Two Rings

by Millie Werber

  When they came for my uncle, I thought of Motel Rafalowitz and old Majer Berger, and again I was scared.

  The Germans didn’t find Feter that day—he was still in Russia at that point and returned only a few months later after he realized he wouldn’t be able to arrange for his family’s transport. But not finding my uncle just seemed to anger the soldiers more. They stormed down the hall and banged on the door of another family. Here, too, lived a man named Glatt, but not my uncle, not any relation of his, and not, as far as any of us knew, involved in the Left Po’alei Zion or any other socialist group. Nonetheless, his name was Glatt. The Germans had Glatt on their list, and they were determined to get a Glatt.

  This Glatt they found, and they grabbed him out of his apartment, his family screaming, “Please, please, don’t take him,” Glatt himself trying to tell them they had the wrong man. It was useless to plead; it was useless to cry.

  They shot him in the hall.

  I remained with Mama in our room, trying not to hear.

  When the German army put up a flyer in the ghetto announcing that Jews aged fifteen to forty could register for work at the Steyr-Daimler-Puch factory just outside of town, I didn’t want to go. It was the summer of 1942, and although the ghetto was dreadful to me, I barely ever wanted to venture out of the cramped room we shared. I was determined never to leave my family. Everything seemed so precarious in the ghetto. I didn’t trust that anything would stay in place if I didn’t watch it all the time. If I went away to work and live at the factory, what would be left when I returned?

  I didn’t want to go.

  It was my uncle, my Feter, who made me. He had returned from Russia by this time and was adamant that all of us try to find work. “If you work,” he said, “you might live.”

  My brother had been chosen for work as a street sweeper. Majer had already studied at a private Jewish high school, which was a big honor in those days; if you could graduate from high school and get your matura—that was considered the mark of a truly educated man. But in the ghetto, work of any kind was precious, and he had been relieved to have a job. One day, though, as he was sweeping the street, he was knocked over by German soldiers driving by in a truck. They were laughing, he told me, pleased that they had run down a Jew. He broke his leg in the fall. Mama tried to set it straight, but he walked with a limp after that.

  When the factory announced that they would take Jewish workers, Majer couldn’t go—they wouldn’t take anyone they considered disabled. My father and aunt and uncle had already managed to get jobs: My father worked in the Kromolowski factory, where they made saddles, Feter worked in a tannery, and Mima was a seamstress in a shop where she made and mended clothes for the Germans. But Mama and I needed work, and even though she was over forty, Mama said she would go with me to the munitions factory to register.

  It didn’t take long for the Germans to sort through the many people who showed up. I was accepted without question; I was young, thin, and delicate, but in apparent good health. At forty-three, Mama was too old. They wouldn’t take her. She was sent back to the ghetto, and I was left at the factory, alone.

  I wanted desperately to go with her, to return to the ghetto and stay with her and the rest of our little family. I wanted to be able to sleep beside her, to feel her warmth surround me. Always that, maybe mostly that—the warmth of Mama’s ample body in the night. Despite the oblavas, the unprovoked brutalities, the sickness and the hunger and the dread that were upon me, still, I wanted only to be with Mama in the ghetto.

  Yet I was not allowed. I was made to stay at the factory. Feter said, and the family agreed, if you work, you might live. So, at fifteen, I began to work in the ammunitions factory, and after that first day at work, I never spent another night with my mother again.

  The factory was a large building a couple of kilometers out of town. Poles had worked there previously, but they were paid, whereas we were available as slave labor—unpaid and barely fed—so the Germans brought us in to replace the Poles. We were set to work at enormous machines for twelve-hour shifts, six hours at a time with a fifteen-minute break between. We worked either 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. or 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. I worked at a machine drilling holes into little metal slugs. I was given measurements—the hole had to be so wide and so deep—and it had to be exact. I was required to drill fifteen hundred pieces per shift—one after the other, hour after hour, day after day. No talking, no sitting. Just drilling holes into metal slugs, precisely so wide, precisely so deep, and placing each one as I finished it into compartmentalized wooden boxes at my side. If I worked, I could live. I was grateful for that. But I knew I could not make a mistake. Mistakes would not be tolerated.

  This I learned within days of arriving at the factory. There was a young man, Weinberg was his name. He was a friend of my brother’s—probably eighteen or so at the time. One day, I saw Weinberg running fast across the grounds, toward the gates of the compound. I wondered why he was sprinting; he, of course, had nowhere to go. Then I saw the soldiers running, too, carrying their rifles, raising them to shoot. And then they did—shoot him, I mean. They raised their rifles and shot this young man dead. Just like that. He crumpled into the dirt, the force of the bullets first propelling him forward, as if pushing him onward for a moment in his desperate stride, but then, and really all at once, because it could have taken only a second or two, Weinberg collapsed on the ground.

  Feter! You told me that working would protect me, that if I work I will live. I am here in this factory, I am here drilling these holes. The dreadful noise of these monstrous machines, the metal dust in the air, the monotony of the endless hours, the loneliness, the fear. My legs ache from standing so long. All so I can live. But what about Weinberg? Weinberg has been working, too, yet he has been killed.

  Weinberg, it seemed, had made some kind of mistake; that’s what the Germans said. They said he was trying to sabotage the ammunition. When the Germans accused him of this crime, he knew what it meant and so he ran. Then he was shot. Then he fell. Then the Germans dragged his body away.

  Alone in the factory, I knew I must not make a mistake.

  During the first several weeks that I worked at the factory—while they were building barracks on Skolzna Street for the twenty-five hundred workers who eventually came there—we were housed in a building that seemed something like a horse arena. I don’t really know what the building was, what it had been intended for, but after the summer of 1942, it became a place for the women, Jewish slave-laborers, to sleep. It was an empty, cavernous structure with a hard cement floor and, around the perimeter, something that looked like a trough. We used this as our latrine. We slept without bedding, without blankets, on the floor.

  After a few weeks—this must have been midsummer—we were told by the factory supervisor, a German named Briti-cleiber, that we could return to the ghetto for several hours to collect and bring back to the factory anything we thought was valuable. He told us that something was about to happen and that if we wanted to bring things to keep for after the war, the Germans would save them for us. He didn’t say so explicitly, but we knew from this little speech that there would be another oblava in the ghetto, perhaps a large one this time.

  I walked back to the ghetto. Of course, we didn’t have anything of real value—my mother had her sewing machine, but what use would I have for that? We had no diamonds or gold or silver. But I went back because I was told I could go and because I wanted to see my family. I was determined not to return to the factory; I wanted to stay with my family in the ghetto, no matter what.

  When I got home, I spoke my mind: “I don’t want to go back. I just want to be with all of you. Please. I want to stay.”

  I was begging. I wanted to be grown-up for my family, to do what they asked of me, but I wanted my mother more, and all I could do was plead.

  My uncle insisted. He was adamant, cruel. I can still hear his words, his face red with pain and fury. “No,” he said. “Send her out. Throw her out from the house.
She must go. She must go to work.”

  It was beyond comprehension, I thought, to drive a daughter away like that, to send her out on her own when all she wanted was to be home. I was lost, conquered by the clarity of his conviction.

  I cried. Mama tried to comfort me. She kissed my cheek.

  “You must go, Maniusia. It is for the best.”

  Mama asked me where I slept, and I told her about the cold cement ground. She handed me our feather blanket to take back.

  That was my valuable, Mama’s last gift to me, and that was the last time I ever saw her, sending me off on my own, back to the German ammunitions factory. It felt like banishment; it felt like desertion.

  The next day, the large-scale deportations began. We knew something big was going to happen, because the Germans set up floodlights in the town, so many lights and so bright that even a couple of kilometers away, as we were, it seemed like daylight in the deepest hours of the night.

  The city of Radom was almost entirely liquidated of Jews in two large deportations during August 1942. Before the war started, about thirty thousand Jews lived there, comprising one-third of the total population. The first deportation occurred on August 5, when the Glinice Ghetto was liquidated; that was the smaller of the two ghettos the Germans established in Radom and the one where my family lived. Eleven days later, and over the course of three days, from August 16 to August 18, the large ghetto was cleared out. My brother was killed during this deportation, executed because, with his limp, he was considered unfit for work. My mother was taken away; she had been working in a shop, which should have protected her, but the soldiers came in anyway, and rounded up all the workers to fulfill some quota they had. I learned this later from my uncle. My grandparents and most of my cousins were taken away that day, as well.

  In all her life, Mama had never traveled, had never been on a train to anywhere. Like her parents and grandparents, my mother, Dvora Ajchenbaum Drezner, was married and lived all her days in Radom. The first time Mama got on a train was the last time, too: Her first train trip was in the cattle car that took her to Treblinka.

  After the deportations, few Jews remained in Radom. For another year or so, until November 1943, the ghetto still stood, populated mostly by Jews who had found work in the stores and workshops the Germans had taken over; some Jews also got sent to the ghetto from the surrounding villages. Mima and Feter stayed for nearly a year longer in their room on Szwarlikowska Street before they, too, came to the factory, in November 1943.

  After the deportations, though, I no longer wanted to be in the ghetto. My brother had been killed; my mother, my grand-parents, and most of my aunts and uncles—they had all been taken away. What was left there for me? I didn’t understand the grown-ups, why they continued in their pathetic daily routines. Searching for bread, scavenging for wood, finding a mitten, maybe a scarf, to keep warm. Why did the world not end? I didn’t understand this. Mama was gone; my brother was dead. Why did life go on?

  Majer, Mama, and me

  No one sat shivah for my brother or for anyone else. Death was everywhere, yet no one mourned in any way that I could see. This I couldn’t bear. Not because of the religious part—not because of some religious obligation to perform a ritual. Even then, this is not what mattered to me. But because it felt as if no one were willing to think about the meaning of things, to make the deaths and the deportations echo in some way. Perhaps I am able to see it differently now: With so much death, how could one sit shivah? One would be sitting shivah continuously for years. But at fifteen, I thought it a meanness of some kind, an intolerable indifference, a crusting-over of the soul, and I was too young for that, despite my surroundings.

  After the deportations, I hated to be in the ghetto. I went back a few times—for the ring, for the wedding—but I no longer had, and wouldn’t have again for years to come, anything I could think of as home. The ghetto was now to me only a place of loss, of fear, and of death. I preferred the factory, with its numbing routine, with Mama’s feather blanket, and, at least for a time, with Heniek.

  3

  HENIEK GREENSPAN WAS A POLICEMAN.

  They were Jews, these policemen, and generally well respected in the community, or at least they had been before the war began. They were men in their prime, able-bodied and agile, and most of them had achieved their matura diploma at least. The Germans used them to carry out their policies in the ghetto and the factory. The policemen would designate people for forced-work details, guard the perimeter of the ghetto, and oversee the distribution of our meager food rations. Though they didn’t carry guns, they were given certain privileges for their services to the Germans. They could go into and out of the ghetto, for example, without explicit permission, and in the factory, some had separate rooms of their own—they didn’t live as the rest did, in crowded barracks. Not all of them, certainly, but most of the Jewish police felt that they had special protection as well as privileges with the Germans, and given the circumstances, the police tended to look upon themselves as better than everyone else.

  Nojich Tannenbaum, for example, was this way. He was an informer as well as a policeman, and he would boast to us that his family—his wife, their young twin girls, their Jewish maid, all of them—would survive on an island of safety while everything else around them burned. He patrolled the factory grounds, supervising—spying, really—looking for anything he could report to the Germans. Maybe someone was hiding extra food; maybe someone was not where he or she was supposed to be. No one ever wanted to see Tannenbaum or be seen by him; certainly no one trusted him. He was a Jew, but he was working for the Germans, seemingly with the wholeness of his heart. I was told that Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Blum, the SS officer who planned and carried out the liquidation of the ghettos, was the godfather of his twins.

  Tannenbaum didn’t know it then—when we were in the factory, none of us did—but the Germans would save no special treatment for their informers and police. In the end, those who had served the Germans would be used and murdered just like the rest of us. Tannenbaum was murdered, though not by the Germans. He was killed by Jews at Auschwitz, exacting their own kind of justice against someone who had caused so much death.

  There was Chiel Friedman, too, with whom I had such dealings later on. Chiel Friedman was a friend of Feter’s from long before the war. They had known each other for years; Feter and he were members of the same socialist Zionist youth organization. During the war, though, Friedman became a member of the Jewish police, and he became proud, arrogant, cruel.

  After the ghetto was liquidated, Feter appealed to Friedman to help find work for my cousin, Moishele, who was only thirteen at the time. He was too young, officially, to work for the Germans, who accepted people for work details only if they were fifteen or older. Feter called out to Friedman one day in the street.

  “Chiel,” he said, “I need your help.” My uncle was calling out to a man who had been a friend, with whom he had once dreamed of a better world, a socialist paradise in which all men would be equal.

  Friedman came over to my uncle, looked him in the eye, and slapped him hard across the face.

  “I am not Chiel Friedman anymore,” he said. “I am Commander Friedman. That is what you must call me.” And he turned on his boot and walked away.

  Feter told me this story after the war had ended. He wanted to explain that what Friedman had done to me—because by that time, I had cause to despise him, too—was characteristic of this man and not directed at me personally. When the two of them were together in Dachau, Feter told me, Friedman would force the men to stand longer than necessary in their twice-daily appels, or roll calls. It could be raining or snowing, the sun could be beating down on them, the winter wind could be whipping through their flimsy uniforms—whatever the weather, it didn’t matter. Chiel Friedman made them stand for a half hour, sometimes an hour longer than the Germans required. Friedman seemed to want to prove himself; he wanted to show the Germans, and maybe the Jews, too, that he knew how to b
e cruel and indiscriminate in his cruelty.

  When Dachau was liberated, Feter told me, Friedman approached him to make peace, to shake his hand, as if now there would be a future for them to share together, as if now Friedman’s time as a policeman could be buried. Friedman put his hand out toward my uncle, but Feter refused to take it.

  “For me the war has ended,” Feter said, “but for you it has just begun.”

  And this was true. Friedman lived a hellish life after the war. The Radomer survivors spurned him, refusing to offer him the help and community they were so eager to offer to each other. Chiel Friedman lived as an outcast.

  This is what it was like to be a policeman in the ghetto, in the factory—to be someone with power when Jews were not allowed to have any power; to be someone who could give and enforce orders and mete out punishments if those orders were not followed; to be someone who had the license to be self-interested at others’ expense. The police were dangerous, and we feared them nearly as much as we feared our German captors.

  Heniek seemed different. He was charming, and in the early days at the factory, even before the barracks were built, he would come into the horse arena to check on the women, not so much to supervise as simply to see if we were okay. I kept mostly to myself—I was on my own in a strange place, without my family, without knowing how I was to manage day to day. I slept beside a girl I knew from Radom, Sally Apel, but I felt separated from all the others there. I was a good deal younger than most of the women, and I was timid. I always spoke softly, almost to myself. I didn’t like to look at people directly, for fear that they would look directly back. It has always been in my nature to be somewhat inconspicuous, quiet, in the corners.