Free Gertruda's Oath: A Child, a Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II by Ram Oren

confronted in his thirty-eight years. He loved Mira, and yet he felt loyal to the SS. There were many things in the organization that he loved, other things he didn’t like, mainly the treatment of the Jews. In the SS, they preached the purity of the Aryan race morning, noon, and night, blamed the Jews for all the troubles afflicting Germany. Newspapers described the Jews as abominable leeches sucking the blood of the Germans. He loathed those attacks, but still believed they were merely pitfalls on the way to the goal. His problem was that his loyalty to the party was as strong as his love for his wife. He was unhappy that Schreider had wrung a promise from him to end his marriage within the week. How could he part from Mira after such a happy life together?
    When Karl came home, Mira was sitting in the living room, listening to an opera on the radio. Ever since she had been fired, she hadn’t been able to find another job. No one dared hire Jews anymore.
    Mira lowered the volume and looked up at her husband. She waited for him to tell her about the meeting with Schreider.
    He dropped onto the easy chair across from her.
    “Schreider gave me an ultimatum.” The words broke in his mouth.
    “Let me guess: he told you to choose—me or the party.”
    “Yes, that’s what he said.”
    “I warned you it would be that. What did you tell him?”
    “I said that you won’t get in the way of my activity.”
    “That convinced him?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “He wants us to get divorced?”
    “Yes.”
    “And what did you decide?”
    “I said I’d do it, but I didn’t mean it.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “That means that I have no intention of getting divorced.”
    “What will happen if Schreider discovers the truth?”
    “I hope he won’t.”
    Karl got up and paced around the room.
    “The party is important to me, Mira,” he said after a long silence. “The party is my future, the future of all of us, Germany’s future.”
    “Your party will bring down a disaster on all of us.”
    “You’re wrong, Mira.”
    She sighed.
    “You’re
wrong, Karl, not me.”

4.
     
    The rainstorm in mid-June 1939 collapsed trees and made roofs fly in the poor neighborhoods of Warsaw. As always, it also disruptedphone lines. Nevertheless, through the deafening beeps and static of the phone in his office, Jacob Stolowitzky could hear a woman’s distant voice sobbing in despair.
    He clutched the receiver in his clenched fist and put it tight to his ear. After a long moment, he managed to identify the voice. It was the wife of the manager of his plant in Berlin.
    “Try to calm down,” he said. “I don’t understand a word.”
    Her weeping slowly subsided.
    “The SS arrested my husband yesterday,” she groaned. “They’re holding him in jail and won’t release him.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he’s a Jew, Mr. Stolowitzky. That’s what he’s guilty of.”
    Stolowitzky turned pale. The arrest of the manager of his big steel plant in the industrial area of Berlin had come at the worst time, in the middle of negotiations with the railroad company of France about supplying hundreds of miles of railroad track. Only the German factory could quickly provide such big quantities of track. Any disruption in the operation of the plant was liable to undermine negotiations with the French. Suddenly, the enormous profit of the deal seemed uncertain.
    “Where is your husband?” he asked.
    “I have no idea.”
    Stolowitzky gave her a few words of comfort and called the German Ministry of Defense. He had good friends there, senior officials he did business with. He often traveled to Germany to meet them and entertained them in the best restaurants. He was sure they could help him now.
    He managed to reach two of them, but this time they treated him coldly.
    “The Nazis are running things now,” they said. “You’ll have to talk with them.”
    “I’ll leave for Germany today,” he said eagerly. “I’ll meet with anybody