Two Rings

by Millie Werber

  Radom postcard, 1930s

  Mama and I shared a bed. Before we moved to the ghetto, we lived in a large, two-room apartment in the center of Radom near City Hall, on Wolnosc Street. The second of the two rooms was separated across the middle by two large wooden wardrobe cabinets in which Mama kept her sewing materials. In the back section of the room were two beds, one for my father and brother and one for Mama and me. My father lived in Paris for the first seven years of my life—I think he felt it would be easier to make a living there than in Poland—but even when he came home in 1935, he slept with my brother, and Mama with me. I loved being in bed with Mama, nestling in her warmth at night under the feather blanket.

  In Europe in those days, it wasn’t the way it is now in America, where parents endlessly praise their children and hug and kiss them every day. Mama didn’t hug me much, and I don’t remember her ever telling me that she loved me. “Why do I have to tell my daughter I love her?” she would have wondered. “Of course I love her; I’m her mother!” I didn’t miss it, though, because I didn’t know anything else. Besides, in bed, I didn’t need Mama’s words; I felt her love every night in her bone-weary embrace. Sometimes I would massage her feet before she fell off to sleep, her muscles slowly releasing, softly relaxing in my hands. Then I would crawl under the feather blanket with her and feel her warm breath on my back.

  Majer, Mama, and me

  The front part of the large room served as both living room and salon for Mama’s customers. She laid out ladies’ magazines on a little coffee table she set there, and her clients would flip through the pages and choose the items they wanted her to make.

  The kitchen was the workroom, with a large table in the center, where my mother stood for hours cutting and sewing her fabrics. She taught me to cut the fabric exactly right, because material was expensive and her clients always wanted to buy just a bit less than they really needed. If Mama told them they needed three yards to make a dress, they’d buy two and a half yards instead to save a little money. So there was no room for error; every cut had to count.

  At the height of her business before the war began, Mama had four women sewing for her. They worked long hours, but she treated them well and helped them save up to buy sewing machines for themselves. That was a big deal, a sewing machine. It was transportable, first of all, so no matter where you had to go, no matter what the situation, you could take the machine with you and earn a living. When the ghetto was established in 1941 and we had to leave our apartment on Wolnosc Street and move in with Mima and my uncle and their two children, Mama brought along her sewing machine. She had hoped that she could continue to work, even in the ghetto. But there was no room to sew—eight of us at that point were living in a single room—and after the first month or two in the ghetto, there were no customers. One of the girls who worked for Mama managed to leave Poland before the war began. She went to Paris, and she brought her machine with her so she could work, so she could live.

  Mama is second from the right; Mima is sitting beside her

  Mama wanted me to learn to sew so that I would have a trade. Sewing and embroidery were the two professions acceptable for girls. Mama was successful in her business—she kept us housed and fed—but it seemed to me that she worked all the time, until we lit candles on Friday night and then again as soon as Shabbos was over. When my father lived away, it was Mama who supported me and my brother. My father did send home some money, I think, and I know he sent occasional treats—canned sliced pineapple, for example, which I happily devoured between pieces of buttered cornbread—but it was my mother’s sewing business that kept our household together. I was young—barely a teenager—and Mama wanted to teach me, too. Perhaps she had a sense that a woman needed to learn to provide for herself, in case she had no one else to rely on.

  I once saw her reading a letter from my father. Sitting on our bed in the back of our apartment with the unfolded paper in her hands, she quietly, quietly cried. I hated that; I hated to see those tears. And I hated, too, to see how hard she had to work with my father away. I knew I didn’t want that for myself, to work all day at the cutting table, to spend every day with scissors and needles and thread.

  Mima and Feter, 1932

  I didn’t want to work, but work is what saved me in the war.

  In the spring of 1941, when we moved to the ghetto, Mama took her sewing machine and one of the two beds from the back room of our apartment; she also took the feather blankets. Everything else we owned—the furniture, the dishes, the cutlery—we had to leave behind. Mima and my uncle—I called him Feter—had found a single-room apartment on Szwarlikowska Street, in the area of the city that the Germans closed off to make the ghetto, and we moved in with them. We had three beds for the eight of us: Mima and Feter and their two children shared two beds, I still got to sleep with Mama, and my father and brother slept on the floor. We had no bathroom—there was an outhouse in the back—and no running water. The wooden floor was painted white; in the winter, the cold made the boards seize up and creak in the night.

  I was frightened of the ghetto, even from the start.

  I had never really known hunger before; we weren’t rich among the Jews of Radom, but we had what we needed—a meal every day with potatoes and meat, on Friday nights a chicken. In the ghetto, I began to learn what hunger is.

  We got ration cards, some kind of food stamps, and we had to stand in line for hours at one of the few bakeries still working for our small ration of bread. Sometimes, when we finally got our turn at the bakery window, we would be told that there was no more bread to be had, that they had already run out. So Mama suggested that we all go to different places to increase our chances. Mama sometimes sent me to stay with a cousin of ours who lived in a building whose ground floor housed one of the bakeries. I would sleep on our cousin’s floor for a few hours at night and then get up at three o’clock in the morning. It would still be dark, of course, and bitter cold, but if I got to the courtyard before there was even a hint of morning in the air, I had a chance of returning home with warm bread in my hands. On those occasions, I was triumphant: “Look, Mama, look what I have brought. A loaf of bread!” A treasure.

  I didn’t like to be on the streets. I didn’t really like to be anywhere outside our single room. Even before the ghetto, before the war, I was frightened of Poles. Jews were never accepted by them; we never felt a part of their society. Jews weren’t allowed to work in any official or government-related jobs—not in banks or on the trains or in the post office. Growing up, I knew to stay away from the Poles, the boys especially, who sometimes threw stones at us. If we saw Polish people walking down the street, we always crossed to the other side. If we ever saw a priest—I don’t know why we did this—we would always hold on to a shirt or coat button. There was somehow supposed to be protection in that small gesture. No priest ever accosted me or anyone I knew, but I knew I was supposed to be wary of priests, to stay away, to clutch a button.

  In the ghetto, the danger was real and routine. Once, coming home from the bakery in the early morning, I passed Chavela Mora, a cousin of mine, on the street. We were the same age and had lived in the same building before the ghetto was established. I used to envy her beauty, with her big brown eyes and a full head of luxuriant blonde curls; my hair was always fine and thin. But now I saw that she was utterly changed. She looked maybe half her former size; she was sprawled out on the sidewalk, her arm outstretched, begging for coins, and all her hair had fallen out. She clearly hadn’t eaten—or washed—in a very long time. Perhaps she had typhus. She looked desperately alone and bewildered, out on the street, with people passing by. What happened to her parents? Why weren’t they there, taking care of her?

  It’s hard to consider a question like this. It’s hard for a fourteen-year-old girl even to formulate such a question.

  I called out to my cousin, but her gaze didn’t move to meet mine. I was frightened, too frightened to approach her, though I wanted to and thought perhaps I should.
I ran home and told Mama what I had seen, but no one could find Chavela after that.

  Maybe she had been taken away.

  They did that, in the ghetto. The Germans would take people randomly off the streets, and no one would ever see them again. People would go out in the day, maybe to try to sell something or find some food, and they would never return. This has to be a child’s greatest fear. Certainly it was mine. To be snatched away and never found.

  This is what happened to Motel Rafalowitz. Or something close to this, anyway.

  Motel had left his apartment early one morning to get his family’s ration of bread. Hours passed and then several days, but Motel never came home. Somehow Motel’s wife, Dina Rosa, eventually learned that Motel was in the Radom jail, having been arrested when he went looking for bread on the Aryan side of town, outside the ghetto. Then we heard—though I have no idea how this information got around—that Motel was going to be executed and that he was going to have to pass by the ghetto wall on his way. Everyone scrambled to see him. Dina Rosa, of course, but many others, too. I went with Mama; I think my brother came, as well. I remember several young boys trying to climb the brick wall that separated the ghetto from the outside world to reach their heads over the top to see.

  We waited for a long while, Dina Rosa screaming out her husband’s name at intervals. And then we heard him—the boys on the wall said Motel was being held between two soldiers. They were passing by just on the other side.

  “Motel!” Dina Rosa called out. “Motel, I am here!”

  “Dina Rosa!” he cried as he passed. “Dina Rosa! Throw me a piece of bread. They’re going to shoot me!”

  Even then I understood the anguish of that cry. In his last moments, more than his wife, more than escape, Motel’s deepest desire was simply for bread, a bite of bread before the gun fired.

  Dina Rosa collapsed against the ghetto wall, sobbing as Mama took her in her arms. Mama was swaying back and forth with Dina Rosa’s heaving cry, trying to comfort the poor woman. But I wanted comfort, too. I wanted those arms about me, Mama clutching me to her breast.

  It wasn’t a scene for a child, for a young girl to see. Motel starving and all alone, with no one able to rescue him. Dina Rosa, disbelieving and empty, for whom all rescue was impossible.

  I was fourteen, and I was scared.

  I was thinking of Jedlińsk.

  It’s 1940, the year before the ghetto was established, and we’re still living on Wolnosc Street. I’m thirteen years old. My father has left Radom for Jedlińsk, a small village about fifteen kilometers outside of town. We have relatives there, I know, but it’s not entirely clear to me why he has taken off. My uncle has left Radom, too. He is a member of a socialist Zionist group, the Left Po’alei Zion, and he has gone to Russia to see if he can arrange safe passage for Mima and their children. Mama tells me something vague about why my father has left home, but I don’t understand entirely what she’s saying. It has something to do with their fearing his arrest, but I don’t see why anyone would want to arrest my father. Perhaps I don’t know him that well—I have never managed to feel close to him since he returned from his many years away in Paris—but I do know that he isn’t a criminal in any way.

  After a few days, Mama tells me I have to go to him, to give him a message from her that he should stay in Jedlińsk for another week. There is going to be another oblava, another roundup of Jews in Radom—I don’t know how she knows this—and he should stay away. My brother, Majer, cannot go—he is sixteen now, and he will surely be recognized as a Jew. It is also impossible for my mother to go. She too will easily be recognized, and how would we manage without her? So I must go. I am thirteen, and I must go on my own to Jedlińsk to tell my father not to return to Radom.

  I am scared. Mama! This is against the law, what you are asking me to do. If I get caught, Mama! What will happen if I get caught?

  Mama dresses me as a peasant girl: She puts a babushka on my head and tells me to take off my shoes. Peasants walk barefoot. I do as I am told. I wear my old coat, but Mama removes from my sleeve the white armband with the blue Magen David that I must wear as a Jew. This is the greatest crime—for a Jew to walk in the street without the armband bearing the Star of David. But Mama takes mine off and takes my face between her hands; she kisses my forehead.

  “You must go now, Maniusia.” She uses a diminutive of my name, an endearment. “You must go tell your father to stay in Jedlińsk.”

  So I walk, barefoot and trembling, out of Radom and onto the lanes leading to the village fifteen kilometers away. My feet begin to hurt as soon as the city streets give way to country roads—I am not accustomed to walking without shoes, and the twigs and pebbles scattered across the lanes dig into my soles. I keep my head down, scared to catch anyone’s eye, scared to be asked what I am doing, a Jew in unconvincing costume.

  Eventually, an old man comes by driving a horse and wagon and offers me a ride toward the village. I accept, grateful to get off my feet. I don’t remember much else—how, after the man dropped me off still some distance from the village, I managed to find my cousins’ house, how long I stayed there, or what I may have said to my father. It’s all a blankness to me, a darkness I can’t penetrate. I have no idea now how I returned home.

  What stays with me is my fear, rising up with the sting of bile in my gut as I walked along. Mama, who had cradled me in her arms every night of my life, had sent me out to walk alone, exposed on country lanes. Mama had sent me into danger.

  At times in the night, somewhere deep down, I still feel the fear of that thirteen-year-old girl, a vague foreboding about what comes next. That feeling has nestled inside me; it can lie dormant for long stretches of time, but it has never gone away.

  The Germans never came looking for my father, as far as I know. They did come for my uncle, though. It was the next year, and they went rampaging through the ghetto, banging on people’s doors, arresting those with socialist affiliations. The Germans had already conducted oblavas for other groups. The intelligentsia, the doctors, and the butchers and water carriers, too, maybe because, either through education or brute strength, these men could be trouble if they organized resistance groups. But on this day, the Germans came looking for the leftists, and the soldiers came into our building looking particularly for my uncle, my Feter, Yisroel Glatt.

  “Glatt! Where is Yisroel Glatt?” they screamed, angry already.

  They had lists of names. I suppose their informers had told them things—who belonged to which organization, who perhaps was trying to stash what where. They burst into our building, clutching their lists, pounding through the hallways with their heavy boots, calling out the names of those they were looking for.

  Feter, center, and friends

  They banged on our door.

  “Glatt. We’re here for Yisroel Glatt.”

  I knew what they could do. I knew what these soldiers were capable of. Even on a whim, even just for fun.

  Some time before, early on in the war, perhaps in September or October 1939, the soldiers had come for Majer Berger, a Torah scribe who lived in our building. He was a quiet man with gentle eyes that creased at the corners when he smiled at me and a light red beard stained murky yellow in places—from cigarettes, I suppose, though I never saw him smoke. He had four small boys; I guess he was in his forties, but I was just twelve at the time, and he seemed ancient to me, the very essence of a religious man. I’m sure he was pious; I probably thought he was close to sacred.

  When the Germans came for him, he offered no resistance. I didn’t even know until late in the day that he had been taken. When he returned later in the evening, I saw him in the hallway. He walked slowly, pressing his hand against the wall for support. A good part of his beard was gone and his face was smeared with blood. Mama pulled me into the apartment, wanting to shield me from such sights. The next day, I learned the story from others in the building: The Germans had taken Mr. Berger and two other bearded Jews down to the Jewish high school a
t 27 Żeromskiego Street. They lined up the men by a tree and then, one by one, grabbed bits of their beards and yanked the hairs out from their bleeding chins. Just like that, the soldiers pulled out the beards of these harmless men. Then the men were made to climb the tree and balance themselves on the branches. The soldiers ordered them to yell out “cuckoo” to each other, obedient show-birds put on display. The Germans were suitably entertained, gawking at the men, laughing and joking as Mr. Berger and the two others tried not to fall. After a time, the men were permitted to come down from the tree and return to their homes.

  How is a young girl to understand the meaning of an event like this? A child understands schoolyard meanness, classroom mischief. Jack once told me that when he was a boy and was made to study with some very old and, he said, very smelly rabbi who had a tendency to nod off during their lessons, he and some of the other boys in the class would sometimes glue little bits of the rabbi’s beard to the study table as he slept. The boys would get a laugh—and a good hard smack—when the rabbi awoke. Little Jewish boys, studying Talmud, playing at pranks.

  Me, circa 1935

  But this—what happened with Mr. Berger—was something else. There was blood and, in Mr. Berger’s eyes, a confused look that I didn’t understand—bewilderment and fear and defeat all at once. I stared, a young girl in braided pigtails, cowering in my mother’s arms.