was happening. Never in all his travels had he been unable to call home. He felt uneasy. Something wasn’t right but he didn’t know what.
He went down to the hotel restaurant and ate a light meal. When he went back to his room, he tried again to call home. The lines were still disconnected.
Stolowitzky asked the operator to keep trying. For hours he waited in vain for a line. At last he fell asleep and woke up in the morning to a tap on his door. A waiter put breakfast next to his bed. He sat up, muttered thanks, and put the tray on his lap. As he was drinking his coffee, he turned on the radio. The news delivered by the announcer froze his blood:
The German army has invaded Poland.
September 1, 1939, a gray and rainy day, would be recorded as one of the worst days in human history. In the morning, like swarms of hungry locusts, two thousand German fighter planes covered the skies of Poland, as 1.8 million German soldiers and twenty-six hundred tanks invaded the state from three sides. Rumors about big military operations Germany was preparing had been in the air for some time. Poland feared the expected events and called up the reserves, but other than that, made no real preparations to greet the invaders.
The Polish army, much smaller than the force of the attacker, fought bravely and inflicted losses on the Germans. Tens of thousands of invaders were killed, almost three hundred planes were brought down, and about 240 tanks were destroyed. It was a hard blow for the German army, but not hard enough to make it retreat. In fact, the Poles had no chance from the very first shot. The Germans conquered one village after another, one town after another, and killed civilians mercilessly.
The German army invasion of Poland stunned the whole world. Even though the Germans were still far from the capital city of Warsaw, the thunder of cannons was already echoing in the city day and night. Agitated people gathered in the streets. The central railroad station teemed with scared families who had snatched up all their valuables, left their homes, and tried in vain to board a train to take them out of the country. Trucks and private cars filled with refugees flooded the roads leading out of Warsaw.
Lydia Stolowitzky walked around her house confused and helpless. Her husband’s absence only increased her despair. For the last two days she hadn’t heard a word from him, and that wasn’t like him. When he traveled, he always made sure to send her telegrams or call every day and report on where he was and tell her exactly when he would be coming home. This time he hadn’t. She had no idea where he was in Paris or what his phone number was. She tried to call her parents in Krakow, but the lines were disconnected.
Dejected and desperate, Lydia understood that she couldn’t stay in Warsaw for long, that she had to flee to safety. But she couldn’t imagine how. Only now did she realize that she had never had to make a truly fateful decision. In her pampered life with Jacob Stolowitzky, the only decisions she had made were what to serve for dinner or which artist to invite for a private appearance in her home. Now she herself would have to decide her fate and the fate of her son, and that burden was already unbearable.
The news of the invasion of Poland couldn’t have come at a worse time for Jacob Stolowitzky. Just when he had to be home, to support his wife and son and find a way to get the family to safety, he was far away from them, helpless, unable to save them.
At first he thought of hurrying to Warsaw before the Germans got there and moving his family to a safe place. He had enough money to guarantee that that would be done in the best way. He called his travel agent, hoping to find a way to get home, but was met with rejection. All trains and buses to Warsaw were canceled until further notice. Again Stolowitzky wanted to call home, but couldn’t. Surprisingly, the operator asked him: “Haven’t you heard of the war, sir?”
Not knowing what to do, he took a cab to the Polish embassy, where pandemonium reigned. Officials ran around panicky in the corridors, pleading with the operators to get them an urgent line and paid no attention whatsoever to him. He made his way to the ambassador’s office. They were old friends and whenever the millionaire from Warsaw was in Paris, they had dinner together at an expensive restaurant.
“Help me get back home,” Stolowitzky asked the ambassador, even before he said hello.
The ambassador gave him a wan smile and said: “Forget it. There’s no chance you’ll get there. The Germans are advancing rapidly. They’ll soon be in Warsaw.”
“But … my wife and child … I can’t leave them there alone.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t help you.”
A new idea suddenly popped up in Stolowitzky’s mind. “I could hire a driver and get to Warsaw with him,” he said. “Maybe it’s not too late.”
“You’re endangering your own life,” the ambassador warned him. “The Germans would arrest you at the border and you probably wouldn’t get out alive.”
Jacob Stolowitzky believed the ambassador was right. His life would indeed be in danger if he went to Warsaw. Nevertheless, he wasn’t willing to give up so fast. He took a cab to the office of his Paris agent to discuss the possibilities of sending a chauffeur to Warsaw to try to get Lydia and Michael out. The agent immediately called in his private chauffeur and suggested he do it. Stolowitzky gave the man a suitcase full of money to bribe whomever he needed to, and promised the chauffeur a big sum if he came back with his wife and son. The chauffeur agreed, wrote down the address of the mansion in Warsaw, and set off.
In the next days, Jacob spent most of his time in his agent’s office, waiting for the chauffeur to come back. Meanwhile, he learned that, because of the German invasion of Poland, the French railroad company worried that a period of uncertainty was in store for Europe. As a result, the terms of the contract would be frozen until the situation was cleared up.
But the contract was the last thing on his mind. He was already imagining his wife and son arriving in Paris safe and sound. That was what he wanted most right now.
It took four days for the chauffeur to return, alone. He said that he had been stopped at the Polish border by German soldiers and not allowed to continue. Stolowitzky felt that his world was collapsing.
He had a bad premonition.
The slim hope that the Polish army would block the Germans before they reached Warsaw dissipated like a light cloud in a storm wind. The news from the front was bad and the Polish government’s attempts to calm fears failed to convince anyone. Alarm sirens wailed day and night, cannon thunder approached the city, German planes dropped bombs on apartment houses and residential areas, and the streets were filled with people and vehicles trying to get out of the city.
One by one, the servants in the Stolowitzky house on Ujazdowska Avenue disappeared. First the cook ran off, then the gardener, then all the others. Only Lydia and Michael, Gertruda and Emil the chauffer remained.
Lydia felt her self-confidence draining away. At any moment, she expected her husband to come back home and take charge. He had promised her to come back in a few days.
The roar of the bombs terrified Michael, and Gertruda couldn’t dissipate his fears even when she sat at his bedside every night. For whole days he didn’t let go of her hand or let her out of his sight. Her cool head, solid body, and firm step served as an indispensable support for the child.
Lydia, who had never made a dinner by herself in her life, was helpless when the cook left her, so Gertruda took over. She bought food in the black market, cooked, set the table, and washed the dishes. She gladly got up early in the morning and went to bed late at night. She took care of Michael and his mother, kept the house clean, and even trimmed the rosebushes in the garden.
Emil clearly lusted for her. His boss’s absence from Warsaw left him a lot of free time and idleness frayed his nerves. Ever since Gertruda had come to work there, he had dreamed of the moment when she’d be his. She inflamed his imagination, her refusal of his advances didn’t discourage him, and now he felt emboldened. Lydia was nervous and yearned for her husband, the servants had disappeared, and Gertruda had become an easy prey.
She was standing at the stove in the kitchen, making dinner. Night fell and cannon shells shook the walls of the house. Gertruda was tasting the soup when a strong hand grabbed her waist from behind. She shrieked in panic and tried to remove the hands gripping her. Emil laughed. “What happened, you don’t like that?”
“Don’t touch me!” she shouted. “Lydia will fire you when she hears about this.”
He continued laughing and didn’t let go of her. “Lydia can’t do anything to me,” he said. “I’m the only man in this house. You all need me. She wouldn’t dare stay here alone with you and Michael.”
Gertruda twisted but he was stronger than she was. When she tried to shout, he put one hand over her mouth and raised her dress with the other. Her legs kicked him in vain. Emil laid her on the floor and attacked her with his full weight. She groaned in despair and prayed.
The voice of a frightened child was heard on the kitchen stairs.
“Gertruda, are you here?” called Michael.
She couldn’t answer. Emil froze. “Don’t move,” he whispered in her ear.
“Gertruda,” Michael continued. “I can’t fall asleep. I need you.”
He came into the doorway and he looked for her. Emil cursed, got up, and slipped out of the kitchen. Gertruda lay on the floor, her body aching. Michael bent over her.
“Are you sick?” he asked.
“No, darling, I just fell down. Help me get up.”
The little boy held out his soft hand to her and she got up slowly.
Trying to cover the rips in her dress, she walked to Michael’s room, put him in bed, and then hurried to her room to change her clothes. Tears fell from her eyes.
The group of Berlin children sailed from Italy and reached the Land of Israel on a cold rainy day in October 1939. The group numbered a dozen boys and girls aged thirteen to sixteen who had attended Jewish schools in Berlin and knew a little Hebrew. They were stuffed into crowded cells in the ship’s hold, hurled on the waves day and night, didn’t talk much, preferred to withdraw into themselves, and feared for the fate of their parents. Sad and uncomfortable, they waited in the port of Haifa in a crowded warehouse until they were taken to the kibbutzim. They carried small suitcases and looked often at the photos their families had left with them.
When the representatives of the kibbutzim arrived, Helga and a few other children were taken to Kfar Giladi, where they met with their guides who would tell them about life on the kibbutz. A few days later, the children of the Berlin group received Hebrew names and Helga became Elisheva. She lived in the same building as her traveling companions, studied with the children of the kibbutz, and worked at various jobs. They spent their free time with adoptive families who tried to give them warmth and love. Elisheva was grateful for the way she was treated by the family that adopted her, one of the veteran families of the twenty-three-year-old kibbutz. She liked life on the kibbutz, although she was still bound to her past. She avoided talking about her family, said only that her father and mother had stayed in Berlin, and didn’t reveal the truth about her father to anyone.
She learned to milk cows, pick oranges, and lead goats to pasture in the mountains of the Galilee. She usually walked around bare-foot, her delicate feet quickly adjusting to the dirt paths, the stones, and the thorns. The sun tanned her pale face and her bare arms. In the kibbutz, her long silences and her solitude in the lap of nature were accepted. She took many walks in the field sunk in thoughts of her father and mother, the friends she had left behind. At night, she couldn’t sleep. The winds of war were blowing hard now and she knew that sooner or later, her father would find himself on the front. She was worried about his safety and waited for his letters.
Helga (Elisheva) Rink, seventeen years old. Kfar Giladi, Israel, 1942.
A few weeks after her arrival at Kfar Giladi, Helga received a letter from her father:
My dear daughter,
I’m sorry to tell you that, despite my many efforts, I haven’t been able to find any traces of Mother so far. None of the many people I asked for information about her could help me. The people I work with deny they had anything to do with Mother’s disappearance.
Every evening I return home depressed. I look at her things, at your things left behind, and my heart is torn with longing. My great hope is that we’ll all soon be reunited and happier than we were.
Meanwhile, I’ve been told that I have to go to Poland. I hope I won’t be assigned work I don’t like.
I long to know how you spend your days. Do you feel well? Have you started school and made new friends? I am attaching a small sum of money for you. In recent days, the post office service has been disrupted because of the war. I won’t be able to get letters from you, but I hope I can still keep writing to you.
Missing you.
Father
Karl Rink gave the letter to a friend who was going to Switzerland and promised to forward it from there. Since he didn’t know where his daughter was, Karl addressed the letter to Yossi Millman of Kibbutz Dafna who had escorted the group of children from Berlin to the Land of Israel. Millman sent the letter to Helga. She hid it and wanted to answer her father, but the letter she got had no return address.
For years after that, Karl Rink didn’t write to his daughter and she couldn’t write to him.
Jacob Stolowitzky was a strong and determined man who had overcome many difficult obstacles in his life, ones that could easily have brought down other men. But never had he felt so helpless and useless as in those damp days in Paris in the autumn of 1939. He listened to the radio and read the newspapers, neither giving him any good news. They reported on the rapid advance of the German army in Poland, the great destruction and the corpses littering the road, the collapse of the Polish army.
Lydia Stolowitzky too, had never felt so desperate as in those days. The news from the front was bad. Columns of tanks and personnel carriers loaded with German soldiers were making their way toward Warsaw, villages and towns were conquered with no resistance, planes bombed various areas of the country indiscriminately, and hundreds of bodies of Polish soldiers and civilians were reeking alongside the roads. Lydia couldn’t get in touch with anyone in her family or with friends in the top levels of government who might be able to help. There was a sense of fear and disorder in the air; rumors of the brutality of the conquerors spread.
Most of Lydia’s friends and neighbors had already fled Warsaw. The manager of her summer estate somehow got to the city to plead with her to hide in the isolated farm. She refused, “No place in Poland is safe today,” she said. “The Germans will certainly get to the farm, too.”
She gave him some money to pay the workers and said she was sorry not to go on paying them in the foreseeable future.
“Never mind,” said the man. “We’ll wait for you until the war is over.”
That very day, Isaac Geller, a rich diamond merchant who lived nearby, knocked on the door of the Stolowitzky house. He was a frequent guest of Lydia’s and a close friend of Jacob’s. Michael often played with his son in the diamond merchant’s house at Ujazdowska 15.
“We’ve decided to escape from here,” he told her. “The Germans are liable to enter Warsaw any day. You should also get out.”
“Where should we go?” asked Lydia in a choked voice.
“Vilna. It’s safer there.”
She didn’t know what to say. She knew that she should leave Warsaw. But she was afraid that if she did, her husband wouldn’t be able to find her.
“Have you gotten a phone call from Jacob?” asked Geller.
“No. The lines are cut.”
“Before we go, can I help you with anything?”
“Thanks. I just want Jacob to be here.”
But Jacob Stolowitzky didn’t come and the roars of the cannons grew louder. The Lithuanian city of Vilna, now under Soviet rule, was 375 miles from Warsaw. According to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had been signed a few weeks earlier, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed not to attack each other. Therefore, many Jews saw Vilna as a safe place. After serious hesitations, Lydia also decided to try to get there.
“Pack only what you and Michael need,” she told Gertruda. “We can’t take everything.”
Emil was ordered to prepare the car for a long trip the next morning. He bought gasoline on the black market, got spare tires and tools for car repair, emptied the trunk of everything superfluous, and also packed his own things.
At dawn, when gray mists still shrouded Warsaw and the roars of the cannons sounded closer than ever, Emil loaded the trunk with the overflowing suitcases Lydia had prepared. She took ancient silver, valuable paintings, jewelry, all the cash in the house, and the family photograph album. Gertruda packed the pictures of Mary and the crucified Jesus that had hung above her bed and dressed Michael in a heavy winter coat.
From a hiding place in the house, Lydia took her husband’s gun and hid it in her purse. “I hope we won’t need to use it,” she said in a worried voice. They got to the door, but Lydia didn’t have the strength to leave. She returned, and for a long time she walked around the rooms whose windows were shuttered. Her eyes lingered on the furniture she was leaving behind, feeling as if she would never see it again. In the bedroom, she locked the door and stretched out on the big bed covered with a scarlet velvet spread. At long last, all alone, away from the servants, the nanny, and her son, she burst into tears.
Emil’s impatient voice filtered through the door. “We shouldn’t waste a minute, Mrs. Stolowitzky. We have to go.”
Her body felt as heavy as lead when she got off the bed. She wiped her tears with a handkerchief and applied makeup to her face. More than ever she needed her husband now, his soothing voice, the security she felt when he was there.
She gathered up her passport, clutched to her chest her purse with money and valuable jewelry, and slowly left the house.
“The war will end soon and we’ll all come back,” Gertruda said, trying in vain to make her voice sound reassuring. Deep in her heart she was afraid that the situation would only get worse.
Lydia sighed deeply as she hid the house key in her purse. “Who knows what will happen to us?” she wondered aloud.
The car drove off.
“When will Father come?” asked Michael, his face sad.
“Soon, Michael, soon,” murmured Lydia.
“I miss him.”
“So do I.”