Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

GENERAL EISENHOWER CALLED HIM 14 7

׳THE GREATEST LIVING EXPERT ON SECURITY׳

German parents arrived in Berlin around March 1915. Herr Heinz Müller was his name and together with his wife "Frau Müller" he led a peaceful and quiet life in the Kaiser's capital. Once every three months Frau Müller went to Holland to visit her relatives. She did not carry much luggage and she wore a rather cheap-looking, homemade lace petticoat...

This went well for about a year but then the German counter-espionage somehow became suspicious of this Müller couple. By sheer luck, Frau Müller happened to be in Holland at the time, so she was in no danger. Oreste discovered that the police were looking for him while staying in Berlin, and tried to escape to Holland. He jumped from a moving train near the German-Dutch frontier, because he had a hunch that they would wait to arrest him at the next station.

He intended to get across the rest of the distance on foot because, at that point, it was only a couple of miles to the border. But when he was halfway, he saw twelve men approaching in a half-circle, each man about a thirty yard distance from the other. The Huns were after him! The visibility was good and Oreste himself was near one outer end of the half-circle.

When he recounted his adventure to me thirty years later, he confessed that this was the supreme moment of fear in his life. "But I realised that I had to control myself, and at once the panic disappeared. How can I explain it to you? I felt as if I had split into two, one part of me was scared stiff and the other walked and heard and looked and moved as a perfectly normal being.

"I crouched close to the ground til the line of men was