Two Rings
Page 19
I always put Jack first, before myself, certainly—even before the children. I wanted to make him happy, to make up as best I could for all he had suffered in the war. I made lunch for him every day and helped him with his coat and handed him his briefcase as he left for work every morning. He was scared to drive, so I drove him everywhere—to his business appointments, to lunch meetings, to the barber. We were always together.
In turn, I know, Jack always wanted to indulge me. He could never take me on enough vacations—to spas in Italy, especially, where we would get massages and lounge in thick cotton robes during the days and eat fancy meals at night—and he could never buy me enough gifts. Eventually, I stopped saying that I admired something—a piece of jewelry, perhaps, or a vase or a figurine—if we were taking a walk and looking in shop windows, because always the next day, I would find whatever it was I had pointed to wrapped up for me in a pretty box. Even as I grew into middle age and put on a few pounds, Jack never wanted me to diet; he said I was beautiful just as I was, and besides, hadn’t I suffered enough starvation during the war?
Jack answered the question I had asked myself at the moment of my liberation—to whom do I belong, and who belongs to me? For sixty years, Jack and I belonged to each other. I can’t imagine what my life would have been without him. Mima told me in Garmisch-Partenkirchen that I would be safe with Jack, and she was right.
Others kept me safe, too, of course, before Jack. In telling my story, I have wanted very much to honor them—Mima and Feter, Zwirek and Zosia, Katz and Leon Rosenbaum, and a German man whose name I never knew. The thought of these selfless souls has comforted and sustained me over the years. Family and strangers, Jews and Gentiles, these simple people were simply good to me, though I had done nothing to deserve their goodness and though I could never pay them back. If I don’t so much believe in God anymore, I do believe in people: I believe that even in the most horrendous circumstances, there is still space for choice. No matter what the situation, people still get to determine how they will be in the world—whether good or evil, kind or cruel, or anything in between—through daily acts of choice, both large and small. Mima and Feter, Zwirek and Zosia, and all the rest of them—they made choices that helped me live when so many others did not.
I want the world to know about these people, these quiet heroes of my life.
Most of all, though, I want the world to know about Heniek, who never got to build a family to honor and remember him. I don’t want Heniek to be erased from history; I want to give Heniek his due, for he chose to be a kind and gentle man in the very worst of times. For sixty-five years, I have kept Heniek to myself. The picture Mima preserved in her shoe, creased in the middle and flaking at the edges, and the golden rings that Jadzia Fetman hid—these have been my private tokens. Every now and then—sometimes once a month, sometimes more—I go to my closet, reach back behind the folded sweaters and neatly stacked boxes of scarves, and retrieve my rings and my picture from their hiding place. Then for a few moments, I sit by myself and hold the rings in my hand and gaze at the picture, our two faces so graceful in their youth, so seemingly unspoiled, and remember again the feeling of what Heniek and I shared—that first kiss, that aching desire, those few brief weeks of hope. To know, secretly, that I was once that girl, that young girl Heniek chose to be his bride . . .
It is hard to be old, but there’s something liberating about old age, too, because finally you realize that you can claim your history in all its fullness, that you can give voice to your memory and speak its truth, and that it is not a betrayal or an indiscretion to do so.
Now I am done with secrets. Now I claim my first love, lest it die with me:
My Heniek, I loved you so.
MILLIE WERBER is today the matriarch of a close and loving family. After moving to the United States in 1946, she and her husband Jack raised their two sons in Queens, New York, where together they built a real estate business. They lived happily together for 60 years until Jack’s death in 2006. Millie now lives on Long Island surrounded by her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
EVE KELLER is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department of Fordham University. Author of Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England, she has published widely on the literature, science, and medicine of early modern England. She lives in suburban New York with her husband, two children, and a hedgehog.
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Poem on page 208 translated by Yehoshua Aizenberg
Copyright © 2012 by Millie Werber and Eve Keller.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Werber, Millie, 1927-
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-610-39123-8
Jews—Poland—Radom—Biography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Poland—Radom—Personal narratives. 4. Jewish children in the Holocaust—Poland—Radom—Biography. 5. Radom
(Poland)—Biography. I. Keller, Eve, 1960- II. Title.
DS134.72.W44A3 2012
940.53’18092—dc23
[B]
2011037794