He took off his wedding ring and placed it in my palm.
We said nothing to each other about what any of this meant.
I took Heniek’s money and I took his ring.
I used the money not long thereafter. The rings—Heniek’s and mine both—I tied together with some thread, and later that night, I put them away in a little pocket my mother had sewn into my cloth panties. I kept them there, in my panties, until the day I arrived at Auschwitz.
Several days later, the SD came to take Heniek and the other factory policemen away. Their families, too. I was maybe twenty feet from Heniek when they grabbed him on the grounds of the KL, but I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t approach him; I couldn’t say good-bye. I stood twenty feet away from my husband and watched the SD lead him and the other factory police out the gates of the Konzentrationslager.
It was wintertime, and it was very cold.
Norembursky was standing there, too, watching with what looked like satisfaction as the policemen were taken away. As he passed, Heniek turned, glared at Norembursky hard in the eyes, and spoke. I heard his words distinctly; I can recite them: “Duvid,” he said, “I know this is your doing. I know this is because of you.” Norembursky just stood there, impassive, unmoved. He had gotten his way, no matter the cost.
What might Norembursky have felt then? What went through his mind when Heniek accused him so? They had been at school together. They had known each other for years. Did it cost Norembursky in any way to let Heniek die as he did? Did part of him, even a little bit, die, too? Part of his humanity, part of his soul? Or was it simply a victory for him to have taken someone’s place? Was there only triumph now in this man’s heart, that he had managed to survive?
I never saw Heniek again, and I was never able to find out what happened to him, where the Germans took him when they left the compound. Did they shoot him right there, in the streets outside the KL grounds? Did he get sent to a camp to be worked to death? To Auschwitz, perhaps, or to Treblinka? Perhaps he starved to death. Perhaps he was gassed.
Was he beaten?
Did he suffer? Did my Heniek suffer?
Heniek was my first love. For sixty years, I was married to Jack and I loved him. Jack was my everything—my strength, my purpose, my partner in life. But Heniek was my first love. There was nothing normal about our love—we courted under the eyes of our enemies; we married as a means of escape. We were husband and wife for only a few months; we never had a home, never dreamed of a family. Nothing normal, but maybe for all that, nothing ordinary. I was sixteen and in love with a charming and beautiful man, a man who had chosen me out of hundreds of women, a man who made me feel vibrant and alive in the midst of war. I was alone and frightened in a dangerous place, and Heniek entered my life to protect me and love me and teach me the fullness of pleasure. He was the center of my life. His love woke me in the morning, sustained me during the hours of empty labor, and sent me to sleep at night. He cared for me and looked out for my needs. He got me into the kitchen, where I could sit during my shifts, where I didn’t have to listen all day to the screech of the drilling machines, where I could occasionally sneak a slice of potato. He spoke to me with the knowing calm of a mature man, a man I could admire without restraint. Heniek loved me with a sweet and assured warmth that I had never known before, and with all the intensity of a young girl awakening into adulthood, I loved him back. I loved him. I did.
I loved Heniek Greenspan. And Duvid Norembursky took him away.
I want to think for a moment about the weight of judgment. Of who deserves to be judged, of who has the right to act as judge. I am not speaking here of public trials, of the court of public opinion, even of the judgments laid down by history. I am thinking of the judgments that reign in one’s own heart, that prompt humility or hatred, that make one grateful for a kindness or make one ache in the night for revenge.
I feel free to judge the Germans for what they did during the war. And I find I even feel some satisfaction in being able to accuse them of their crimes.
In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, I was invited to return to Lippstadt, where I had spent several months in another ammunitions factory we had been sent to from Auschwitz. Sometime in the 1980s, I think it was, a high school had been founded in Gütersloh, the neighboring town, for the city’s very top students. The Anne Frank School, it was called. The students had been doing a good-works project—cleaning up a dilapidated old Jewish cemetery in Lippstadt—and as they were cutting back the weeds, clearing out the overgrowth, they had come upon a gravestone they didn’t understand. The stone marked the grave of an infant who had died in 1945. This was odd, they thought, because the students had been taught that the last Jews had been evicted from the town by 1938; from 1938, they had been told, there were no Jews in Lippstadt. It was judenrein. So where had this child come from?
The students started researching their city’s wartime history and eventually discovered that Jews and Russian prisoners of war had been made to work at an ammunitions factory that existed there. The gravestone marked the burial of a Jewish couple’s baby who had died in 1945, just before the couple immigrated to Palestine. No one had ever told these students from the Anne Frank School—not their parents, not their grandparents—what had gone on in Lippstadt during the war, how prisoners were used as slaves to make weapons for the war. It had been erased from history. Until the gravestone of a Jewish baby brought that history to light.
The school decided to try to locate whomever they could who had worked in the factory. It took some doing, but they managed to find me and six or seven others. When they called me from Lippstadt inviting me to speak before the students during the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration, the school officials couldn’t have been nicer. Would I like to bring my family along? Of course, we will pay. Your son is coming and eats only kosher food? We will get him a private chef to prepare whatever he would like. Please, remember that it’s very cold and rainy here; don’t forget to pack galoshes. Galoshes! Can you imagine? A German worrying about me that I shouldn’t freeze or get my feet wet in the rain. I was dumbfounded.
Really, they were very kind, very solicitous.
When I spoke at the school, I wanted above all to make it clear that I wasn’t accusing them—the students and teachers. The students were just children, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old; the teachers were perhaps thirty or forty. All of them, of course, had been born after the war. But I did want them to think about their parents and their grandparents: I wanted them to ask their families what they had done.
“Look,” I said, “I didn’t come here to accuse you of anything. All of you are young, and I will not judge you. But if you want to hear the truth and not just learn what is written in the histories of this town, then ask your parents directly. Ask your fathers and your grandfathers: What were you doing then? Every German wants to say that he was fighting the Russians, that he wasn’t involved in this, he wasn’t a part of what was done to the Jews. But how could that be? Some of your grandparents were murderers. And not only your grandfathers—your grandmothers, too. The women could be the cruelest of all. Tell your grandparents that you want to know, that you are interested to know: What did they do, and what did they know during the war? Perhaps they will not tell you these things, but you should ask, because you should know who your grandparents were.”
This was so satisfying to me, saying these things directly to these young people. It was so good to speak what was in my heart, to not hide, to not dissemble to them, even despite their overwhelming generosity to me and my family. It was a cleansing of some kind. Oddly perhaps, the young German students and teachers to whom I spoke seemed fully open to what I had to say, eager even to hear a survivor bring testimony to the history of their city, a history that the city itself had previously wanted to erase. That impressed me deeply, and still does.
But then, what about the Jews? Am I to judge my own people in the same way? Jews were the victims, not the criminals. J
ack used to say that when history reflects on this time hundreds of years from now, it will be seen that, given everything, the Jews—as a whole, as a people—acted appropriately and generally with honor. That may well be true. But there were those among us who did unspeakable things to save themselves, to save their families—or tried to. Is there any justification for that? I am thinking here not of history, but of my own life: Am I supposed to forgive someone who damns others to save himself?
I have forgiven some; in my heart I have. I feel no hatred for my cousin Elkanah Morgan, whom I will speak about, or for Chiel Friedman, who had been my uncle’s friend. What these two men would do to me in the KL could easily have led to my death, but somehow I find that no enmity rises in me now at the mention of their names. But it is different with Duvid Norembursky. Though he was a Jew and thus surely in some way a victim, too, can I not raise my fist at his selfish cruelty? Can I not cry out at the horror of what he did? Of what he did to Heniek and the others? Of what he took from me?
Some years after the war, when Jack and I had settled in America, I did try to get some small justice, even to exact some small revenge against Norembursky and his wife. He didn’t deserve the life he got. He had killed Heniek to get it. Or, perhaps better, perhaps more honest: He had caused Heniek to be killed. Was there to be no consequence? Was that murder to make no sound? To drop silently into the same abyss that every other murder had? How powerless it feels to sustain a blow and be unable to fight back. It feels like suffocating, like the natural back-and-forth of breath suddenly is no more. It feels like nothingness.
Heniek was gone, and I could not make him come back. Who was there to love me now? Who was there to shelter me?
And there was more to come.
The next day, I was arrested as well.
6
I WAS IN THE KITCHEN, BACK AT WORK, AS I HAD TO BE. How could I be, I wonder? How could I sit again my on my little stool and peel my daily quota of potatoes after Heniek had been taken away? I had to do my work as if Heniek were still with me, as if he might walk into the kitchen to check on me, as if he still might meet me after my shift for a few private moments. He would do none of those things, but still I had to do my work. The factory, the kitchen—it was no different from the ghetto: Terrible things happened, and no one could stop to mourn. My life had ended, and yet still my life went on. I don’t know how that was possible.
I was in the kitchen, and my second cousin, Elkanah Morgan, came in. We called him Kunah. He had been a member of the ghetto police, and he had come with Norembursky and the others from the ghetto when they had replaced the factory police just a few days earlier. I had known Kunah for years, of course. He lived not far from my own home, and when I was young, before the war, I was sometimes permitted to go to his family’s apartment, not so much to visit him, but to spend some time with the wonderful thing he had built—a radio with earphones. This was a big deal in those days: Not everyone had a radio—we certainly didn’t—and the earphones added wonder to the invention. Not often, but occasionally, and when I could, I would go and sit and listen with my cousins to Polish songs playing on Kunah’s radio.
So when I saw Kunah enter the kitchen that day, I wasn’t frightened at all. He was my cousin; he would never do anything to hurt me, to put me in danger. But then he came over to me and said, “Come with me.” Simple. Just like that. “Come with me. I must take you because you are Greenspan.”
Greenspan was Heniek’s name, but mine was Drezner. There was no way to change my name legally when I got married. So although I was married to Heniek, I was still Mania Drezner, not Greenspan. Kunah knew this. But there was a girl named Greenspan—not related to Heniek—who was one of the girls Miller had chosen to work for him in the kuznia. She was several years older than I, and I knew that Miller had one day caught her kissing her boyfriend. I don’t know if Miller punished her for that. But after Norembursky reported Miller for having committed Rassenschande, the police were required to arrest all the girls who had been involved, dozens of them. And Greenspan was one, and she was arrested. Still, why arrest me, too? I wasn’t Greenspan, and I hadn’t—thank God—worked in the kuznia.
Perhaps Kunah, like so many of the police, wanted to do more for the Germans than he had been asked. He had on his list of people to arrest one girl named Greenspan. But he would outdo the list: He would bring them two. He wouldn’t listen to me.
“I am not Greenspan. You know this, Kunah. I am Drezner and have always been. I have nothing to do with this. Tell them you know that I didn’t work in the kuznia. I have nothing to do with them.”
But he was implacable. There was no convincing him. “Come,” he said, “you have to go.”
And I did. I always did as I was told. So my cousin took me out from the kitchen and led me to the gates of the KL compound, where twenty or so men and four or five women were nervously waiting. Kunah left me with these people, all of us silent and frightened and fidgeting in the cold. He walked away without saying anything to me—no explanation, no apology. Several other policemen were there, too. They told us to start walking and led us after maybe ten or fifteen minutes to a building none of us had ever been to before—the headquarters of the SS. This was where the Sicherheitsdienst was housed; this was where the Security Service tortured and executed suspected enemies of the Nazi regime; this, presumably, was where Duvid Norembursky had reported Miller’s crimes. People taken to this place did not return. It was a place where people were killed.
The officers of the SD wore black uniforms, and everyone was petrified of them.
We were led through the main floor of the building and then down a flight of stairs. It was dark in the stairwell, and it was hard to see the steps as we descended. It began to seem that we were no longer in a building at all but rather going down under the earth. It smelled like the earth—a musty smell of moisture and dirt—a smell fit for animals.
At the bottom of the stairs, down a little ways, there was a room, though “room” is not really the right word for this place. It was like a dungeon dug out from the ground: The floor was just packed earth; there were no windows. There was a small, dim bulb hanging from the ceiling. It was the jail of the SD.
We were perhaps twenty-five people in this room, this dungeon. Eight or ten of the group were those rounded up in Miller’s Rassenschande affair. The girl Greenspan was there—the one who had been caught kissing her boyfriend, the one on whose account Kunah had decided to arrest me.
Really, I was there because of her. I know this is not an entirely fair assessment: She had done nothing to cause my arrest—my arrest was through no fault of hers—but I was there because my cousin had brought me because I had the same name as hers. If she hadn’t been chosen by Miller, Kunah would never have taken me. But in this girl Greenspan’s mind, in her fear, in her desperation at what was surely about to ensue, the whole situation was the other way around.
“I’m here because of you!” she screamed. “You’re the one who got me here! You got me arrested!”
This was crazy, of course.
“No one knows me as Greenspan. There are no papers, no documents. I am Mania Drezner, as I have always been. I have nothing to do with this,” I kept protesting. But she wouldn’t let go of it; she wouldn’t listen to reason. She was just tormenting me with her accusations, unfounded, unreasonable, unending.
We were hours in that dungeon jail. It felt like years. Standing in the darkness, we could hear the screams from upstairs. Screams to make your bones sting. Screams that if there were a God, God would hear; if there were a God, God would make those screams stop.
No light. No food. No water. No rescue. No God.
The hours droned on.
They came in, the SS, the SD—I don’t know who they were. They came in and took us out, one at a time. One by one. And between their visits to our dungeon, only screams.
No light. No food. No water.
No bathrooms.
People had to go. People needed to u
rinate. But there was nowhere to go in that earthen dungeon, and people knew they could be shot for soiling the floor. We were petrified that our waste might make a noticeable stench that would get us killed.
An absurd fear befitting an absurd place: We were going to be killed anyway in this place, whether we relieved ourselves or not. But how to avoid urinating in jail now became our focus, the searing focal point of our agony and apprehension.
What the men did! I didn’t want to look; I didn’t want to see their desperation. The men tied their penises. They tore off strips from their shirts, pulled pieces of string from their pockets, to tie tourniquets around their penises so the urine couldn’t come out. They moaned in double distress, each man in his own private misery, trying to hold it in.
Then I, too, had to go. At first just a quiet pressure, a tingling almost, in my lower abdomen. I was used to this—we all were. During our shifts in the celownik, we weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom whenever we needed to. At the end of the first six-hour shift, we were given fifteen minutes: If we needed to go, that’s when we were allowed. But if we had to go earlier, then we just had to hold it—we had to wait until the end of the shift.
The body grows accustomed to its circumstance: I learned to hold it in, as we all did. The pressure would come, it would draw my attention, and then it would subside. At least for a time. When it returned, it would be more insistent, almost a bright spot, a pulsing knot of nerves deep inside my groin. But I learned to hold it in, in the factory, knowing that at some point, my six hours would be up.
It was different in the jail. The screaming upstairs, the shrieks of people I knew, of people who had been standing with me in that dankness just before. Me. I am next; they’re going to take me next; now is when I am going to die. And the people moaning beside me, suffering in their own extremities of body and spirit, privately, miserably.
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