Two Rings (12 page)

Once the barracks became a
KL
, any sense we had that working in the factory would protect us vanished. A double row of barbed-wire fencing was erected around the perimeter of the barracks; the wires were electrified so anyone who touched them would die. We were given uniforms, the striped dresses that you see in pictures—dirty gray and blue stripes and cloth so coarse it scratched whenever it touched your skin. We were allowed to keep whatever clothes we had from the ghetto, but we had to wear the uniforms every day. And there were new rules. We were told: “Do not try to escape. If anyone escapes, twenty will be killed in their place.”

The Germans were true to their word. Some people did escape. People were killed on account of them. And Heniek and I got caught up in the whole horror of it. Another Jewish policeman, Duvid Norembursky, was one of those who escaped; he was responsible for my Heniek's death.

EVERYTHING NOW BEGINS TO HAPPEN VERY FAST. THE EVENTS of the winter of 1943–1944 all happened in such quick succession, they exist in my memory as multiple strands of a single story. But it is not at all clear to me how precisely the strands are intertwined—how precisely they relate to each other, in time and in cause. I know them only as I feel them: filaments of grief and fear woven deeply into my life.

In the weeks immediately before and after the creation of the Konzentrationslager at the barracks on Skolzna Street, it was clear that life in the ghetto was getting ever more precarious. It wasn't only I who thought the factory barracks were safer than the ghetto streets. Even despite its own brand of horrors, the barracks provided some measure of protection. The roundups were fewer; the food—though only hard bread and
thin broth flecked with meat—was at least distributed every day. We were comforted with what we forced ourselves to believe: that the Germans needed us to work, that they wouldn't kill us if we worked.

In the ghetto, people longed for work at the factory. The liquidations had emptied the ghetto of most of its inhabitants; those who remained were desperate to devise ways to leave and work for the war. Duvid Norembursky, a member of the ghetto police, was one of those who found a way.

I have much to say about Duvid Norembursky; he is the villain of my story. But I need to admit that I cannot be objective about the man: I do not know what was in his heart; I do not know what in fact linked the series of events that I will describe. What I can say with certainty is that this is how we in the factory understood these events; this is how we—and not I alone—put them together to tell a story that made sense, however horrendous it was.

There was a foundry, a
kuznia
, connected to the ammunitions factory, a place of fire and smoke and molten-hot metals. Working there was one of the most feared assignments in the compound. People had to inhale sooty air for twelve hours every day, blackening their lungs, dying from within. What precisely they did there—make gun parts, repair machines—truly, I do not know. But nobody ever wanted to work there, especially the girls.

The kuznia was run by a German officer named Commandant Miller. Hundreds of men and women worked in the kuznia, of
course, but Miller also chose young girls to work specifically for him. There were fifty, I think, from Radom whom he selected. He looked for a certain kind of girl—healthy, young, robust. The girls were petrified to be chosen. I knew a girl who cut off two of her fingers in order to get out from under Miller's control. She claimed it was an accident, that her fingers had gotten mangled by accident while she was working at one of the kuznia's machines, but we all knew that she mutilated herself on purpose to make herself distasteful to this man.

How dreadful does a situation have to be for someone to force her fingers into the moving parts of a machine in order to escape it?

I shudder to think what went on in the kuznia, what happened with Miller when the girls weren't working at the fire. What did I know of such things?

One day, a friend of mine came into our barracks crying. I know this girl's name—I even know where she now lies buried in New York—but I won't say her name here. I don't know if she ever told her family what happened in the kuznia, and what if her children don't know this part of their mother's history? It's not for me to let it out. I respect her memory, and I will keep her name.

When she came into the barracks crying, she was barely able to speak. She took me into a corner, grasping my arms and trying to steady her breath. It was hard for her to get the words out. She started to tell me the things Miller made the girls do, what he did to them. As hard as it was for her to speak, it was as hard for me to hear. I didn't understand, really, what she was talking about. It's not just that I didn't have any
experience of these things myself; it's that I didn't even know that they existed. I didn't know such perversity was in the world. This, in a way, is what the war was for us—a constant confrontation with a reality we had never imagined, never knew was even possible.

Miller made this girl take off all her clothes in front of him and stretch out over a chair. He took out a rubber baton, the truncheon he used to beat people into compliance, and he pushed it down her throat to keep her quiet. And then, as he held the baton in place, his rough hand over her mouth, the poor girl choking on the thing, coughing for air, he undid his own clothes and spread her legs and forced himself on her. Neither of us had the word for this: Do you understand? I didn't know what rape was; I didn't know there was such a thing in the world. Still, I could sense what my friend was trying to tell me, this horrible, unspeakable thing. My friend was telling me a story she had no words for, a lovely, innocent girl broken by a brutal man, and there was nothing I could do to help her, to make her misery go away.

I visit her grave sometimes, and I think about this story I have never told anyone, and I hope in my heart she somehow found peace.

 

 

 

They must have known what Miller was doing. The ghetto police. They must have been aware that Miller was sexually abusing the girls. He wasn't allowed to, not because abuse was forbidden—of course not—but because he was thereby committing
Rassenschande
; literally, the word means “race shame,” but it was used to describe sexual relations between a German
and a Jew. Miller was mixing Aryan blood with Jewish blood, jeopardizing the purity of the master race.

Duvid Norembursky somehow knew of Miller's misdeeds.

Did the policeman spend his days scheming? Did he sit with the other members of the ghetto police, relishing the telling of his tale, a story that he must have hoped would win him favor in the eyes of Miller's superiors and would thereby benefit him and his family? Did it matter to him that his scheme would also likely send others to their doom? Surely it's clear from what he did after Heniek was taken away that Norembursky was a heartless man, that he was out only for his own safety, and to hell with the others. To hell with Heniek, to hell with the twelve additional members of the factory police who were taken away because of him, to hell even with his wife's own family. Duvid Norembursky was responsible for the death of them all.

Miller may have been all-powerful in the kuznia, but even he couldn't get away with committing Rassenschande. Cavorting with the impure Jewish race was strictly forbidden. At least this is what Norembursky must have thought. So Norembursky went to Miller's superiors in the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst—the Security Service—and reported Miller. It is important to understand that nothing Norembursky did then or afterward suggests that he was trying to protect the girls; he was trying to make himself look good to the Germans. A Jew acting on behalf of the Germans: a Jewish policeman protecting the purity of the German race. For this great act, Norembursky was in fact rewarded: He and his family, along with twelve other policemen in his group from the ghetto, along with their families, were all brought to the Konzentrationslager to
stay. For reporting this crime, this group of policemen was granted the better position of working in the KL, which is precisely what it seems they wanted to achieve.

But their safety meant others' demise. The factory permitted only a certain number of policemen to work there. For the thirteen who came in from the ghetto, thirteen policemen from the factory were taken away: Heniek was one of them.

He must have known it was coming.

There was competition among the various factions of police. Heniek worked in the factory for one supervisor; the police who worked in the ghetto were responsible to someone else. Miller had his own police. Every commander reigned within his own little fiefdom, everyone trying to protect what he could. Tannenbaum, who also worked for the SD, was given a small apartment in the barracks for himself, his wife, their twins, and their maid. This is why Tannenbaum felt he was different from everyone else; he was protected, he thought, by the German commander he worked for.

But not Heniek. Heniek wasn't protected. Or not enough.

He came to me one day in the kitchen. He took me over to the corner and stood with his back to the others in the room. I was happy to see him, of course; I always was. But it made me nervous to be taken away from my work like this. I didn't know what he wanted. And what if someone saw?

He reached into his pocket and pulled something out for me to take. It was a small packet of money. He said he wanted me to have it. But why should he want me to hold his money? Why shouldn't he keep it himself? Why did he think it would be safer with me?

“No,” I told him. “I don't want to hold this money; you keep it.”

“It's not to hold, Maniusia; it's to keep. The money is for you. It's a gift, for whenever you will need it.”

I continued to resist, but he became insistent: “You must take this, Maniusia. Maybe it will help you.”

He was holding my hands, looking at me with his sweet love, imploring me to take his money, as if my taking it might give him some assurance that I would manage, that this young girl he had tried to rescue could still be saved even if he could not.

He must have had some premonition. The gift was his way of saying good-bye.

He took off his wedding ring and placed it in my palm.

We said nothing to each other about what any of this meant.

I took Heniek's money and I took his ring.

I used the money not long thereafter. The rings—Heniek's and mine both—I tied together with some thread, and later that night, I put them away in a little pocket my mother had sewn into my cloth panties. I kept them there, in my panties, until the day I arrived at Auschwitz.

Several days later, the SD came to take Heniek and the other factory policemen away. Their families, too. I was maybe twenty feet from Heniek when they grabbed him on the grounds of the KL, but I couldn't get to him. I couldn't approach him; I couldn't say good-bye. I stood twenty feet away from my husband and watched the SD lead him and the other factory police out the gates of the Konzentrationslager.

It was wintertime, and it was very cold.

 

 

 

Norembursky was standing there, too, watching with what looked like satisfaction as the policemen were taken away. As
he passed, Heniek turned, glared at Norembursky hard in the eyes, and spoke. I heard his words distinctly; I can recite them: “Duvid,” he said, “I know this is your doing. I know this is because of you.” Norembursky just stood there, impassive, unmoved. He had gotten his way, no matter the cost.

What might Norembursky have felt then? What went through his mind when Heniek accused him so? They had been at school together. They had known each other for years. Did it cost Norembursky in any way to let Heniek die as he did? Did part of him, even a little bit, die, too? Part of his humanity, part of his soul? Or was it simply a victory for him to have taken someone's place? Was there only triumph now in this man's heart, that he had managed to survive?