Isaac's Army (15 page)

MARTHA AND ROBERT RUN

In the late spring of 1940, as construction on the walls around the Jewish Quarter quickened, Martha Osnos prepared to be baptized. The Christian cleansing ritual was the final step in obtaining the Gentile travel documents that she and nine-year-old Robert needed for their imminent departure from Poland. Martha had thought of nothing else since her husband, Joseph, contacted her from Bucharest with word that he had arranged a
promessa
from the Romanian government. A
promessa
was a diplomatic promissory note guaranteeing the recipient a permanent visa—if the recipient was allowed to get to the issuing country’s nearest embassy. Since Poland no longer legally existed, the nearest Romanian consulate was in Berlin. The
promessa
thus amounted to a request that German authorities allow the bearer of the note to transit through the Third Reich.

Promessa
s were rarely granted, and were usually reserved for VIPs or the very rich. Martha had no idea how Joseph had managed to obtain one. In fact, it was through a combination of dumb luck and brazen chutzpah. Since arriving in Bucharest in October 1939, Joe Osnos had focused on earning the money he would need to get his
family out of Poland. Just as he had initially made a few dollars trading currencies with evacuees along the Polish-Romanian frontier, he used his salesman’s talent and gift of gab to go into the used car business in Bucharest, where refugees were selling their vehicles to raise funds.

Joe did well enough trading automobiles that with his first big payout, he was able to hire a tailor to make him an expensive suit of high-quality fabric. Osnos had always been a smart dresser in Warsaw, perhaps even somewhat vain about his appearance. Now he had a plan, and for that plan to succeed, he needed to make a strong first impression.

Looking like an oligarch in his new suit, Joseph marched confidently into the Polish embassy in Bucharest and managed to procure (perhaps through a discreet donation) a difficult-to-obtain
note verbale
formally recommending that the Romanian Foreign Ministry assist him in obtaining exit visas for his family. Armed with the all-important
note verbale
, his fluent French, and a determined, arrogant attitude that matched his finely tailored clothing, Joe Osnos then bluffed his way into the Romanian Foreign Ministry, past gruff security guards and through several layers of protective secretaries, into what he thought was the office of the head of the visa department. But in fact Joe had been too convincing in his displays of self-importance, and he found himself face-to-face with the foreign minister himself. Taken aback by the intrusion, Romania’s top diplomat politely but coolly informed Joseph that he was in the wrong office, and called an assistant to remove him. “
Another elegant secretary took Joseph to the right place and explained that ‘Monsieur le Ministre’ was sending Mr. Osnos,” Martha later explained in her unpublished journal. “That was understood as ‘Mr. Osnos is recommended by Monsieur le Ministre,’ and the visas were granted at once. No place in the world thrived on bribery like prewar Romania,” she added. “No friends, no fellow refugees in Bucharest would believe that only sheer luck helped in this endeavor.”

Joe’s unexpected coup, however, still obliged Martha to procure a passport and emigration permits from the German authorities, a nerve-racking process that took months and required large sums of money. A shadowy network of intermediaries and charlatans occupied
this fraud-ridden niche, and Martha fell prey to one particularly odious document fixer in Warsw who claimed to have connections with the Gestapo. “
He looked like Mephisto himself,” she recalled. “Tremendous black eyebrows, everlasting little smile, very well dressed in Tyrolean hat and camel hair coat. He would come every few days assuring me that everything is proceeding fine.”

To pay for Mephisto’s services, Martha rented her apartment to a prosperous family of assimilated Jews who had fled from Western Poland. The influx of refugees from Western Poland, which had been incorporated directly into the Reich and was being systematically depopulated, had swollen Warsaw’s Jewish population from 357,000 in October 1939 to just under 400,000 by mid-1940, and many of the new Jewish arrivals sought out flats in predominantly Gentile neighborhoods, which seemed safer than the Jewish Quarter. For one, there was a far smaller chance of being attacked by pogromists. And the labyrinth of walls being erected around the Quarter made daily life there increasingly inconvenient. By June 1940, after several months of construction, twenty sections of the ten-foot-high barrier had been completed. Some parts were only strung in wire; some were still theoretical, plans on paper. At other points, like the area between New Linden and Forestry Boulevard, the wall meandered unpredictably so that going to a store directly across the street now required a five-block detour. Traversing from Mushroom Street, where Simha Ratheiser had attended high school, to neighboring Electoral Avenue necessitated exiting through one gate and reentering through another, adding twenty minutes to what was otherwise a few minutes’ walk.

Life in the Jewish Quarter also involved the constant specter of delousing baths, and their attendant financial costs, which the Nazis now used as the latest means of shaking down the Jewish community. In the name of disease prevention Jews were routinely required to be deloused—or pay bribes not to be deloused—a humiliating process that often involved public nudity.

So Martha had little difficulty finding willing tenants in her Gentile neighborhood. The problem was that the tenant family had moved in with the expectation that she would soon be leaving the country. But as Mephisto’s excuses became increasingly improbable, living conditions became increasingly difficult. “
One kitchen, one bathroom, and all those people just waiting for me to leave.”

Finally, Martha’s patience ran out and she went to Mephisto’s house to confront him about the lack of progress with her documentation. “[His] home was one room in an otherwise empty and bombed-out apartment: A straw sack in one corner, a string with drying socks and underwear across the room, one chair where the camel hair coat and Tyrolian hat were hanging.” Mephisto was a con man. He had no connections with the Gestapo, and had simply been pocketing Martha’s money.

Ironically, it was Martha’s increasingly impatient tenants who turned out to have connections to the authorities. “
By a miracle,” she recalled, “they discovered that a cousin of theirs was married to a German girl.” He was able to use his influence to get Martha her passport and travel permit. Now all Martha needed was two contradictory documents. To leave Poland, she needed a certificate stipulating that she had paid her emigration dues to the Jewish Community Council; and to transit through Germany, she needed written proof that she was not Jewish, since Jews could not travel on trains or enter the Reich. This Kafkaesque pair of transactions was accomplished first at the
Judenrat
, the German-appointed governing body in the Jewish Quarter, and then at a small private chapel, where in exchange for a few zlotys Martha was sprinkled with holy water and baptized Irene.

By June 5, 1940, as German forces outflanked the vaunted Maginot Line and advanced on Paris, Martha Osnos had circumvented the final bureaucratic barrier to her departure. Emigrants from the General Government were permitted to take only a few clothes and ten Reichsmarks with them when they left the colony. Martha had jewelry that she would later need to sell to finance her travels, including a 1.5 carat diamond engagement ring. While she would never leave something so valuable behind, she was afraid of being searched and arrested for smuggling at the border. So she invited customs officers over to her apartment for a private viewing. Such prescreenings were common during the corrupt Nazi occupation, and always accompanied by gifts. “
I prepared a lot of vodka Wyborowa [the premium brand made by the huge Konesser plant in Praga], pickles and kielbasa, set the table and packed my few possessions,” Martha recalled. “Everything went very well.” The stuffed and pickled customs men happily stamped and sealed her suitcase, obligingly leaving a narrow slit through which she slid her jewels.

On Sunday, June 9, 1940, the day before the French government evacuated Paris and Italy declared war on Britain and France, Martha and Robert Osnos bade a tearful farewell to Janine, Hanna, and little Joanna Mortkowicz and boarded their train to Berlin.

“
Berlin was full of sunshine, flowers, decorated with flags,” Martha recalled of the German capital, so starkly confident and well kept in comparison to occupied Warsaw. Martha had an elderly uncle in Berlin who had just taken a much younger wife. He lived in the upscale district of Wilmesdorf-Charlottenburg, in the western part of the city not far from the Olympic Stadium built for the 1936 Games. Many Jews used to reside in Wilmesdorf, which was known for its cafés, cabarets, and rich cultural life. Most had fled, however, by the time Martha and Robert arrived at Uncle Mendel’s door in the summer of 1940. Mendel remained because his new bride “didn’t want to part with her lovely apartment, grand piano and oriental rugs,” Martha recalled. “Just a few weeks prior to my arrival she had had face-lifting by surgery, which was rather amazing considering the circumstances.”

The welcome Martha and Robert received from their relatives was frosty. “I’m sorry to say that the stay in Berlin was painful and difficult mostly because of the lady of the house,” Martha would later comment in her unpublished journal. “She wanted to know if I had brought enough food with me to last through the few days I was supposed to stay.”

That Warsaw was being starved to feed Berlin had apparently been lost on Mendel’s pampered wife, who examined the few boiled eggs Martha had packed in Poland with evident disdain. Martha was stunned by the pettiness of her relatives, but she was even more worried about the reception she would get from Romanian officials. Romania, after all, was an openly anti-Semitic state, and its government, though professing neutrality, enjoyed friendly relations with the Third Reich.

To Martha’s surprise and relief, Romanian consular officials proved gracious and accommodating. “The Romanian consul with whom I spoke French was charming and helpful. He knew immediately that I was Jewish.”

The promised visas were ready and issued without delay. Perhaps Joseph Osnos’s accidental brush with the foreign minister had expedited
the process. The Romanian consul chivalrously announced that he would treat Martha as his “special protégée.”

Martha and Robert’s Romanian travel documents were all in order. But to get to Bucharest they needed to cross Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav authorities were not issuing transit visas to Jews. Not a problem, Martha’s new diplomatic protector declared gallantly. He called his counterparts at the Yugoslav embassy and assured them over the phone that Martha was Catholic, winking at her “humorously at the same time.”

Martha and Robert’s Polish passports now held Yugoslav transit stamps. All that remained was to purchase a pair of train tickets with the money Joseph had wired from Bucharest. Martha thought their troubles were over. But when she and Robert went to a Berlin travel agency to inquire about the tickets, an unexpected and potentially serious accounting problem arose: “You couldn’t have brought money from Poland for your ticket,” the German travel agent said suspiciously. All Poles, including Gentiles, were allowed to take no more than ten marks out of the General Government, and Martha feared that the travel agent suspected that she was either a runaway slave laborer, or, worse, a Jew. Either way he would call the Gestapo. “My husband deposited the money for me with the Romanian consul,” Martha lied in a panic. “I will know,” the nosy German snapped, reaching for the phone.

“This is the end,” Martha whispered to Robert in Polish. “The consul will never say he has the money for me.” The chivalrous Romanian not only vouched for Martha, but he also offered to give the suspicious travel agent a letter to that effect and to wire the funds personally.

Martha’s euphoria that the Romanian consul had unexpectedly backed her story soon turned to concern. She needed to reimburse him for the tickets, but she had only ten marks. Other than her smuggled jewelry, she was without means. The money Joseph Osnos had wired her from Bucharest for tickets had apparently been lost or stolen in transit. Reluctantly, Martha turned for help to her uncle Mendel, who only weeks earlier had paid for his wife’s cosmetic surgery. “There is a war on, money is scarce,” her uncle responded.

Martha exploded. She threatened to humiliate Mendel in front of
all his neighbors by screaming from the balcony that he was a miser. She would make a scene at the afternoon tea party his haughty wife was organizing. She would never let either of them live down this uncharitable moment. Uncle Mendel grudgingly lent her the fare—albeit only for the cheapest possible seats and on the condition that Joseph Osnos repay him via bank transfer the moment Martha landed in Bucharest.

Thirty-six hours later, having bade farewell to “poor uncle,” whom they would never see again, Martha and Robert were in a crowded train compartment full of working-class Germans. Martha’s nerves were frayed, her emotions swaying between relief and resentment.