Two Rings

by Millie Werber

  What a remarkable child he was. I so wanted him to survive.

  And now the selection. We’re being sorted out. To the left, to the right. To the camp, to the gas. Shulem Szpitalnik is shoved over to a woman he doesn’t know, and she now takes him hesitantly by the hand. And they go together, the two of them, hand in hand, to their death.

  Chaos. Frenzy. Fear.

  We are told to undress. Undress? In the open? With everyone around? For what? Why should we have to undress? We have been counted before; we have been lined up before, but never without clothes, never naked.

  We have things. Not much, but little things, little things we have brought with us, for memory’s sake, or for the sake of safety. We want to be able to hide these things.

  Szlamek Horowitz’s mother approaches me. She tells me that she is wearing under her dress a small belt made of cloth into which she has sewn little pockets. In the pockets, she has hidden away several diamonds. Perhaps she will be able to buy some bread with these stones; perhaps she will be able to buy her life. She asks me, Will I hide this belt for her? Will I hide her little diamonds? If I do, if I agree, she says, we will be partners: She will split the diamonds with me, and both of us will be able to buy some bread. Perhaps both of us will be able to buy our lives. I want to say yes; really, I do. But I can’t. I’m afraid. I know I can’t keep anything from the Germans; they will find out, surely, and instead of saving my life, the diamonds will be the end of it. I will be beaten; I will be killed. I cannot, I am sorry, I am too afraid.

  And where can we hide anything, anyway? We are being told to undress, to strip naked.

  I, too, have things to hide—my picture, my rings. But where will I hide them if I have to give up my underwear?

  I hear a man calling out a woman’s name.

  “Jadzia, Jadzia, come here!”

  The man is from Radom, already interned in Auschwitz, and he has come to meet this transport of Radomers to see if he can find anyone from his family—his mother or a sister, perhaps, maybe his wife. He doesn’t find anyone from his family, but he knows this woman, Jadzia, and he tells her he has something to give her. He has a pocket watch; he was hoping to give it to someone in his family, but now he doesn’t think he’ll ever find any of them. So he wants to give the watch to Jadzia; perhaps it will help her. It’s a gold watch in a case that opens up from either side. I’m sure it’s worth a lot of money. Jadzia takes the watch and returns to our group. Surrounded by women, she lifts the bottom of her dress and reaches underneath. She pushes the watch up into her vagina. High up. All the way in.

  “They will not search me there,” she says. “The watch will be safe in there.”

  Jadzia was right, as it turned out. When we were inspected later on, they checked between our fingers, between our toes, in our mouths. But not in our vaginas. We were spared this, I assume, not because of the degradation of an inspection there—the degradations were so many that day in Auschwitz—but because of the time it would take to inspect so many women in that particular way. There were many hundreds of women in the Tomaszów transport, and for the German commanders and their inmate officers, there was much to be done with us, and there was no time for lengthy inspections.

  Jadzia was able to keep her pocket watch, but later, when we were in the barracks, she was unable to get it out. Lying on the bunk—the prycza, it was called, rough wooden slats laid side to side, eight women crammed together on each prycza at night—she reached in, trying to get a firm hold. Then she pulled, gently at first, I suspect, but maybe then not so gently. It wouldn’t come out; it was stuck. She dug into her insides, she yanked at the fob, but nothing worked. Maybe she had swollen up; maybe the watch had gotten lodged on a bit of pelvic bone. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t come out. And it was terrible, she suffered so. Days and days, fishing around inside herself. She asked her best friend to try, and she did; others, too—other women from the barracks went between her legs, mucking around inside her for that watch. Nothing helped; no one could get it out. She got an infection, night after night screaming in pain. I don’t know how she got through the days. She cried out to us, just to kill her. She didn’t want to go to the revier, the so-called infirmary; she knew that no one came out from there. She preferred to die in the barracks, with her friends about her.

  “Just kill me,” she said. “I don’t care anymore. I cannot take this pain.”

  Perhaps this is odd: I don’t remember how Jadzia finally got the pocket watch out of herself—whether she managed to remove it herself or whether someone else did. What I remember is her torture, the price she paid for trying to give herself a little protection.

  Jadzia survived the war; I don’t know what happened to the watch.

  Mima also has a place for hiding things—her ankle boots, which for some reason she is allowed to keep. In the heel of one, she has sealed up her little gold ring. But she has a picture, too, of her children—of Chava, who has already been killed, and of Moishele, whom she has just seen taken away with Feter. More than anything, Mima wants to keep this picture, the faces of her children in black and white. So she takes off one of her shoes and gently tugs at the inner lining, carefully lifting the thin strip of leather from the undersole.

  Mima and Feter’s children, Chava and Moishele, in the photograph that Mima hid in her ankle boot

  I see what she is doing. I have a picture, too; I, too, want to keep this picture.

  “Mima, will you take my picture? Will you keep it for me?”

  “Of course, Maniusia, of course.”

  So she takes my treasured picture, sliding it with hers under the bottom lining of her shoe. And both pictures—one of two young children, the other of two young newlyweds—stay there, hidden in Mima’s shoe, slightly creased, all through the rest of the war.

  I have Mima’s picture of Chava and Moishele, framed, hanging on my wall; until now, I have kept my own picture to myself.

  But then the rings. What of my wedding rings? I want these, too; I want these especially. I have kept these rings hoping Heniek and I might one day be able to wear them again, hoping we might one day again be husband and wife. I know, I suppose, that Heniek is dead, that I will never see him again. But still I hope. How can I give up my hope if I cannot give up my longing? I want the rings so I can hold on to hope, so I can hold on to him, my husband, my Heniek.

  What am I to do? I cannot put the rings in the heel of Mima’s shoe—that space was sealed when the shoes were made. So where can I hide them?

  There is a woman among us, also named Jadzia, but a different woman from the first. Her name is Jadzia Fetman, and she’s from Warsaw, not Radom. She and her sister Carolla came to the Radom factory several months ago, and I’ve known her already for some time. She’s strong and fearless, even gruff in her manner, but she’s kind, too; I know that. I tell her about the rings. I tell her that I want to keep them, but I have no place to hide them. I realize I have to get rid of them; I tell Jadzia that I’m going to throw them down, in the dirt. I won’t have them, but at least the Germans won’t have them, either.

  And then, again, a kindness from nowhere, an unrequited goodness, an act of purity in a sullied place.

  “Mania. I will take the rings. I will hide them for you.”

  And she does. Jadzia takes my rings, and she reaches under her grimy striped dress, and she puts my wedding rings up into her vagina. And she keeps them there throughout that terrible day, my thin gold wedding rings, my treasures, hidden in the warmth of her insides.

  I don’t remember when Jadzia gave the rings back to me. Nor do I remember how I managed to keep them with me during my months in Auschwitz. My memories of Auschwitz—of the entire war, really—come only in pieces. Stray anecdotes, interrupted narratives, bits of conversation. I remember that I had these rings and didn’t know how I could keep them, and I remember the wondrous kindness of Jadzia to do something dangerous and indecent to help me. I know at some point I got the rings back. I have them still.

&n
bsp; We stand naked, hundreds of Radom women in the middle of an enormous compound. The place is teeming with naked women. What is happening to us, to be naked in so public a place? To be so completely exposed. The Germans are all about, with their dogs and their rubber batons, swiping at us at random. The camp guards—Jews even—are no better than their captors.

  When I was at Beis Yaakov, the Jewish grammar school for girls—it seems a lifetime ago; it seems some other world (for it is, it is)—I was taught how to be modest. My teacher was a beautiful and pious woman, and when she prayed in the corner of the room, her face turned to the wall, her body gently pitching forward and back in time with the rhythms of her soft chanting, she seemed so focused, so fervent in her quiet devotion, I was sure that she was speaking directly to God. My family, too, of course, but this woman most especially taught me modesty—that I should be covered, dresses below my knees, sleeves below my elbows, and this seemed right to me—though, of course, I never would have questioned it, anyway. It seemed right to me for a girl to be covered in this way. It was a sign of humility and decency to be modest in one’s dress.

  In Auschwitz, I am utterly exposed. I don’t know where to put my hands—there is too much of me for my meager hands to cover. My breasts, my bottom; the front of me, the back. Where to cast my eyes? I don’t want to look at anybody; I don’t want anybody to look at me. I want to evaporate; I want to dissolve into the air.

  We are taken to be shaved. We stand in line before a row of women, Jewish inmates they are, standing across from us with straight razors in their hands. Each in turn, we stand before them, and each one of us gets shaved. Everywhere. Our heads, under our arms, between our legs.

  “Arms up! Spread your legs!”

  Razors scraping against skin. Razors scratching, nicking the flesh. Little pellets of blood rise up on my stinging skin. I ask, timidly, tentatively, “Please, will you save some hair on my head?” I have always had such fine hair—baby hair, I call it. Silly, I suppose, to be concerned about so small a thing. Sillier still to think that my simple request might ever be granted. The woman grabs my hair in her fist, pulls hard, yanking up the skin of my scalp, and swipes her razor across my head. She cuts off my hair; she slices off a small piece of my scalp.

  In the Auschwitz museum—I visited there in 1987—there are rooms filled with the things the Germans confiscated from the Jews: thousands of suitcases, a storeroom of eyeglasses, shoes of every size, a mountain of human hair. All that hair, shaved from all those heads. And attached at the ends of those fragile strands, for a time, at any rate, little bits of scalp, shards of Jewish skin.

  Eventually my hair grew back, except for in that one place where my skin was shorn. The skin grew back, but never the hair.

  Next, the Entlaussung, the delousing.

  Again, we stand before Jewish inmates—hard, harsh women, willing to do such atrocious things.

  Again, “Arms up! Legs open!”

  They dunk dirty rags into buckets of some liquid—a disinfectant, a delousing agent. The woman before me lifts her rag dripping with the stuff. I am no one to her—a naked body without a history, without a name. I am no different from the hundreds—surely the thousands—who have stood before her. Today, yesterday, last week, last year. This woman works blindly at her station as I worked at mine at the factory. I am a nothingness before her. She slaps the rags up and down my naked body. Liquid fire, acid eating away at my bleeding skin. My head, my underarms. Between my legs—so private, those parts, so delicate, throbbing now, scorching. I am aflame. My body on fire.

  This is Auschwitz, this indignity, this torture. Everyone knows this now; everyone knows now about the nightmare of Auschwitz, about the walking skeletons, about the crematoria, about the Final Solution. Nowadays you see a picture of naked, shaven women standing dazed in a barren yard somewhere in Auschwitz, and the image is horrifying, of course, but by now it is familiar, too. Everyone has seen these pictures; our children have been raised on them. But then, we didn’t know about any of this. These insults to our bodies, to ourselves—to our sense of our selves—they shocked us just as much as they were degrading and filled with pain. That first day in Auschwitz was filled with things that seemed insane: Someone put a pocket watch in her vagina! Who does this? In what kind of world is someone made to do this? We had lived through the war already for five years. We had been through much; all of us had been through much. But until now, we had lived in a world that we recognized—a frightening world, a cruel world, to be sure, but it was a world we could understand, too. The reality of Auschwitz was unrecognizable. These affronts stunned us, tore us brutally from anything we were able to decipher for ourselves, and dropped us into the panicked insanity of this horrible, horrifying place.

  And then the showers. How can I describe this? Hundreds of us, petrified and disoriented, driven into a cement-walled chamber.

  There are round spigots hanging from the ceiling. This is a gas chamber; I am sure of it. We have been herded into this room to be gassed. I am going to be gassed.

  My heart is pounding, my breath is fast and shallow. My mouth is so parched my tongue sticks to my teeth. I wait moment by moment for the end, for the gas, to breathe poison. I look up at the spigots, watching for the gas. Will it burn my insides, that first breath? Will it take long for me to die? This waiting is the worst, the anticipation of the physical torture to come.

  Women are screaming, wailing. Hundreds of women huddled together on the verge of a massive murder. I cling to Mima, her arms wrapped around me. We will be together when we die. But I want Mama. More than ever, I want to be with my mother. It is horrible—I can’t say it another way—it is horrible to be in this room waiting for the gas.

  The spigots open, and out of them—water. Scalding hot, then freezing cold, then hot and cold again. But water, not gas. Water.

  We emerge from that chamber transformed. Truly, we can barely recognize each other; without hair, we all look like men. We gaze into each other’s eyes to see if we can see ourselves in someone else’s pupils. We want to know what we look like—shorn and swollen, devastated, but grateful, too, for we haven’t been killed.

  Each of us is given a dress. You get whatever is handed to you. Tall women get short dresses, short women get long ones. No bra, no panties. Just a dress. For shoes I got a pair of wooden clogs that had never been sanded or smoothed out on the insides. It was an unequaled agony, walking barefoot in these clogs. I have nightmares about them even now.

  I lost my period at Auschwitz, and I said it was a blessing. What would I have done with a period? How would I have managed that?

  11

  I REMAINED IN AUSCHWITZ FOR ALMOST SIX MONTHS, FROM July 1944 until just before the end of the year. Auschwitz was a daily dread: The threat of death, of being “selected,” was with us every day. We saw the smoke of the crematoria; we knew what was possible. Twice a day, we stood for the appels; every so often, we were made to stand naked, and an SS officer would come to look us over and select women from the line. I always stood with my head bent down, trying to cover myself with my eyes.

  Auschwitz is now called an extermination camp, a death factory. Ten thousand people were killed in a single day in Auschwitz—more than one million people in all. It looked like death there—skeletal bodies, sunken eyes, black smoke from the chimneys. And the stench, the stench of what was burning. Nothing grew at Auschwitz. The place was more barren than a desert, as if nature itself knew that Auschwitz was the kingdom of death. Not a tree or a shrub, not a blade of grass. Not a fly. Nothing. Auschwitz was the end of the world, death’s domain.

  I had no sense then of the overall operation of the place, no awareness of its intricate structures, its hierarchies of power and systems of barbarity and barter. I knew only my own experience; I had only my own partial, incomplete view. People needed to survive; no one had the means to survive. Violence was the norm. My months at Auschwitz were focused on only what mattered most—food, shoes, staying unnoticed. I had my aunt
, and I had a good deal of luck. I cannot describe what Auschwitz was “like,” for it was like nothing else that ever was; I can offer only pieces, those that live in me still.

  I was hungry all the time. Every morning, we got tepid brown liquid and a slice of hard bread. After the evening appel, we were given thin broth. Every day, the same; every day, not enough to calm the pain gnawing at my gut. My hunger was like an animal I carried inside, an animal that periodically unfurled its claws and scraped at the edges of my belly. It might lie quiet for a time, perhaps when I was talking with Mima or focused on some small labor. But not often, and never for long. That scraping, that digging, that pain inside my gut—it never went away. It was there when I went to sleep at night, and it greeted me as soon as I awoke in the morning. In Auschwitz, bread was precious beyond measure, precious nearly beyond love.

  But maybe not quite. Or not for everyone.

  Not, at least, for Mima.

  Mima, 1932

  Everyone needed a partner in Auschwitz, someone to watch out for you, someone to hold your bowl and spoon when you went to the latrine. Mima was my partner. I don’t know during those days and months at Auschwitz if I provided any solace for my aunt, if my life and her daily determination to protect it gave her any strength, any inner resolve to hold on. I hope they did; I really do hope her care for me was good for her, because I know with perfect clarity how good it was for me. I know what would have happened to me in Auschwitz without her.