Two Rings

by Millie Werber

  The Germans seemed not to care. Now that the workers from the other kitchen took over the work in ours, I was given a job back in the munitions factory, lifting and cutting long and heavy steel bars. The job was too hard for me—I was too small to be able to maneuver the bars effectively—and somehow, though I don’t remember how, I was able to use the money Heniek had given me to get transferred to another part of the factory—it was called the montage—where I put together some of the pieces that made up revolvers. It seemed not to matter to the Germans that I had escaped the oblava. After that one day, they didn’t send anyone to come looking for me.

  But it mattered to Chiel Friedman. He resented it, resented that I had managed to elude him. I think he had wanted to show the Germans how good he was at his policing job, to show them that he could ferret out the young girl who tried to avoid capture. So it angered him that he was unable to do this, that a mere girl had won. He never said anything to me about it, but whenever I saw him after that in the KL compound, he would stare at me with an intensity that frightened me, a ferocity that said, “I know who you are. I know how to harm you.” I would look away, pretending not to have seen him, not to have noticed the menace in his eyes.

  Friedman was the one who had slapped my uncle and had told him that he was to be called “Commander,” to distinguish himself from everyone else. He was the one to whom my uncle would say, when they were liberated together from Dachau, “For me the war has ended, but for you it has just begun.”

  So it was for Friedman. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him after the war. He went to Garmisch-Partenkirchen along with the many other Radomers, but people didn’t want to know him. People had so many things against him, he was afraid even to leave his house.

  Eventually—and reluctantly—he married a woman he thought beneath him. Like most of the Jewish police, Friedman had his matura. He was intelligent, educated; he came from a family rich enough to send him to school. Before the war, he would have been considered a good catch. But this woman he married was prost—common, vulgar; she came from a lowly family, barely more than peasants. She was strongly built and burly, like someone made for physical labor. People said she looked like a cow. In Poland, before the war, she might have been his maid.

  Friedman married her—Chava was her name—but only because he saw that he was a lost man, that he had no chance in Germany. I think he believed that at some point, the Jews might even kill him. Chava had family in Canada, and she proposed to him that if he married her, he could go to Canada with her and start over, away from the Radomers who reviled him. He was reluctant, but he was desperate: Chava offered a way out.

  Here is the amazing part. When he married Chava, this woman he didn’t love, this woman he believed was so much beneath him, he actually invited Jack and me to the wedding. Jack, it turned out, was a cousin of his, and Friedman had no other family to invite.

  Had Friedman forgotten what he had done to me? How he had searched for me and cursed me as the rats ran over my face?

  We declined the invitation.

  Years later, he came to my house. It was probably the 1970s by then. Jack and I had become close to his sister, Luba, and once, when she was visiting from Israel, she asked if her brother could meet her at our house in New York. Luba had not seen him at all in the decades since the war. She never talked about him with us, and we never asked her what she knew about the things he had done. I supposed she asked us to meet him in our house because she wanted to see him somewhere where their own conversation might be moderated by others around. Chiel (as we called him by then) flew in from Toronto, and we offered to pick him up from the airport and bring him over for a couple of hours so he and Luba could talk. Mima and Feter were living next to us at that time in Jackson Heights, and I kept from them the news that Chiel was coming—Feter would never have permitted it; he never would have sanctioned Chiel’s stepping into my house.

  I have to say, even after everything, I felt sorry for him: He suffered so much—from fear, maybe, or from guilt, I don’t know. When Jack and I met him at the airport, I could see that he was looking around, checking all about him to see if anyone was out to get him. He was in New York, a city of millions, and yet he was afraid that some Radomer might be lurking somewhere in Idyllwild Airport, waiting in a corner to pounce on him.

  He came to the house, sat in my living room, and spent two hours complaining. How he was being so badly mistreated by the Radomers, how people were exaggerating the things he had done, telling lies about his past. What had he ever done that was so bad? That deserved such treatment? And who, after the war, he wanted to know, had done so much for someone else?

  It was true, that part. Chiel had been married before the war—his wife and son both died in Auschwitz—and this woman, Chiel’s first wife, had a brother who had paid a Polish family to take in his young daughter during the war. But the father, Chiel’s brother-in-law, didn’t survive, and after Chiel came to Canada, he spent a lot of effort—and I’m sure a lot of money—tracking down this girl in Poland. At first, the little girl didn’t want to go with him—she had been raised Catholic by people she thought of as her parents—but she did eventually agree to go, provided that Chiel would promise to take care of her Polish family. He sent a sewing machine to the little girl’s “sister,” and he sent monthly packages to her “parents.”

  Chiel took in his brother-in-law’s daughter and raised her as his own. Yes, this is true. But why did he do this thing? He claimed it was proof of his goodness, that only a good man would have gone to such trouble for a child not his own. But I think he did it for himself, to make himself feel better about whatever he had done during the war. I don’t even think he was trying to atone, because that would have meant coming to terms with his past; that would have required some inner reckoning, some recognition that he had done wrong during the war. I don’t think Chiel was ever capable of that kind of self-reflection or self-knowledge. His habit was to make excuses for himself: He had been afraid for his life; he had wanted to protect his wife and his son. Of course, he never said these things—not to me, not to Jack. I don’t think he would have said them to anyone. But I believe he said them to himself, at night, perhaps, when maybe it would have been hard to fall asleep. Then maybe he would remind himself, again and again, that he had raised his niece as his own, which surely proved that he was a good man, after all. Wrapping himself in half-truths, trying to bring comfort to his quiet hours, to bring calm to his conscience at night.

  All of us, I suppose, tell ourselves stories about our lives, stories that make it easier to live with ourselves and the choices we have made. If you tell yourself a story long enough and often enough, you might in fact come to believe it: “I didn’t have a choice. I was only trying to protect my family. And look, I raised this child.” You might even come to substitute the good version of yourself for the truer but more insidious one. But I don’t believe that in a sane mind, in a sane man, that substitution can ever be complete; some part of you must always know the cruelty at your core. And that must be hell.

  Though I could never soften to Chiel, I believe I eventually forgave him. It was so clear to me that he was living in a jail after the war. That jail was built by the Radomers, to be sure, but all his self-justifications, all his storytelling—these were part of his jail, too. He wanted to turn his back on the truth of his past in order to find some peace for himself in the present. To the day he died, I don’t think he found it.

  9

  I REMEMBER ALMOST NOTHING ABOUT MY LAST FIVE OR SIX months in the KL at Radom. After the ruin of winter, the earthquakes and aftershocks, what was left? Darkness, maybe; a sense of nothingness. My life had exploded in the tumult of those days, though surely I shouldn’t here be using terms drawn from the natural world to describe them. These weren’t natural disasters, not natural events even in the mystifying course of human history. Those several weeks during the winter of 1943–1944 were, for me at least, an eruption of the worst humankind was
capable of; they tore from me any sense I may have had that life was for living, that life held in store riches and promise and pleasure. Having lost Heniek—and because of a Jew, no less—I felt I had lost everything. It felt almost an affliction to live, an emptiness to be endured.

  Still, I must remember Zosia; I must remember Katz. And Szlamek, too, and Feter, who told me where to hide. I must remember their simple goodness when my own life was imperiled, for their goodness was true, too, flickering in the dark.

  In the late spring and summer of 1944, rumors began circulating that the Russians were advancing from the east. A man who worked with us in the factory but somehow had connections outside it—maybe he knew a Pole still living a relatively normal life in Radom—fed us information. He said the Americans had landed in France and that he was certain they would break through Germany’s forces in Western Europe. The Russians, he told us, were already in Poland, now just thirty kilometers from Radom.

  We didn’t dare to hope, but this was joyous news. We thought the Russians would be our saviors. We prayed for their advance, for their imminent arrival to liberate us. The Germans were scared; they wanted out.

  They decided to empty the camp.

  It was the end of July, almost exactly two years since I had begun working at the factory. Two thousand men and nearly five hundred women were all now to be taken out, made to leave, made to go . . . where? We didn’t know. We knew only that we had to leave Radom. We were going to be made to walk.

  Szlamek found me and advised me, again, to put on my civilian clothes under my striped uniform. He must have been still thinking of escape; he must have been thinking that the walk—wherever we were walking—would offer opportunities to run.

  I put on what I had—a sweater, I remember, maybe a blouse. We collected whatever we still had from the ghetto and could secretly carry. Szlamek’s mother wore a pocketed belt under her dress; I didn’t know then what she kept in it. Before she moved to the factory, Mima had opened a hollow space in the heel of one of her shoes; she then sealed in it a small ring of hers. I had the little pocket sewn into my panties; to the two gold wedding bands, I now added my only other treasure—the picture of me and Heniek.

  Then we left. Every Jew who was still in Radom—the factory workers, those who had worked in the shops taken over by the Germans, the informers, the police—every Jew was gathered together to begin a march to we-didn’t-know-where.

  In my whole life, I had been outside of Radom only once, when Mama brought me along with her to a spa in Busko-Zdrój, where she was treated for rheumatism. Other than that—and my little journey to Jedlińsk—everything else was Radom, the city of my family for generations. I remember in the ghetto seeing my grandfather cry for fear of a deportation that would keep him from having a proper Jewish burial in Radom. I think perhaps even more than dying, he feared not having his bones rest in Radom’s Jewish cemetery.

  The factory, too, and the whole complex of the KL—they were known, familiar worlds by this time as well. Even the dangers were known—the factory machinery, the guards with their guns, the roundups, and the hunger and the disease and all the rest. I’d been working for two years already; I knew the world I was made to live in. Yet now we were to be made to leave. We were to be made to walk. We didn’t know for how long, or for what purpose. We were walking into the unknown.

  It was July 26, 1944, and it was blazing hot. The light shuddered in visible, heaving waves; the air had a thickness to it, a dampness and density that settled on the skin and clung to it like wet wool.

  I wore my blouse and sweater under my camp uniform.

  We were given nothing for the journey—no food, no water. Just a massive column of people: men and women and a small number of young boys, too, walking closely together, too closely, I suspect, for the heat, looking about, looking down, all afraid, all exhausted before we even began, past the barbed-wire gates, and out onto the road. At first, I remember, I walked near Mima and Feter; perhaps my father was with us, too. I don’t remember anyone speaking, or conversations of any kind.

  The German soldiers walked on either side of the road. They carried guns and held dogs on leashes.

  For three days, we walked in the ferocious summer heat. Perhaps we walked for four days; I don’t know. One loses a sense of time when all the world contracts into the single project of taking yet another step, step after step, for kilometers on end. And the heat all around, the heat burning down from the heavens and rising up in waves from under the road. All the world transformed into an oven, a terrific furnace, and all of us enveloped in it, burning in its belly, with no one to offer us relief.

  We dragged ourselves along in that heat, people eventually stripping off whatever clothes they had put on under their camp uniforms. It was too hot for extra clothes, too hot to be walking, each step along the hard surface a new affliction in one’s legs. I know we walked close to one hundred kilometers, from Radom east, and slightly north, to Tomaszów Mazowiecki. At night, we lay in the wheat fields that lined the road, and the pointed tips of the harvested stalks pricked our skin as we sank into dreamless sleep.

  On the second day of the march, or perhaps the third—I don’t remember, only that I had been walking forever in the unrelenting anger of that heat—we came upon a small village with ramshackle houses set apart from each other by patches of yard and fences built from splintered wood. An odd quiet suffused the place—no wagons on the road making way for the thousands marching through, no one hammering on a roof, no children playing in a yard. Everyone was inside, protected, hidden in safety—except for a single woman I saw standing at the threshold of her house, staring blankly at us, as we dragged ourselves along in the heat.

  Would no one offer us any help? No one with a spoonful of water? A drop of mercy for the Jews passing by?

  A frightful thought came to me then—that I was absolutely alone, even amid the many hundreds of others walking alongside me, alone and without consequence in the world. That no one would want to protect me. That there was no safety left anywhere. I was alone and exposed on the open road.

  Was this when it started? A thought barely conscious, a question unformed, simmering in my blood: Why go on?

  A young boy was walking somewhat ahead of me. I didn’t know him; I didn’t remember having ever seen him in the area of the barracks, but I remember noticing that he was walking by himself, no mother with an arm around him hurrying him along, no father holding his hand. Seeing him made me wonder about another motherless boy I knew, a boy we called Shulem Szpitalnik, whom I and several others had taken care of in the barracks. I didn’t see Shulem Szpitalnik at all on the march, and I wouldn’t see him again until we arrived at Auschwitz.

  But here was this other boy walking ahead of me. He knelt down by a puddle at the side of the road. Where did this puddle come from, I wonder? Certainly, there had been no rain. Perhaps someone had dumped a pail of dirty water from a house. Perhaps some water had splashed out of a bucket as someone was returning home from a nearby well. A puddle of dirty water—a miniature oasis in the summer heat. The boy knelt down and bent his head to the ground to take a sip. To lap up a drop of water. But this was not permitted; we were not allowed to linger in our march, even for a moment. Did he know this? I wondered. Did he know the cost of his desire for relief?

  The boy knelt down and bent his body to the ground. A German guard came up to him, stood over him, impassively watching the boy lick the water. He took his gun from its holster, held it out before him, and then, without reprimand, without a word of any kind, the soldier shot the boy in the back of the head. The boy fell over onto his side. No one made a motion toward him. No one cried out or ran to pick up his body. We all just walked on, under the blazing sun.

  At the back of the march, there was a horse-drawn wagon. It was a simple enough contraption, just a horse attached by harness to a wooden cart. A soldier sat on a plank above the cart and drove the wagon on. Several others walked alongside. This wagon, we were told, wa
s provided for our comfort: If any of us felt tired, if we felt we could walk no longer, we were welcome to drop to the back of the march and ride on the wagon.

  Mr. Goldberg was the first to get on. He was an older man, maybe sixty or more. My family knew him a little from Radom. He was wealthy before the war and generous, too: I know he had money with him in the KL; I heard that he was able to buy bread from the Poles and that he shared it with others in his barracks.

  To share your bread when you yourself are starving—this is an extraordinary thing. It’s important to consider this.

  Mr. Goldberg got on the wagon. He was old, he was exhausted, and the heat was too much to bear. He needed a rest, a moment of respite. So he got on the wagon.

  The soldier flicked the reins and turned the horse off the road. I watched the wagon head into the woods; I remember wondering why they would be taking a detour. Then I heard a single shot. Moments later, the wagon returned, empty.

  I am trying to figure this out, if there is some logic here. Of course, nothing like this occurred to me then, but now, in my reflection, in my telling this little story, I have to wonder about the logic of that wagon. What idea underlies an order instructing soldiers to shoot on the spot anyone who bends down to lap up a tongueful of dirty water from the road, but then also orchestrates an elaborate farce about offered aid, about a free ride on a wagon, only to turn that wagon into a vehicle of death? The Germans were so meticulous about things. They kept records of everything. There’s a book detailing the minutiae of the Radom deportations; they calculated exactly how many calories the Jewish workers in the factory should consume in a day. So in what meticulous plan did that wagon play a part? As much as they wanted to exterminate us, as much as by this time they had put into effect their Final Solution, still they needed workers. Even at Auschwitz, we were known as the “ammunition workers,” and every so often, some number of us would be selected and taken away to an armaments factory in Germany to work, as I eventually would be, in the winter of 1944–1945. They wanted to kill us all, I suppose, but still leave themselves just enough Jews to provide the slave labor they needed to keep the war machine alive.