We passed a store; maybe it was a bakery, I don’t know. I remember there were round ovens inside. We went in and showed the woman there what had happened to Jack—he just turned around and I pointed to his backside. She let us warm up by the ovens, and she gave me a needle and thread to try to sew up Jack’s pants after they had softened and I was able delicately to separate the fabric from his skin. It wasn’t very good; the pants really needed a big patch, but we managed. As always, we managed.
We found our way to the train station and headed, without event—thank God—back to Germany.
In later years, Jack and I would marvel at what we went through on our little adventure in Italy. How stupid we were to try to cross the Alps on our own—two city-dwellers tackling a mountain. It’s absurd, if you think about it even for a moment. We could have died out there on the mountains, and no one would ever have known. But somehow, by luck, by chance, by nothing more solid than that—somehow we made it, and when we arrived back in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, we made our arrangements to get married.
15
JACK WAS A ROMANTIC. FROM THE VERY BEGINNING UNTIL the very end, he always wanted to sweep me off my feet, to celebrate my presence in his life. We were married on January 24, 1946. We had no money, no photographer, few guests. The war was still raw for all of us, and we were all as much aware of the many, many people who weren’t with us as we were of those few people who were. Weddings in those days weren’t simply joyous affairs. But Jack worked hard to make the day grand, and I loved him for the ardor of his effort.
I was finally reunited with my father when Jack and I returned to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. My father agreed, heartily, to the marriage: Jack was known to be a good man, and he came from a good family. Feter gladly endorsed the idea, too. Feter’s approval mattered a lot to me; during the war, he had saved my life. Twice, really—first, when he had forced me, against my will, to go to the factory to work, and then again when he figured out where to hide me during the oblava in the factory kitchen. He had protected me during the war; his opinion of what I should do afterward meant a lot to me.
My father, several months after the war
I went to the rabbi in town to ask him to perform the chuppah. I didn’t mind so much one way or the other whether a rabbi would officiate at the wedding; I was done with all that, and had been since Auschwitz. I went to the rabbi out of respect for my father and uncle; I knew they would care, and I wanted to please them. But I suppose there are times—not many, perhaps, but a few over the course of my life—when my own sense of what is right has outweighed my tendency to conform to other people’s pleasures. This was one of those times.
The rabbi was an elderly man with watery eyes and vague wisps of a beard. He looked every inch the part, and he spoke to me with a distant formality as we sat across from each other at a table in the apartment where he lived. There was simply no softness in the man. Perhaps he had seen too much during the war; perhaps he had been through too much himself. I know he, too, had survived the camps. What was left of him—if there ever had been any more—was hardened, as unfeeling as stone. He agreed to officiate at the wedding, but told me that first I had to go to the mikveh, to be ritually purified, according to tradition.
This struck me as outrageous. Purified? Me? In what way, precisely, had I been sullied? I asked him, “Rabbi, do you know where I have been? I have just come from Auschwitz, and you want me to go to the mikveh?”
He didn’t care. What mattered to him were only the exacting details of the law. He insisted: Either I go to the mikveh, or he would refuse to perform the wedding.
“Would you prefer that I live with a man without a chuppah? Is that better?” I asked.
I thought perhaps he might try to convince me, might try to explain to me the importance of going to the mikveh. Maybe he understood the meaning of this ritual; he was a rabbi, after all. Maybe he understood what made it necessary for me to be “purified” before I was wed.
But he wasn’t interested in conversation or explanation. He nearly spat at me: “I don’t care what you do: Either you go to the mikveh, or I won’t perform the chuppah.”
So I shot back, suddenly, uncharacteristically, defiant: “Then you are not the rabbi for me.” I got up, turned around, and walked out.
I was so proud of that! It felt so good. Even now, when I think about it, I am proud that I had the courage to stand up to that man. For years already, people had been telling me what to do. They said, “Go,” I went; they said, “Work,” I worked. “Get up”; “Lie down”; “Stand here”; “Go there.” That was my life; I had been formed within the pattern of being obedient to orders. But when I went to this rabbi, hardened and hard-hearted as he was, something in me suddenly stood up to protest. His unconsidered command hit up against something solid in me, something strong and unbending, something that said, simply, “No. I won’t do this. It makes no sense.” It was my small bid to right an infinitely skewed world. And it felt good.
Jack didn’t mind; maybe he was even a little bit proud of me, too. Instead, my uncle would perform the wedding. He had married me to Heniek in the ghetto; he would marry me to Jack, now.
Jack made all the arrangements, such as they were. He had been buying whiskey in Stuttgart, where it was cheaper, and selling it in Lippstadt for a small profit, so he had accumulated a little money. He bought burgundy-colored material, which we had made into a wedding dress. The dressmaker asked to be paid in food, so Jack asked Srulik Rosensweig, the man who worked in the American kitchen and would bring cans of soup for us back to the apartment, to take something from the kitchen to pay the dressmaker, and he did. Jack wanted me to have my hair done, like a proper, elegant lady. So he found a hairdresser and went out and scavenged some wood so she could build a fire to heat the water she washed my hair with. He asked my father to go to Feldafing, a deportation camp not far from Munich, to see if he could find some kosher meat to serve at our little wedding party. We were living like vagabonds with nearly nothing to our names, managing from day to day on leftovers, scraps, whatever bits and pieces we could find—a sandwich made from the fat off the top of a can of soup; a dress stitched together from a soldier’s discarded uniform. And yet Jack took these bits and pieces and out of them created a miracle of a day, a wonder of a wedding.
He gave me chrysanthemums. A cold-weather flower, a flower needing long nights to bloom, a flower befitting our experience. But these chrysanthemums were white and lush and thick with life, befitting the day.
Jack took me to the attic of the apartment—he always thought attics held a special romance; he offered me the flowers, and he gave me a scrap of paper torn from a brown bag on which he had written a wedding poem:
White flowers, tender flowers
Like your soul free from sin
Despite the difficult, hard life
Not altered by storm, cold and wind.
The tender flowers I send to you today
May they continue to be your symbol;
From the depth of my heart
My wish beams with love and much joy
I should be your last one and you my last one,
Always mine.
In the middle of winter, a flowering poem, a poem like a flower that grows white, despite its sojourn in the dark.
After all that Jack had endured, where did he find the resources to write something of such delicate beauty? This was astonishing to me. And, too, the hopeful confidence about the future without pretending to eclipse the past—that we were not for each other the first, but, oh, that we might be for each other the last. I treasure this poem, its beauty, its honesty, its love.
I read the poem with Jack looking on. When I was done and looked up at him, overcome, I think, by the simple beauty of the thing in my hands, Jack took me in his arms and bent his head to mine, and he kissed me then with a passion, an urgency even, I had not known he owned. And I was surprised to find and pleased—relieved, to be true—that I wanted him just as much. I wanted him, t
oo.
We went first to a German justice of the peace for a civil ceremony. Jack joked, “I’m taking you to a priest to get married.” It was, I have to say, somewhat mortifying to stand before a German official and listen to him pronounce us man and wife. What had the man been doing a year earlier? Where had he been? But never mind. It was a bright winter day, and we rode to City Hall in an open sleigh drawn by a white horse. It was something out of a fairy tale—me in my new wedding dress holding my oh-so-white flowers and the snow glistening all around. It was beautiful, and it was fresh and clean and crisply bright.
My uncle performed the chuppah at the apartment. Other than the two of us, my father, Mima, and Feter—we had maybe twelve other people with us, all from Radom. The ceremony was performed according to tradition; the celebration after, with meat supplied by my father, was simple and brief. A friend of ours somehow managed to scrounge two oranges for the occasion—a rare delicacy even before the war. Those oranges provided what luxury the wedding had, and we were grateful to see them set on our wedding table.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Jack and I had found each other. We were in love. We were married. That was a start. That was enough.
Jack and me, 1946
16
JACK HAD NEVER MET HIS BROTHER MANNES, AND I COULD tell that my husband was both eager and anxious when we arrived at the door of Mannes’s handsome Victorian home in Beacon, New York. It was the end of June 1946; we had been met at the boat by Jack’s uncle Philip, and he had brought us up the Hudson Valley that first evening to stay with Mannes, who had guaranteed our passage. The door opened on an elegant entryway, and we saw Jack’s brother and his wife standing in the gentle light. Mannes stepped forward at once, greeting us warmly, enfolding us both in an oversized embrace.
Mannes’s wife, Brina, on the other hand, was another story entirely. She stood stiffly beside him, arms folded across her ample chest. We were ushered into the front hall; she said a formal hello to Jack, and then, glancing briefly up and down the length of me, she asked Jack, “This is your wife?” She didn’t address me; she didn’t extend a hand; she barely nodded in my direction. As if I were some appendage, like a piece of old luggage Jack had brought along.
Then, to me, for the first time: “You should take a bath.” Not “Please come in. You must be tired from your trip. Would you like to sit down?” Not “Would you like something to drink?” Not “Welcome to my home. Thank God you have survived and made it to America.” Not anything warm, not anything human. Just “Take a bath,” as if before she could touch me, before she could sanction my body on her bedsheets, she needed first to ensure that I washed the European germs off me.
Okay, I thought, okay. Maybe I’m being a little sensitive; maybe I’m mishearing the iciness, the cold condescension in her voice. She was, after all, a rich and well-established woman. Her husband had invented the design for one-piece pilot uniforms. Like the children’s snowsuits you see now, where a single zipper extends from one shoulder all the way across the body and down the opposite leg, the design had allowed airmen to get into and out of their uniforms with ease. Mannes had gotten multiple military contracts during the war and had grown rich. Brina was from Radom, just like the rest of us, but she was a big shot in America now, and here I was, fresh from an overseas voyage out of an old and old-fashioned world. She probably saw me gaping at the Studebaker in the driveway as I came in; who had ever seen anything like that before? Maybe what I heard as dismissive disdain was just a newfangled form of formality.
I took my few things and went upstairs. As I undressed in the attic bedroom where we would sleep, I heard the tub being filled on the second floor, which surprised me, because I thought I would be expected to draw my own bath, especially given the way I had been treated when I first arrived. I went down to the bathroom and slipped into the warmth of the tub. That was good. It was good to let myself relax, to settle down into the suds. I was newly pregnant by this time and had just spent ten days on rocky seas lying nauseous on a bunk in the lower deck of an army transport boat.
Someone knocked at the door. “Don’t wash your face.” It was Mannes. I couldn’t understand why he would say that, but I didn’t pay it much attention. A few minutes later, he knocked again. And again came the obscure instruction through the door: “Malka”—he called me by my Yiddish name—“don’t wash your face with the bathwater.” This got me nervous, wondering what was wrong with the water that I shouldn’t let it touch my face. Then a third time: “Don’t wash your face, Malka. We put a disinfectant in the water.”
It was like the earth had opened underneath me. I was back in Auschwitz, being deloused. I had thought that, finally, I had arrived in a place of safety, a place where I wouldn’t have to feel myself always the outsider, the unwanted, the scum of the earth. I had thought that maybe here, in this new land of opportunity, Jack and I could start again from scratch, start clean and build something together, a new life. But I was made to realize that here it was no different; here, even in my own family, I was still the dirty Jew.
I hadn’t wanted to come to America. Even though Jack wanted very much to meet his one remaining sibling, I kept thinking of what my grandfather said to me when I was a child—that the streets in America were made from traif. Even with all the optimism people had after the war for the endless opportunities of America—in America you could be anything, in America people could grow rich—still, America seemed frighteningly foreign to me, utterly unlike anything I understood as home. But I knew that I didn’t have a home in Europe anymore. A couple Jack knew had returned to Radom some months after the war, and they had been hanged by the local Poles, who presumably feared that the couple might want their property back. So Jack worked with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Jewish agency in Europe, to arrange for our passage, and we set off, along with my father and Jack’s one remaining nephew, Sidney, in the middle of June 1946.
On the boat to America
It had started out well enough. We recognized Jack’s uncle, Philip, at the docks because he was carrying a sign that said “Werber” on it, and we pushed our way through the throng to get to him. Philip took us first to his apartment in the Bronx. He told us he was a roofer and showed us all the roofs along the Grand Concourse that he had worked on. The Grand Concourse in those days was a fancy area; the men dressed in fur collars and the women wore sheer stockings made of nylon. We thought he must be a millionaire to have made all those roofs, but as it turned out, he only fixed roofs; he didn’t lay them from scratch. Still, his apartment building was on a lovely, tree-lined street, and as we entered his apartment, we saw a tremendous table that seemed to stretch the length of the entire living room. It was piled with food. We couldn’t believe how much food—roasted chicken, sliced brisket, potatoes steaming hot in a porcelain bowl. We had never eaten such a feast. We thought, this is what America is, this profusion, this easy availability of luxury. Jack’s uncle, a simple roof-fixer from Poland, had his own apartment and didn’t want for food; he even owned a car. It felt good to get to this America. This land of possibility, we thought, might hold possibility for us, too.
That seemed less true—or not even true at all—once we arrived at Mannes’s house. For the three weeks we spent there, we were made to feel that we were nothing at all.
I had brought with me from Europe a bar of soap, a little oval of Palmolive soap that smelled like a field of fresh-cut flowers. Mima had found it somewhere when we were living in Kaunitz. This bar of soap, neatly wrapped in its corrugated green paper, was for me a token of another world, long before the war, a world where women had soft skin and silken hair, a world in which women could walk down the street and smell fresh and clean—like the women from the magazines my mother used to keep in our apartment for her clients to look at. I loved this little bar of soap, and I decided right away when Mima gave it to me that I would never use it; I didn’t want to use it up with water and washing. I made myself a little promise instead—that whenever
I would be able to buy real underwear, whenever I could get some panties and bras and stockings of my own, I would nestle this sweet-smelling bar of soap among my delicate underthings, and I would be able to wear that lovely scent upon me every day.
And that’s what I did. I kept the soap as a sachet, and when I arrived in Beacon fourteen months later, I still had that bar of soap with me.
After ten or twelve days on the boat, and now in Beacon for several more, I wanted to do some clothes washing, so I asked Brina if there was someplace I could wash out a few of our clothes. Yes, she said, in the basement; I could find a basin and a slop sink there, but she didn’t have any soap. “Oh, I have some soap,” I told her. “I’ll give you mine.” Though I thought it was odd that she didn’t have any soap for her own washing, I went and got my bar of Palmolive, and Brina took it from me and ripped off the paper wrapping, and, handing it back to me, said, “Good, you can use this.”
So I washed out our clothes in the basement slop sink, and I used up my little bar of soap. I gently cried the whole time as I watched it dissolve.
When Mannes saw me later that day, he could tell that I had been crying, even though I tried to hide it. He asked what was wrong. I told him I was fine, that I had just been doing some washing during the afternoon and I was tired. He asked if I liked the washing machine they had. Washing machine? What washing machine? I did everything by hand. “Why did you do that, Malka? We have a beautiful machine that will do the washing for you.” And he showed me the thing in the basement, and he pointed out the box of soap powder on the shelf right above it. It was Ivory soap. I didn’t know the name, and I couldn’t read the English writing on the box.
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