We sat. We lay on our bunks. We walked from room to room.
There was nothing to do.
I got boils. Large pockets of pus swelled up in the creases of my body, under my arms and in the folds of skin around my groin. I couldn’t sit upright for the pain—my thighs pressing on the boils at my groin. When the boils broke and the pus ran out, all I could do was rip off bits of my dress and dab the infected filth with the dirty cloth.
My body was repulsive to me. I was disgusted by myself.
From time to time, the women fought. There was a big argument, I remember, about the sexual status of one of the women. Some women were saying that she was not really a woman, that she wasn’t made right, that someone’s mother knew someone else who had heard that this woman had gone to Warsaw to get an operation “down there.”
“No! It isn’t true! I’m married even.” She begged the women to stop, to let her be. But they dismissed her, pestered her, mocked her feeble protests. Idle women, scared for their lives, quelling their fears, relieving their boredom through meanness.
Others exchanged recipes—different topic, equally absurd—how many eggs they used in a bobka, how hot to make the oven to get the best crust on a challah.
I didn’t understand this, gossiping about scandals, chatting about food. Did these women think that we were going to live? That there would come a time when we would live lives in which a question about the number of eggs you used in a bobka had meaning? It seemed so foreign to me, by this time, that there might actually exist a world somewhere where gossip and idle chatter about food mattered.
To me there was only loneliness, and there was sorrow, and there was death. In those three weeks, I gave up whatever fight I still had in me. I was consumed by my loss of Heniek. I cried for Heniek, and for myself, too. To be honest, I cried for Heniek more than I cried for Mama. I recognized the disparity then, and it pained me, because I loved Mama so very much. But my thoughts were all of Heniek and of the love and passion we had shared. For those few months with him, I had found happiness. I had let myself believe in the future and in promise and possibility. Even in the midst of war, of liquidations and executions and cruelties beyond imagining, I had let myself believe that all was not darkness and death. Heniek had let me believe in life.
Now, for three weeks with nothing to do, alone, with no partner to talk to, my mind turned inward. A thousand times a day, I watched Heniek being led out of the Konzentrationslager, walking away from me, accusing Norembursky of his crime. My mind turned all to death, to the end of everything: Heniek’s death, my death. How will I die? How much will it hurt? These thoughts were my companions in quarantine.
After three weeks, when we were finally released—Ruska, of course, did not have typhus, and she survived the war, though just barely—we were taken to the factory in Lippstadt, where for the next ten weeks I worked again making munitions for the Germans. Not much remains with me from this time: I don’t remember the exact nature of my work, though I know I got to sit at a machine to do it and that Mima and I were on alternate shifts; she worked nights and I worked days. I don’t think I saw Mima even once.
What I remember most clearly from my time in Lippstadt is the remarkable kindness of a German, a man whose name I never knew, whose face I never saw—a man who belonged to the people who sought to destroy me but who, in defiance of his people, offered instead generosity and solace.
He gave me a piece of sandwich.
I always took a little rest when we were given our break between shifts. Just two or three minutes to lay my head down and close my eyes after I had gotten my small portion of soup. This was better to me than trying to get extra soup. When the women would run up and fight each other for the repeta—seconds—if it was offered, I would rest instead, lay my head down and sleep, even just for a moment.
One evening, when I picked up my head, I saw a little package wrapped in brown paper lying beside me. I looked at it, but I didn’t touch it, because I was worried that someone was testing me, trying to find out if I would take it, only to accuse me of stealing. So I ignored it and went back to my work. The next evening, the same thing happened—a package was left, and I refused to touch it. On the third evening, as I was resting, I suddenly felt a callused hand on my mouth; another hand covered my eyes. A man spoke to me, quietly but urgently. “Don’t scream. Don’t scream,” he said. “I am the one who puts down this package for you. It’s me that’s leaving you this package.”
He was speaking to me in simple German, simple enough for me to understand. He said, “I just want to ask a few questions.”
I didn’t move, terrified at what this German might want from me.
“Is it true what I am hearing in the underground? Is it true that they are killing Jews? That in Auschwitz they are gassing Jews to death?”
Who was this man assaulting me with his hands on my face? Why was he asking about what the Germans were doing to the Jews?
I didn’t trust his tone; I didn’t know what to make of the sound of disbelief in his voice. He was a German; he was my enemy. Yet his voice was full of horror as he asked his questions. And he had left something for me, or so he said; he had left me some kind of gift.
He took his hands from my face. I sat motionless, afraid of whatever it was that was happening. I wanted to open the package, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t look at him; in all the years of the war—and for years after it, decades—I never looked a German in the eyes.
He tried to calm me; he could see I was terrified. He spoke gently now, still quietly, more plaintive than insistent, trying to convince me that he was on my side. He said, “You can answer me. I am here working in this factory just as you are. I am not out fighting for Hitler. I am against Hitler. Don’t be afraid of me. I have been watching you, and I see that you never go for seconds. I thought you might need this more than the others. Here, look, I left this for you from my sandwich.”
And he unwrapped the little package himself and showed me what was there: a third of a sandwich, maybe. A piece of salami between slices of brown bread. A feast, this was—meat and bread to bite and chew, meat and bread to be rolled on my tongue, the salt and the fat of it. Two bites, three bites—it was a banquet.
I don’t think I had much to tell him. I confirmed, eyes down, lips barely moving, yes, they are gassing people in Auschwitz. But what else did I have to say?
He came every night and gave me a portion of his sandwich. And he came with news, too: that the war would soon be over, that the Americans and the English were on their way, and that the Russians, too, were coming from the other side.
I did believe him about this, because for some weeks already, we could hear the bombs falling not far off. We figured the Allies knew that there were slave-laborers at the factory, because the bombs landed all around, but never in, the factory complex itself. The German civilians must have known, too, because people from the town came to the factory during the raids to hide in the bomb shelters there. The Jews and Russian prisoners, of course, had to stay in the factory as the bombs fell. I told my friend Fela that I wouldn’t mind dying in a bomb blast; it would be quick at least, and I suspected it wouldn’t hurt too much.
Every night, I took the piece of sandwich and shared it with Fela; she was the girl who some months later would discourage me from spending time with Jack when we were in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Fela had a little gold ring that she asked me to offer to the German; she wanted to give him something to thank him for the piece of sandwich he was giving me. When I offered it to him, I explained that I was sharing the piece of sandwich with my friend; she and I were partners and shared everything we had. I could tell that he was impressed by this—that I was sharing what little he was able to give me. I know he wished he could have brought more for us to eat, but he said he couldn’t bring another sandwich with him to the factory; he was checked by the guards every morning. He wouldn’t take the ring. He said we should keep it, in case we might have need of it i
n the future.
The following evening, when I opened the package, I saw that this man had given me a full half of his sandwich, so there would be more to share. He was now taking less for himself—he was giving up even more—so that I could share his gift with another Jew.
This was astonishing to me, the kindness of this German, the good-heartedness of this man who wanted to do what he could to help two Jews eat. I have thought about this man many times over the years. I am sorry that I was too scared to look at his face; I am sorry that I never asked his name. This man risked his own well-being for my sake—for surely he would have been punished had he been caught giving food to a Jew. Zwirek had extended such goodness two years before; Katz had done so as well. Now, yet another. A Pole, a Jew, and a German: men with kindness harbored in their hearts.
I know that I did not deserve their kindness, any more than I deserved the miseries I was made to suffer. Nothing that happened in the war made sense like that. The world I inhabited was not one in which rewards and punishments were handed out according to reason, according to any standard of justice I could discern. Life and death were the result of happenstance, of luck, of fortune—random events that never added up to anything I could count on.
13
BY THE END OF MARCH 1945, IT WAS AGAIN TIME TO LEAVE. The Germans at the factory apparently knew that the war would soon be over, but they didn’t seem to know what to do with us: Lippstadt would fall and they would flee, but they didn’t want to leave us behind to work for their victors. The soldiers assigned to the factory floor spent the hours pacing, watching us work; we could almost smell their nervousness. One evening, just before my shift was over, the young officer in charge of our group called us into the yard in front of the factory and told us we were leaving. Immediately. I could tell this was a relief to him, this decision, finally, about how to dispose of us. Instead of returning to the barracks, we were going to walk out of the compound, out of Lippstadt, and head south. The others—like Mima—who were on the night shift were called from their barracks to join us. We wore our frayed, striped dresses and the old coats we still had with us from Auschwitz.
The last time I had been on such a march, eight months earlier, we had walked from Radom to Tomaszów, in the scorching heat of high summer. Now, in late March, the weather was still wintry, especially at night, and the road was stiff with frozen mud and ice. We walked pressed against each other to shield ourselves from the cold. We were a long and weary column, perhaps two hundred of us in all, flanked on either side by our still-anxious German guards, clutching the guns slung across their chests, their heavy boots crunching in the ice. We walked for two nights in the wicked winter cold, not knowing where we were being led or what the Germans would do with us. During the days, we were hidden from sight—once, I remember, in an abandoned barn filled with hay. I thought the Germans were locking us in to set fire to the place; I thought we were about to be burned alive. I waited a long time in that barn, straining to hear the first crack of flame.
Then, on the third morning of the march, it ended. Literally out of nowhere, out of an otherwise empty sky. It was very early, just before dawn, and the air had that feeling of freshness that can sometimes emerge in the moments when night seems ready to give over into day. I was chilled, and I clutched my coat at the collar to try to keep off the dampness of the air. Mima was walking beside me, our arms nearly touching for the warmth. We were very tired, exhausted really, after another long, dark night of walking—after so many years of war. I could tell we weren’t far from a town—Kaunitz, as it turned out—because the road had gotten firmer under our feet and I thought I could see lights quivering in the distance. People were getting up with the dawn, readying themselves for another day.
Then we heard the rumble of airplanes, a muffled roar approaching in the brightening light of a gunmetal sky.
As if in response to some silent command, the guards started to shout at us all at once: “Get down! Everyone, on your bellies. Faces down!” A sudden eruption of activity broke the monotony of our endless walk. The soldiers, unslinging their guns, ran to surround us as we fell to the ground. Someone yelled out the order again: “No moving! Don’t lift your heads!” I dug my face into the frozen dirt, certain the Germans would shoot. I could feel Mima next to me, but I was too scared to inch my way over to find her hand. I did as I was told: I lay still; I didn’t move my head. Above us now, the boom of airplanes roaring by; around us, the anxious breath of the soldiers stamping their feet in the cold. Did it last an hour? Maybe just ten minutes. I don’t know.
Then shooting began. Not at us, but not too far away—down the road some small distance—we heard the rapid crack of gunfire. “We’re next. We’re next,” I kept thinking. “Now is when I’m going to die.” I had decided that it would be worse than a bomb blast, that it would take longer to die from a gunshot. I didn’t want to die slowly; I didn’t want to die in pain. I breathed in the dirt, bits of grit flecking my frozen lips. I kept my eyes tightly shut. I tried to ready myself for the bullets.
Sometime later, we heard that it was another group of women who had left the factory with us—a group of Russian prisoners—that had been shot. They had been walking ahead of us, and they, too, had been ordered to get down as the sound of the planes approached, and then the Germans shot them, every one of them, right on the road. Apparently, this little massacre led to our liberation—because just as the Russians were being shot, the Americans were flying overhead, and when they saw what was happening below—women being shot in the back—they decided to intervene. So down they came in parachutes—dozens of them, falling from the sky. We had the impression that they didn’t have prior orders for this, that it wasn’t planned, because when Mima said it was safe to look up, to lift my head from the dirt (a thing I didn’t want to do; I didn’t believe—I couldn’t believe—that the Germans had fled), I saw soldiers, American soldiers, falling randomly from the sky, and some of them were bloodied from their fall, some had landed on the fences by the side of the road, their parachutes caught in the wooden posts. One young soldier I saw was dangling from the limbs of a tree. But Mima was right—it was safe to lift our heads, because the Germans had run away. We arose, dazed and disbelieving, and found ourselves surrounded only by Americans, young men talking in a language we didn’t understand but telling us news we did. It was over: The Germans were gone; we were free.
They had been standing above us just moments before, their guns pointed at our backs, readying themselves to shoot. But then, instead of shooting, they ran. It was only a minute, a second, that separated my life from my death. I could have been dead; I was about to be dead. But, instead—I don’t know why—I was alive.
The edge between life and death is so sharp, so arbitrary, so senseless.
Liberation was a bewilderment to me. I remember throwing aside the little packet of sugar I still had with me from Auschwitz, thinking suddenly that I wouldn’t need it anymore. I remember thinking—no, I remember knowing, with clarity—that I no longer wanted to be a Jew, that I wanted simply to be a human being without the encumbrances of history and obligation. And I remember a sudden fright, a terrifying question rising up in me from the hollow of my gut: To whom do I belong, and who belongs to me?
I had Mima: I know that; I knew it then. Still, I had lost what mattered most: my mother, my Heniek. Standing amid exuberance, amid tears of thankfulness and disbelieving smiles, I was shaken by a wrenching awareness: I was free, I would have a future, but I would enter it alone.
14
IN THE SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE JACK DIED—IN 2006, AT the age of ninety-two—his thoughts often returned to our time together in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Jack loved me very much—I say this with simple candor—and I know it gave him pleasure to see me well dressed and well fed, to see me surrounded by beautiful things. We started together from nothing; once our real estate business became successful, he wanted to see that I should always have everything. He called me his queen. From the start
and even into our old age, he said that the world was envious that he walked with me on his arm. But in the end—at the end—what mattered most to him was that I had come to his doorstep in 1945.
“I cannot believe that you came to me, that you came looking for me. I am not a believer, Millie, but I believe God sent you to find me.”
He was thinking of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
Jack, too, had been alone in the world. Except for his brother Mannes, who had moved to New York before World War I and whom Jack had never met, all of Jack’s siblings—there had been eight children in all—were gone. Some had died before the war; some were killed during it. Most of his cousins were killed as well, as were nearly all of his nieces and nephews, and his father and grandparents, too—his mother had died when he was a young child. His wife, Rachel, to whom he had been married for just three or four years when he was arrested, and his little daughter, Emma, were both gone. A flourishing, thriving family, all now dead. At the edge of despair, Jack had managed to find purpose and a will to live in his efforts to help save nearly seven hundred boys who had come in a transport to Buchenwald in the summer of 1944. After the war, Jack eventually found his way to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and he moved in with one of his cousins who had survived—Itamar, who was living in that apartment he shared with the group of other Radomers.
Jack had been in Garmisch for several weeks when I arrived late in the summer of 1945. Like an angel out of the wilderness, a harbinger of happiness, I came. That is how Jack saw it—or, that is how he wanted to remember it, that in all the world, I managed to come searching for him, to raise up his soul from the devastation of the war. In the final weeks of his life, that memory rose up again and lingered with him. In those last weeks, he mentioned it often.
Two Rings Page 15