Two Rings

by Millie Werber

  It wasn’t true, exactly, that I had come to Garmisch-Partenkirchen looking for Jack. Mima and I had come because we were looking for Radomers, and when Mima wanted to move on, when she wanted to go to Italy because she had heard that her husband and her brother-in-law—my father—were in Bari waiting for a boat to Palestine, she left me with Jack or, at least, in Jack’s protection. She said simply: “You’ll be safe with Jack.”

  I did feel safe with Jack. I was riveted by his stories, by the enormity of his hardships, by his determination to get through it all. He was so smart and so strategic in his dealings with his captors—figuring out exactly which rocks were best to pick up, or working out where exactly to hide the many children in his charge so the Germans wouldn’t find them. I admired him for this, and I pitied him, too, for the horrors he had endured—hanging for hours by his upturned arms from a gallows, being whipped on his naked back until he fainted from the pain, being buried once under corpses and rescued only by happenstance. Compared with his, my own stories to me seemed insignificant. Maybe, knowing that he could go on and envision a future for himself despite his past helped me to see that perhaps I could, too.

  Jack had lost his wife and child, as I had lost my Heniek. We spoke about this, at least a little. I could never bring myself to tell Jack everything about my feelings for Heniek—and why should I, really? He didn’t need to know all the details, just as I didn’t need to know every detail about his wife. But talking to each other about even the outlines of our previous loves brought us closer together. Honesty does that.

  Still, though, I was certain I wouldn’t marry again, and I told Jack so. That, too, surprisingly perhaps, brought us closer to each other, perhaps because it made Jack pursue me with more persistence, but also I think because knowing I wouldn’t marry him, and so knowing that nothing really was at stake, allowed me to feel comfortable with him. It made me feel safe, for the first time in years.

  My determination not to remarry slowly faded, imperceptibly almost, over the several months I spent in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. I found myself seeking out Jack’s company. So after many hours of quiet conversation, when he sat, twirling that ring between his fingers, asking, “Whose finger will this fit?” I found myself suspecting that it would fit mine.

  We decided to go together to Italy.

  By this time, Mima had been away for weeks and we hadn’t heard anything back from her or from anyone who had seen her. I wanted to find out what happened and whether she had found Feter and my father. This is how it was after the war—Jews traipsing all over Europe, jumping on trains, sleeping in abandoned buildings, trying to find anyone in their family who might still be alive. As it turned out, Feter and my father had been told that Mima and I had been killed in Auschwitz; a woman they knew from Radom had told them that she had seen us going to the gas chambers. So they had gone to Bari, where they heard you could get smuggled to Palestine. Mima wound up finding them there, in Bari, but the meeting brought relief and devastation at once. Mima learned then that although Feter had survived, their son, Moishele, had not. She had seen Moishele last when the men were taken away at Auschwitz, and all the time since then she had been hoping, praying, that Feter might have been able to protect him, to save him from the gas chambers.

  Mima and Moishele before the war

  I don’t think Mima ever recovered from what she learned that day in Italy. None of us recovered, really, from the war—it’s an absurdity, a way of not wanting to deal with things, to pretend otherwise. But Mima had held her hope for Moishele so close to her heart—I think maybe all the time she was protecting me, there was some part of her hoping that Feter was doing the same for their son. But Feter hadn’t been able to protect him.

  Did she blame him? I wonder. Did something in her love for Feter die on the day she learned of Moishele’s death? Chava had been killed in Feter’s care; now Mima learned that Moishele had, too. In truth, there’s nothing Feter could have done to save his children, but the heart doesn’t always abide by such truths. Mima had helped me survive; her own children perished. Mima and Feter never had another child, though Mima was only in her early thirties when the war ended. She was sad, I think, all her days.

  Mima and me, 1946

  Jack and I, of course, knew nothing of this at the time, so we decided to make the trip to Italy to search for Mima and any family she might have found. In the end, we didn’t find our family in Italy. Mima, Feter, and my father were returning to Garmisch-Partenkirchen just as we were making our way south, and it was only after we finally got back to Germany that we were all united. But our trip through Italy turned out to be perilous in ways we couldn’t have imagined, and the experience of it bound Jack and me to each other. When we returned, I was wearing Jack’s ring.

  We traveled to Italy by train, and to be honest, it was a fairly festive time. We carried with us Displaced Person cards, which allowed us passage on any train, and Jack had accumulated a little pocket money by selling cigarettes and other small items in Garmisch, so we were able to buy a little food—perhaps a sandwich to share—along the way. With us on the train to Florence, which was our first stop, was a group of Italian soldiers returning home from Russian POW camps. They were joyous in their liberation, and we spent the hours listening to them sing Italian classics. It was late fall in Italy. The weather was crisp and bright, the air smelled fresh, the soldiers were drunk with the anticipation of home, and I was traveling with a man I found myself starting to love. The soldiers gave us bread and wine, and we ate and drank and listened to their full-throated songs. It was good, all of this; it was good. It felt like life.

  In Florence, we found a cousin who told us that Mima had gone south. We decided to continue south, too, hoping to meet up with her en route or to find her in Bari. We spent the night in Florence, at a little hotel near the train station. Though it cost us more money than we wanted to spend, we took two rooms; I was given a room on the first floor, and Jack got one all the way up on the sixth or seventh. Before we parted for the night, I remember, Jack stood at the top of the winding staircase in the center of the main hall; he waved down to me, sending me good-night wishes, and I looked all the way up and waved back. Such a simple pleasure that was—waving softly toward a loving face looking sweetly down. It made me laugh, that silly scene, and I realized suddenly that I was having fun. I hadn’t thought it was possible.

  In the morning, we set off for Livorno, which we intended to be just a stopping-off point on our way to Bari. But while we were there, we somehow found out that Mima had found Feter and my father in Bari and that they were already on their way north, back to Germany. So we turned around. We looked for a place to spend the night, but all we found were buildings marked albergo, which is how you say “hotel” in Italian, but we didn’t know that at the time. We thought there was no place for us to sleep. Still, Jack said not to worry, he would figure something out.

  He had a pocketknife with him, and with it he cut several branches from a palm tree and laid them out next to a building close to the train station. “This will be our bed,” he said, “here, under the stars.” I was nervous about sleeping outside, on a street by the station, which is never the nicest part of any town. But Jack was confident; he seemed so sure of himself, and he always had a little joke to ease my mind.

  “Don’t worry, Maniusia. No one will steal our diamonds.”

  Of course, we had no diamonds.

  “Here,” he said, “lie down next to me.”

  He made a place for me on a bed of palms. I curled myself next to him and let myself relax into his protective care.

  He wrapped his arms around me to keep me warm. He whispered to me then, gently, softly, “I know I am much older than you, but if I am not too old, if you will have me, I would want very much to marry you.” And he reached into his pocket and held out to me the ring he had been playing with back in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

  I had known, I suppose, that we were headed toward marriage, once I agreed to travel wi
th him to Italy. And Jack was so persistent in his pursuit, so single-minded in his evident devotion, he was rather hard to resist. He thought of me, I think, almost as a child—young and lovely and in some way unspoiled despite my experience—and I think that just as he had found life and life-giving purpose in helping to protect the transport of children brought to Buchenwald, so he found it enlivening to protect and care for me. I came to him out of the wilderness, a young thing in need of nurture. I accepted this role; I even embraced it, for I wanted someone older and wiser in the ways of the world. I wanted someone to be strong where I felt weak, someone determined to find joy where I was so prone now to find only sadness and emptiness.

  I did not let go of Heniek. First love is so pure, so uncompromised by the demands and details of life. That joy— Heniek loves me! He chose me!—it doesn’t go away. But it can get put away, to make way for other things. So although I didn’t let go of my love for Heniek, I did let go of my determination never to marry again. I opened myself—I opened my heart—to Jack.

  I said yes.

  We spent the night half-awake, nervously watching all about us. But I was wrapped in Jack’s arms, and I felt safe.

  We began our journey home.

  We found the train back toward Germany. It was quiet in the train, with only a few people, and quite without any boisterous singing. At the Austrian border, officials came to check papers. We had the same Displaced Person cards we carried on the way down, but though they had been sufficient then, for some reason—we couldn’t understand what the Italian guards were saying; we didn’t know what was wrong—they were deemed insufficient now. So again, after everything, after allowing ourselves to believe that it was all over, that we were done with soldiers and guns and orders called out in unremitting anger—again, we were arrested, taken away at gunpoint, and thrown into a jail.

  The place was pitch-black and cold. We were locked in a small room of some kind, without windows or ventilation; we couldn’t get our bearings, because it was so dark. I could sense that there were two others in the room, but they must have been as frightened as we were, because no one said a word. It seemed so long in that darkness. Slowly, our eyes began to grow accustomed to the dark, and I could begin to make out the contour of two faces, and eyes glinting like the eyes of cats pointed in our direction.

  “Mania! It’s us, Mania and Alter Singer!”

  Unbelievable. Incredible. We had been thrown into a cell with a couple who had been brought to the Radom factory during the war. Mania and I had slept in the same barracks. It was an inexplicable coincidence, yet, I suppose, no more inexplicable than anything else we had been through.

  We fell upon each other as if we each had found a lost treasure: a known face, a lingering embrace, a remnant of home.

  After a day or so, we were taken from the jail to a refugee camp of some kind. Though it didn’t seem well guarded—there were no watchtowers, no Germans manhandling us with batons or machine guns—the camp, surrounded by barbed wire and filled with throngs of frightened men and women, still too closely resembled the places we had so recently been freed from for us to trust that nothing bad would happen to us there.

  One day after we arrived, we lifted up a piece of fence, crawled underneath, and set ourselves free. No one seemed to notice.

  The four of us started to walk north, toward the Alps.

  We met up with a small band of Jewish smugglers. They were headed toward Austria, and they agreed to take us with them as long as we were able to keep up with them on our own; they told us they wouldn’t wait for us if our pace slowed. They knew their way across the Alps, and we could follow along in their tracks—it was November or December by this time, and the mountains were high with snow—but they had to be across the border by morning and they simply would not wait for anything.

  We were unprepared for such a journey. Neither Jack nor I had ever hiked in the mountains; we came from Radom, after all, an industrial city with barely a hill, let alone a mountain, and we had spent the past half-decade fending off starvation. We weren’t built for such a trek. We had come to Italy by train, and we assumed we would return the same way. I had a sweater and pants made from a soldier’s uniform so I at least had clothes that had some thickness to them, some strength. But Jack was wearing just a simple suit—a suit for the city, not something to wear trekking over mountains in the cold of winter. And we didn’t have the proper shoes: You need boots to climb a mountain, and boots we didn’t have. Nor gloves.

  Still, we were grateful to have guides. We set off.

  First, I remember, we had to cross a river. The air was icy cold, the water was colder still, and the river was running fast. It was night, too, and it was hard to see where we were going. The Alters were ahead of us; the smugglers, our guides, were ahead of them. Jack and I held on to each other, struggling against the strong push of the current. We were unused to such effort. Our muscles began to seize, tight and taut as rope, cramping from the strain.

  We made it across—a miracle it was—but Jack at some point had hurt his knee and our pace soon slowed. We became separated from our friends and our guides. We were somewhere in the Alps, nearing the onset of winter, in the depths of the night. And we were alone and had no idea where to go.

  Up. Where else could we go? We went up, up toward the peak of the mountain so we could get down to the other side.

  The absurdity of it! The two of us, without food or water, mountain climbing without guides, without light, without proper clothes. But what choice did we have? There was nothing to do but go up, nothing to do but climb.

  So we climbed. Throughout the night, in snow that reached up almost to our knees, each step an effort beyond what we could reasonably accomplish. We kept thinking we must be nearing the crest, we must be getting close, but ahead of us always was just more mountain, more and more steps reaching up.

  We were very cold, we were very tired, and we started to become very scared.

  At some point, we reached a plateau and sat down on the snow to rest. I heard the howl of animals. Mountain leopards, I thought, maybe jackals. The sound of hungry animals must have been there before, but I hadn’t paid any attention as I walked; I must have been concentrating only on being able to take the next step. But now, huddled against Jack in cold that could shatter stone, I could hear the howl of beasts echoing in the predawn light.

  I knew we couldn’t stay there. If we sat still much longer, if we happened to fall asleep, we might freeze to death. And I feared the animals would come upon us as we slept and would eat us alive. Jack wanted to stay, to rest a while longer from our trek. He joked about my fear: “Maybe the animals, at least, will get breakfast.” He was just as scared as I was, I knew that, but somehow he could always turn things into a joke. Maybe that was his protection, the jokes his shield against the fear.

  I told Jack that we had to leave, or we would die all alone in the mountains and no one would find us.

  It was starting now to become light, and we spotted through the trees a small house in the far distance, all the way down the mountain. A cottage, we thought, where perhaps we might find a moment’s shelter, a little warmth, maybe even a drop of food. It was very far down, the mountain was very steep, and Jack was afraid to move. But I refused to stay. I feared the cold and, even more, the howling of the animals.

  We walked to the edge of the plateau, sat down with our legs outstretched—me in front, Jack straddling me from behind—like a toboggan, the two of us, a two-man sled in the snow. We pushed off and started down the slope.

  It seemed to work for a while, sliding down the mountain together toward that light in the distance. But soon we were going too fast. Beneath the top layer of snow was a thicker, deeper layer of ice. As we slid, we could feel its hardness against our backsides, little juts tearing into the fabric of our clothes, cutting through our pants but not slowing our descent. We were racing down an icy mountain slope, and we had no way to steer or stop.

  As we neared the tree l
ine, I noticed a thick tree stump jutting out from the snow in front of us. I reached out with my leg and managed, somehow—I don’t know how—to hook my foot against it, which abruptly stopped our fall. We crashed, tumbling on top of each other in the snow. But we broke no bones.

  We picked ourselves up and walked the rest of the way, grabbing on to the tree trunks and branches for support as we made our way down.

  The cottage was old and shabby. We knocked quietly on the thin wooden door, not wanting to wake everyone inside. An old man answered, thin and stooped; we could see just past him into the one small room: A cow stood idly in the middle. The man had no barn for his animal, so it lived with him. We knew this man couldn’t have much, but we were fairly desperate. We hadn’t eaten in two days; we had been sucking on bits of ice. I took off my ring, the little band Jack had given to me just a few days earlier in Livorno, and held it out to him. We had nothing else to offer, and we needed, desperately, to eat. But the man wouldn’t take it. He told us, in German, that we were now in Austria—we had managed to cross the border without knowing it—but that he had nothing he could give us; he could barely feed his own family with the meager amount he had.

  He wished us luck and sent us on our way.

  It was full daylight by this time, and we were worried that we might be taken for smugglers in this border town. We must have looked a mess after our night on the mountain. We fell in with a group of workers and tried to walk along with them so we would not be noticed. I walked behind Jack, keeping my eyes down, wanting, as ever, to be unseen. But I saw. Looking down, I saw that Jack’s pants, flimsy city things unfit for the mountains, had been torn to shreds on the ice, and as they tore, his skin tore, too, and now the shreds of fabric and skin had frozen together. His backside was frozen—threads and flesh and blood—frozen into one. He must have been too cold, perhaps too scared, to feel the pain. I knew we had to get inside somewhere; he had to warm his body. What would happen if he got frostbite on his backside?