Two Rings

by Millie Werber

  “Don’t marry this man. Don’t leave Radom. You want to give him a ring; give him. But don’t leave Radom with him.”

  Was he thinking of my safety? Was he suspicious of the proposed exchange? Later, after the war, I was in touch with his sister, and she told me that her mother was always talking about me, saying that I would be a good match for her son the goldsmith. But I had no knowledge of this then, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to me, anyway. I was interested only in Heniek, and I was marrying him despite the idea of escaping to Argentina, not because of it.

  People in the barracks seemed to want me not to go as well. They wanted to take my place; one woman offered me a fortune if I would give up my place in the exchange to her (I told her to ask Heniek; it wasn’t up to me whom he would take). And they wondered why Heniek had picked me. What was so special about me that among all the women working at the factory—there were nearly five hundred of us—Heniek had asked me to go with him?

  What could I say? I didn’t know myself what he saw in me. There were women in the barracks who were more educated than I, who came from wealthier homes. I had been the smarkata, and yet Heniek had chosen me, me among all the others. Perhaps because I was young? He was twenty-eight at the time. He told me once that a friend joked with him that he was robbing the cradle in marrying me, that I was too young to know anything, and he joked back that his friend shouldn’t worry—he would raise me right. So maybe my youth was appealing to him, just as his worldly maturity appealed to me. Whatever it was, I was gladdened by his choice, proud even, if I can say it, that among all the women wanting him, Heniek wanted me.

  Heniek and I were married several days later in Mima and Feter’s single room on Szwarlikowska Street. My father was there, but it was Feter who said the blessings. We shared a sip of something, though I don’t know what, and Heniek broke a glass. We had no documents to sign. We had no ketubah, and we had, of course, no marriage license from the state.

  This is what even now I struggle to make sense of: How did we think this was going to work? Heniek did not have the same last name as his brother-in-law; I never had any document to share a name with Heniek. I was Mania Drezner before I got married and I was Mania Drezner after. So how did we think we could be convincingly claimed as part of Heniek’s brother-in-law’s family? I don’t understand this. Something doesn’t make sense here in the story of my own life; there’s a blank space in my history, and I have no way to fill it in and no one to ask.

  Nonetheless, we were married. Heniek gave me a simple gold band, and I gave him the ring I had gotten made for him with his initials engraved on top.

  I have the rings still. Both rings, tied together with a thin length of thread.

  Sometime later, we had a picture taken. Try as I might—and it bothers me that there are things that stay hidden in me somewhere, inaccessible to my searching, whereas others I remember with a readiness that amazes me—I cannot recall where or when or how we got this picture taken. But I have it even now, along with the rings. It’s black and white, of course, and we look—I need to say this—we look happy, almost eager. Our temples are touching, my face slightly lower than his, and we’re both looking straight at the camera. I am smiling slightly, even a little impishly. I remember I didn’t like how my hair looked in the picture—it’s done up in a way, as if supported by curlers, and I still think I don’t look good in it. It’s printed on flimsy paper; all the edges are frayed, and there are jagged creases down the middle because of the way it was kept when I was at Auschwitz. But it’s a lovely picture, nonetheless.

  All through my life, during the many decades that followed, I have kept this picture with me. Years after the war, Jack mounted it on a little rectangle of cardboard to give it some substance. How sweet this was of Jack, how selfless, to preserve a picture of me with another man. But I put the picture away: It stays in an old envelope on a shelf in the back of my closet hidden behind my clothes. Wherever I have lived—in Germany after the war, in various apartments and houses in New York after we came to America—I have kept this picture, secretly close to my heart, but tucked away.

  Our evening was over. We had to return to the factory—Heniek to his duties in the police, I to my work in the kitchen. We would be leaving shortly for Argentina.

  Soon thereafter, we got word: The “exchange” had taken place. Seventeen people, all related in a single family—Heniek’s sister and brother-in-law, the girl Henia Friedman, all those who were designated for the exchange with Germans living in Argentina—were gathered together in the ghetto and taken to the central square, presumably for transport. But then, instead of being loaded onto trucks, they were lined up and shot. We heard that one member of the family escaped: Heniek’s nephew, Amek Bleiweis, somehow knowing not to trust the reality of the exchange, lowered himself into the dugout of a communal latrine and hid in human excrement until the massacre was over. He said the stench stayed on him for weeks. Heniek and I eluded the slaughter, but for no reason other than that we were not living in or visiting the ghetto when it happened.

  This was the maniacal logic of the war. I couldn’t understand it then, and it’s certainly no clearer to me now, why the Germans thought it necessary to concoct this ruse. The Germans were killing us routinely and without cause. My brother was shot because he had a limp. Chava had been murdered because she was running in fear. Rafalowitz and Weinberg and the man the German officer killed at the factory on Yom Kippur: The Germans didn’t need a reason; they killed because they killed. So why did they need a story about people going to Argentina in order to kill them? Was the story to worsen the pain? To deliver people to death only after giving them the hope of life?

  And why had we been spared? This is a different sort of question, I know. But it was a question that haunted me. I had visited the ghetto just a day or two before the killing. I could have been there. I could have been killed. For no reason at all, Heniek and I were simply elsewhere when the killing occurred. So we were alive.

  At least then. At least at that point.

  Heniek and I were married in idea, really, more than in actuality. We couldn’t live together, of course, and we barely had time alone. Heniek had a room in one of the barracks—a wooden bed, a thin mattress, a standing lamp without a shade. I don’t know whether the room was his or if he somehow got permission to use someone else’s for an hour or two at a time. We didn’t go there much; it was against the rules, and I had to walk back to my barracks in the dark on my own. And there was always fear, always the threat of getting caught.

  Heniek was twelve years older than I; he knew how to handle himself in the world, he had experience of women, and he had a good deal of power over the Jews in his charge. I was young and vulnerable and innocent of absolutely everything. I gave myself to Heniek, and he could have done with me whatever he pleased. But what pleased Heniek was to be a gentleman. Heniek loved me with patience and with tenderness, and he guided me gently with his kisses to find my deepest pleasure.

  In the end, we were married for only a short time. Perhaps just a few months, though truly, I don’t know. I don’t myself know when exactly we got married, and there is no legal record of the date. Perhaps we were married in the summer of 1943; perhaps it was the fall. I cannot say how long Heniek Greenspan was my husband; I know only that it was not long enough.

  In the winter of 1943–1944, the area of the barracks on Skolzna Street became a Konzentrationslager, a concentration camp. A few months earlier, in November 1943, the Radom ghetto was finally emptied and my aunt and uncle came to the factory with their son, Moishele. He was still too young to work, but they tried as best they could to make him look older, and he managed to survive almost another year, until we were sent to Auschwitz.

  Once the barracks became a KL, any sense we had that working in the factory would protect us vanished. A double row of barbed-wire fencing was erected around the perimeter of the barracks; the wires were electrified so anyone who touched them would die. We were given
uniforms, the striped dresses that you see in pictures—dirty gray and blue stripes and cloth so coarse it scratched whenever it touched your skin. We were allowed to keep whatever clothes we had from the ghetto, but we had to wear the uniforms every day. And there were new rules. We were told: “Do not try to escape. If anyone escapes, twenty will be killed in their place.”

  The Germans were true to their word. Some people did escape. People were killed on account of them. And Heniek and I got caught up in the whole horror of it. Another Jewish policeman, Duvid Norembursky, was one of those who escaped; he was responsible for my Heniek’s death.

  5

  EVERYTHING NOW BEGINS TO HAPPEN VERY FAST. THE EVENTS of the winter of 1943–1944 all happened in such quick succession, they exist in my memory as multiple strands of a single story. But it is not at all clear to me how precisely the strands are intertwined—how precisely they relate to each other, in time and in cause. I know them only as I feel them: filaments of grief and fear woven deeply into my life.

  In the weeks immediately before and after the creation of the Konzentrationslager at the barracks on Skolzna Street, it was clear that life in the ghetto was getting ever more precarious. It wasn’t only I who thought the factory barracks were safer than the ghetto streets. Even despite its own brand of horrors, the barracks provided some measure of protection. The roundups were fewer; the food—though only hard bread and thin broth flecked with meat—was at least distributed every day. We were comforted with what we forced ourselves to believe: that the Germans needed us to work, that they wouldn’t kill us if we worked.

  In the ghetto, people longed for work at the factory. The liquidations had emptied the ghetto of most of its inhabitants; those who remained were desperate to devise ways to leave and work for the war. Duvid Norembursky, a member of the ghetto police, was one of those who found a way.

  I have much to say about Duvid Norembursky; he is the villain of my story. But I need to admit that I cannot be objective about the man: I do not know what was in his heart; I do not know what in fact linked the series of events that I will describe. What I can say with certainty is that this is how we in the factory understood these events; this is how we—and not I alone—put them together to tell a story that made sense, however horrendous it was.

  There was a foundry, a kuznia, connected to the ammunitions factory, a place of fire and smoke and molten-hot metals. Working there was one of the most feared assignments in the compound. People had to inhale sooty air for twelve hours every day, blackening their lungs, dying from within. What precisely they did there—make gun parts, repair machines—truly, I do not know. But nobody ever wanted to work there, especially the girls.

  The kuznia was run by a German officer named Commandant Miller. Hundreds of men and women worked in the kuznia, of course, but Miller also chose young girls to work specifically for him. There were fifty, I think, from Radom whom he selected. He looked for a certain kind of girl—healthy, young, robust. The girls were petrified to be chosen. I knew a girl who cut off two of her fingers in order to get out from under Miller’s control. She claimed it was an accident, that her fingers had gotten mangled by accident while she was working at one of the kuznia’s machines, but we all knew that she mutilated herself on purpose to make herself distasteful to this man.

  How dreadful does a situation have to be for someone to force her fingers into the moving parts of a machine in order to escape it?

  I shudder to think what went on in the kuznia, what happened with Miller when the girls weren’t working at the fire. What did I know of such things?

  One day, a friend of mine came into our barracks crying. I know this girl’s name—I even know where she now lies buried in New York—but I won’t say her name here. I don’t know if she ever told her family what happened in the kuznia, and what if her children don’t know this part of their mother’s history? It’s not for me to let it out. I respect her memory, and I will keep her name.

  When she came into the barracks crying, she was barely able to speak. She took me into a corner, grasping my arms and trying to steady her breath. It was hard for her to get the words out. She started to tell me the things Miller made the girls do, what he did to them. As hard as it was for her to speak, it was as hard for me to hear. I didn’t understand, really, what she was talking about. It’s not just that I didn’t have any experience of these things myself; it’s that I didn’t even know that they existed. I didn’t know such perversity was in the world. This, in a way, is what the war was for us—a constant confrontation with a reality we had never imagined, never knew was even possible.

  Miller made this girl take off all her clothes in front of him and stretch out over a chair. He took out a rubber baton, the truncheon he used to beat people into compliance, and he pushed it down her throat to keep her quiet. And then, as he held the baton in place, his rough hand over her mouth, the poor girl choking on the thing, coughing for air, he undid his own clothes and spread her legs and forced himself on her. Neither of us had the word for this: Do you understand? I didn’t know what rape was; I didn’t know there was such a thing in the world. Still, I could sense what my friend was trying to tell me, this horrible, unspeakable thing. My friend was telling me a story she had no words for, a lovely, innocent girl broken by a brutal man, and there was nothing I could do to help her, to make her misery go away.

  I visit her grave sometimes, and I think about this story I have never told anyone, and I hope in my heart she somehow found peace.

  They must have known what Miller was doing. The ghetto police. They must have been aware that Miller was sexually abusing the girls. He wasn’t allowed to, not because abuse was forbidden—of course not—but because he was thereby committing Rassenschande; literally, the word means “race shame,” but it was used to describe sexual relations between a German and a Jew. Miller was mixing Aryan blood with Jewish blood, jeopardizing the purity of the master race.

  Duvid Norembursky somehow knew of Miller’s misdeeds.

  Did the policeman spend his days scheming? Did he sit with the other members of the ghetto police, relishing the telling of his tale, a story that he must have hoped would win him favor in the eyes of Miller’s superiors and would thereby benefit him and his family? Did it matter to him that his scheme would also likely send others to their doom? Surely it’s clear from what he did after Heniek was taken away that Norembursky was a heartless man, that he was out only for his own safety, and to hell with the others. To hell with Heniek, to hell with the twelve additional members of the factory police who were taken away because of him, to hell even with his wife’s own family. Duvid Norembursky was responsible for the death of them all.

  Miller may have been all-powerful in the kuznia, but even he couldn’t get away with committing Rassenschande. Cavorting with the impure Jewish race was strictly forbidden. At least this is what Norembursky must have thought. So Norembursky went to Miller’s superiors in the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst—the Security Service—and reported Miller. It is important to understand that nothing Norembursky did then or afterward suggests that he was trying to protect the girls; he was trying to make himself look good to the Germans. A Jew acting on behalf of the Germans: a Jewish policeman protecting the purity of the German race. For this great act, Norembursky was in fact rewarded: He and his family, along with twelve other policemen in his group from the ghetto, along with their families, were all brought to the Konzentrationslager to stay. For reporting this crime, this group of policemen was granted the better position of working in the KL, which is precisely what it seems they wanted to achieve.

  But their safety meant others’ demise. The factory permitted only a certain number of policemen to work there. For the thirteen who came in from the ghetto, thirteen policemen from the factory were taken away: Heniek was one of them.

  He must have known it was coming.

  There was competition among the various factions of police. Heniek worked in the factory for one supervisor; the police w
ho worked in the ghetto were responsible to someone else. Miller had his own police. Every commander reigned within his own little fiefdom, everyone trying to protect what he could. Tannenbaum, who also worked for the SD, was given a small apartment in the barracks for himself, his wife, their twins, and their maid. This is why Tannenbaum felt he was different from everyone else; he was protected, he thought, by the German commander he worked for.

  But not Heniek. Heniek wasn’t protected. Or not enough.

  He came to me one day in the kitchen. He took me over to the corner and stood with his back to the others in the room. I was happy to see him, of course; I always was. But it made me nervous to be taken away from my work like this. I didn’t know what he wanted. And what if someone saw?

  He reached into his pocket and pulled something out for me to take. It was a small packet of money. He said he wanted me to have it. But why should he want me to hold his money? Why shouldn’t he keep it himself? Why did he think it would be safer with me?

  “No,” I told him. “I don’t want to hold this money; you keep it.”

  “It’s not to hold, Maniusia; it’s to keep. The money is for you. It’s a gift, for whenever you will need it.”

  I continued to resist, but he became insistent: “You must take this, Maniusia. Maybe it will help you.”

  He was holding my hands, looking at me with his sweet love, imploring me to take his money, as if my taking it might give him some assurance that I would manage, that this young girl he had tried to rescue could still be saved even if he could not.

  He must have had some premonition. The gift was his way of saying good-bye.