Two Rings

by Millie Werber

  So they weren’t intent on murdering every one of us on that march; they were content to let die those who fell from exhaustion; they were content to kill outright those who could no longer bear the ordeal. But still, why the wagon? Why seduce us with the offer of comfort only to turn that offer into a means of murder? To this day, I cannot comprehend the reason for that wagon.

  There were others, too, I know, others like Mr. Goldberg who went on the wagon. Nojich Tannenbaum, for example. Though with him it was different, for he didn’t go himself on the wagon; he put his children there.

  Tannenbaum was the informer, the one who boasted that he and his family would survive the war on an island of safety while all around them everything would be burning. He had such confidence, this Tannenbaum; he was so sure that the Germans would protect him for his services to them. Tannenbaum thought he was safe from what was happening to all the other Jews. But he was made to go on that march, too; he was sent to Auschwitz, just like the rest of us.

  Tannenbaum walked along in the heat with his family. His twin girls were maybe two or three years old at the time, too young to walk on their own. So Tannenbaum carried one of them on his shoulders, and the maid carried the other one. And I suppose it got too hard for him, carrying his child all that distance. So he told the maid—her last name was Helfand, I remember; she was a Jew, too, a girl from our town—he told her to put the child she carried down on the wagon and he would put the other one down, too. And that’s what they did: They put the two little girls on the wagon.

  I didn’t get to see what happened after that—if the little girls cried as their father left them. Perhaps they thought they were being treated to something special, to ride along on a wagon while everyone else had to walk. What did he say to them as he put them down? What could he possibly have said? I don’t know. I didn’t see. Nor did I see what happened with his wife, if she went crazy in anger or fright, if he had to calm her or try somehow to justify what he had done. Had she concurred with this plan? Had she agreed to his putting their children on that wagon?

  There were too many horrors happening to think of these things, to consider the weight, the meaning of these things. Of a boy shot for thirst, of a father giving up his babies to die. A girl I knew, Luba Lastman, I saw run off into the high wheat fields, hoping to escape, I assume. She was the daughter of the family who owned the apartment building we lived in on Wolnosc Street. She was maybe twenty years old, young and strong; she must have thought she could outrun the soldiers. But the Germans followed her in with their dogs, sniffing, barking, straining at their leashes. I heard the shot in the near distance.

  And we just kept walking, everyone in his own world, everyone with his own troubles, everyone under the flaming sun.

  For me, it was my thighs. Walking in that impossible, scorching heat. I had taken off my blouse and sweater early on. I wasn’t going to escape—nobody could escape—so what need did I have for civilian clothes? But even just with the disheveled dress I wore, the heat was unbearable. As I was walking, with the sweat and the dirt, my thighs rubbed one against the other. With every step, they rubbed back and forth, catching against the sweat. All those steps, all those kilometers. Soon the rubbing raised sores between my legs, and the sores soon opened and bled. And there was nothing to do, nothing to ease the pain. I had just to keep walking, in that heat, with no water, my feet aching, my legs bleeding. My body pulled to the earth by the weight of its own fatigue.

  So when was this? Still the second day, perhaps. Something broke in me, broke off in my brain and vanished. A will, perhaps, a determination to move forward, to get to the next place, the next stage of whatever path I was on. At some point, this no longer existed for me. And in its place, the question: Why go on? For what? To where? I couldn’t go on anymore; I couldn’t walk anymore in so much pain. The heat and the thirst and the searing fire between my legs—it was too much. I was done. I gave up. I was content to climb onto the wagon.

  Where was my family? Mima and Feter and my father? I don’t think I saw them; in any event, I wasn’t aware of them. I don’t think they knew what I was doing; I have to believe they would have tried to stop me.

  It was simple, really. I turned around and started to walk back, against the flow of the hundreds of people walking behind me. No one minded me, no one asked why I was walking in the wrong direction. They realized, they didn’t realize—who knows? Everyone was consumed in his own misery, as I was consumed in mine.

  I reached the wagon. It was a relief to me, that wagon. A place to rest, a place to find an end to the torture down my legs. Not a place of death, no, just the opposite. The wagon was respite, an end to the ordeal of walking. It was where the pain would stop, where the bright lightning down my legs would cease. I craved that wagon more than I had craved anything in my life. It was my sole focus, the concentrated point of all my energy, to climb onto that wagon and find my rest.

  I lay my hands on the wooden boards, taking a step or two in time with the wagon’s movement so I could hoist myself up. No thinking now, no reflection. Walking in time with the movement of the wheels, with the clopping of the horses’ hooves, myself synchronized with the wagon and about to get on.

  And then, under my arms, other arms holding me. Hands in my armpits holding me firmly and pulling me back, dragging me away from the wagon.

  The wagon moved forward; I dimly watched it go.

  Two people kept me from death; I had no idea who they were.

  Did I faint at that point? Collapse into the support of whoever was holding me upright? I remember two young men on either side of me; I remember them holding me, drawing me forward, back into that mass of people traipsing along on an endless road.

  What followed is indistinct to me, a memory muffled in an emptiness that didn’t go away. I had been brought back from the edge, but I have no sense, even now, that I was grateful for the effort. I had given up, and even in my return, I remained as I was, drained of all effort, spent, exhausted, done.

  I remember Mima scolding me, but it was like calling out into a void, a voice without resonance, to no avail. Before us, we simply had more of the same—more heat, more thirst, more of the march. There was nothing to be done but follow along with everyone else.

  After one hundred kilometers, we reached the town of Tomaszów. The Germans separated the men from the women—the men were taken down the road to a building that looked like a run-down factory; the women were pushed into an abandoned warehouse.

  We had heard rumors about the gas. Nothing was certain, but we had heard that there were places like Treblinka, where the Germans were sending Jews to be gassed to death. So when the women saw their men herded into this factory, they thought this was it, this was the place where their husbands and brothers, their fathers and their sons, were going to die. The men would be shoved into this building, and the gas would be turned on, and they would be forced to suck in the poisoned air. It was, in the end, just an abandoned building, but the women didn’t know that then.

  So they began to scream.

  Women exhausted, women on the verge of collapse, were suddenly transformed, erupting with an energy all but absent moments before. Shrieking, crying, “Where are you taking them? What is happening to my husband?” Calling out, wild-eyed, as we were driven into this warehouse, some hundreds of women pushed into this cavernous building. After the torment of the march came the nightmare of women watching their men and boys being sent to what the women thought was their death.

  And all around us, the Germans, with their guns and their dogs.

  We were pushed inside; then the Germans left and locked the doors behind them.

  The warehouse was windowless, dark, and it smelled stale. We sat down wherever we could—on the floor, on benches—it didn’t matter. We had marched for days; we were locked in an airless and barren place with guards standing outside the doors; we didn’t know what was going to happen to us or what was happening even now to our men. But we were being allowed to re
st. That, at least, was a gift.

  Then came the lice. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, an invasion like the plagues in Egypt. All at once, everyone was up and shrieking, frantically tearing at their skin. The lice were all over us, swarming about our heads and over our bodies. I remember jumping wildly, trying in vain to push them off, to swipe them down and off of me. Nothing worked. The place was infested, and soon so were we.

  We went to sleep that night, our bodies alive with insects. It would take the Entlaussung—the “delousing”—of Auschwitz to rid ourselves of the vermin.

  When I was growing up in Radom—before the ghetto, before the war—I used to walk to school every day with another girl, Mila Rosenbaum. I would stop by her apartment on my way and wait for her to collect her things so we could go off together. She was the youngest in a large family with many brothers and sisters. The next child up was a boy named Heniek; there were older siblings, too, but I didn’t know them as well, because they were so much older than I. One, I remembered, Leon, worked at the factory in Radom.

  Mila and Heniek both survived the war; Mila settled in Israel, Heniek in Toronto. Jack and I kept in touch with them both. Once, many years after the war, Jack and I were visiting Heniek in Toronto—for a bar mitzvah, I think, or perhaps for someone’s wedding. We sat in his living room, talking about this and that, nothing special, when one of Heniek’s brothers, Leon Rosenbaum, came over to me and asked if I remembered him. Yes, I said, of course I did. He was one of Mila’s older brothers; I remembered him from their apartment when I used to wait for Mila on the way to school, and from the factory, too, during the war; I remember he worked at the kuznia. But this was not what he was talking about. “Don’t you remember,” Leon asked me, “that time on the march to Tomaszów? That time when I pulled you away from the wagon?”

  Unbelievable. In all those years, I never knew who it was who had put his hands under my arms to keep me from that wagon. During all those years of friendship with Heniek, I had no idea it was his brother who had kept me that day from death.

  Leon then told me who the other boy was, but I didn’t write down his name and I don’t remember it now. I wish I could name him.

  I never thought much of my own stories. I don’t think it ever even came up with Heniek, that story about the wagon. We were all survivors and everyone had stories; everyone had private horrors and near escapes from death. We talked about the war all the time—even today, we talk about it endlessly among ourselves. But it’s never a presentation, a detailed exposition, like, “Here, I’m going to tell you a story about what happened to me.”

  So I never mentioned to Heniek what had happened on the march, and I never wrote down the name of the other boy who had pulled me from that wagon. But at least I got to know about Leon; at least I got to thank Leon, directly, for what he had done.

  10

  SOMEHOW—ODDLY, PERHAPS—IT’S THE BOOTS THAT MATTER most. Maybe it’s because of those cursed clogs I was given in their place, which tore at my feet and made them bleed. Or maybe it’s because the boots were from home, a remnant of Radom taken from me. Perhaps. All I know is that when I got to Auschwitz and I was made to undress, I had to give up my boots—soft, brown leather, lace-up boots that came up high on my calves. I had to take them off and throw them onto an enormous heap of footwear—shoes and boots, all worn and rough, piling up in an ever-growing mound, the plunder of war. Seeing that vast and growing pile, I knew that whatever was going to befall me in this place, I was never going to see my boots again; I was never going to get my boots back. That was terrible to me, an indecency, to be bereft of my own boots.

  The rolling doors of the metal boxcar slide open, and I have a brief moment of relief, almost of hope. I have heard rumors about Auschwitz, vague suspicions about it being a death camp, about people being forced to breathe poisoned gas, and the few days I have spent on the train from Tomaszów to Auschwitz have made these rumors seem real. Has it been two days? Three? No food or water, the car crowded so densely there was no place to crouch, the air rank with the smell of urine and feces steaming in the sweltering heat. It felt like death inside that train; it felt as if we were riding that train toward death. I prayed to a God I barely believed in that at my death, I would not feel pain.

  When the doors slide open, everyone comes pouring out. Hundreds of us, the withered along with the dead, spewed out at once from fetid cars. Dogs are barking, soldiers shouting orders I can’t understand, but there, above the gates, I read the words wrought in metal that confirm my uncle’s teaching: Arbeit macht frei. I don’t know German well, but the phrase is close enough to Yiddish for me to understand: Work makes you free. This is what Feter routinely says, or close enough, anyway. If you work, you will survive. This is why I went to the factory in the first place; this is why I grudgingly consented to return there after going back to the ghetto and getting the feather blanket. For years already, everyone has been desperate to find work, and now here we are, the surviving ammunition workers from Radom, come into the fresh air after unendurable days in a closed car, come to a new camp to work for the war.

  But my minute of hope ends nearly before it has begun. Men in uniform are coming at us with hard rubber batons, jabbing people in the gut, whacking at our backs, barking at us orders to separate—men here, women over there. Everyone suddenly is frantic, not knowing what is unfolding in our midst. Mima and I watch Feter, Moishele, and my father being pushed along into the mass of men hustled away from us.

  Mima calls out, “Szrul! Take care of our son!”

  Now it is just the women. The selection begins—to the right, to the left. Families further torn apart. I see a friend of mine, Hilda Schwartz, furiously clutching at her mother. The guards are pulling her mother away, rough-handling her, beating both of them with their sticks. Hilda doesn’t want to let go; she’s in a rage, crying, clawing at her mother’s dress, holding on like someone over the edge of a cliff, desperate to keep her grip on solid earth, desperate not to fall into the emptiness beneath. And the guards, the soldiers—whoever they are, the Germans—they’re pounding at them, mother and daughter both, as Hilda vainly tries to hold on.

  (The fierceness of that love! How unrelenting, how heroic, and no less for its futility. A daughter’s true devotion; I admire that so.)

  Hilda’s mother is dragged away.

  The place is all chaos. Wailing children are shoved next to bewildered women not their mothers to try, futilely, to calm them, to quiet them down. The Germans want to kill us, it seems, but they don’t want to deal with our screams. The little boy, Shulem Szpitalnik, goes like this, paired off with a woman he’s never seen before.

  Shulem Szpitalnik. That wasn’t his real name; it’s the name we gave because he never told us his own.

  It was in Radom during the previous spring, and I was returning with the women to the barracks from my shift at the factory. I noticed a sad-faced boy walking alone and aimlessly. He was maybe five or six years old and looked utterly bewildered to be wandering all by himself. I took his hand and gently guided him into the row of women walking back. He came along easily, quietly, sandwiched between me and Mima, grateful, it seemed, to be led.

  When we got back to the barracks, all the women crowded around.

  “What’s your name, little boy?” “Where’s your mother?”

  We wanted to know where he came from and what he was doing out on the streets all alone. But he wouldn’t answer us; he didn’t say a word.

  Someone thought maybe he was deaf; maybe he wasn’t answering us because he couldn’t hear our questions. So she threw a shoe down hard against the floor to make a big noise and see if he would react. He did—he startled at the sound, but still he didn’t say anything. He looked more resolute than scared, content to be indoors with a group of women hovering about him, but determined not to speak. Perhaps, we thought, he was obeying a lesson his mother taught him; perhaps his mother had told him never to talk to people he didn’t know.

  In all the m
onths he was with us, we never found out anything about this boy—his name, his age, where he came from, or how he wound up walking alone on the streets. He never said a word to any of us. But we took him in and cared for him, as best we could, during the time we had left in Radom. We fed him from our bits of bread and broth, and we gave him a name that he eventually responded to. He hid himself at night in the barracks that served as a kind of clinic. In Yiddish, the word for “hospital” is spitual, so we called him Shulem Szpitalnik, the peaceable boy who hid in a hospital. The name was more than a way to call out to him; it was a way to hold him in our hearts.

  I so admired this boy. He never complained and he never cried. And he was smart, too: He seemed always to know without being told when it was safe for him to be seen and when he needed to disappear. During the appels, for example, he knew that he mustn’t be spotted when we were being counted in the evenings after work. When the appel was disbanded, he’d suddenly reappear in the barracks and come to us for a sip of soup. We were hungry all the time, with not enough food for ourselves, but we gave to him, anyway, because he was young and he was helpless, and offering him bits of our food, offering him what small protection we could, must have in some small way made us feel human.

  He walked with us on the march to Tomaszów—one hundred kilometers, and he didn’t give up. And he rode with us on the train to Auschwitz. All alone and with no one he would speak to.