Two Rings (15 page)

And still Greenspan, tormenting me. “What am I doing here? What have you done to me? It is because of you. I am here because of you.”

It was unbearable. I thought I could take no more.

Then I heard someone calling to me in the dim light. “Mania, I know who you are. I know you are not Greenspan.”

A small man—his name was Katz. I didn't know who he was, but he apparently knew me. He was an informer, I later found out, and he had been arrested and brought to the jail because the Germans didn't trust their informers: The Germans used them, gave them protection for a time, and then executed them, along with everyone else.

Katz said to me, “I want to make you a promise. If they will take me first, I will tell them who you are. I will tell them that you are not Greenspan, and that you never worked in the kuznia. I will tell them that you are here only because of a name association. If they will take me first, I promise I will let them know.”

Why this gift? Why this kindness out of nowhere? I had no explanation, no more than I had for Zosia's grace or Greenspan's crazed accusation or Kunah's adamant insistence that he take me away. Perhaps before he died, Katz wanted to expiate his own sins. Had he informed on Jews? On his friends? Had he sent people to death? I don't know what prompted him to offer me this gift, without any hope of possible recompense. And I was never able to ask him, because soon the soldiers came and called his name. They took him out. We heard the screams. I never saw him again.

They came for me maybe fifteen minutes later. I didn't imagine that Katz's efforts could have done any good. What was now ahead of me? A beating? A shot to the head? Would the prisoners now huddle together listening to my screams as I was interrogated by the SD? What could I possibly tell them? I had nothing to say. I didn't know anything. I was so terribly afraid of being beaten.

I was led by two soldiers, each one gripping me tightly by the arm. I cannot express what I felt walking up those stairs, walking down the passageway to the interrogation room. I couldn't see clearly where I was going. I was numb; I could barely breathe. I didn't have a trace of hope.

The soldiers took me into a small room. It smelled dusty, but sharp, too, as if metal had recently been polished. There was a table and a chair and two German officers, one by the table, the other by the door. I stood still, trying to keep upright, trying not to let on how close I was to collapse. The man by the table stared at me for a moment, then walked calmly to me; he opened his gloved hand and without a word struck me hard across the face. Smack. Then again and again, the hard, smooth leather raising welts on my cheeks.

I had never been hit before. The pain was sharp, like the smell of the room, bright almost—the sting concentrating in my face but somehow also radiating through my body. I was shocked by it. I can't say caught off guard, because I knew the blow was coming, but I was shocked by the pain itself, the first flash and then the searing throbs, a pulsing in my body in rhythm with my racing heart.

I tried hard not to cry. I stood there, trying to steady my breath, trying simply to look ahead, to stare at nothing.

The officer brought his face close to mine. I could feel his breath against my cheek. “You must tell no one about this place. You were never here and you never saw anything and you never heard anything. Do you understand this? Do you understand?”

Still looking ahead, away from him, I nodded, yes, yes, I understand.

“You can go back to the kitchen,” he said, “but you will say nothing. We will know if you do. We have people who will know, and they will tell. If we hear that you have spoken about this place, we will bring you back here and you will never get out.”

And then he nodded to the man at the door, and two soldiers came in to take me out. They walked me through the hall and out the front door and to the gate of the compound, where I was met by two of the Jewish police.

With that, simply, inexplicably, I was returned from the dead.

 

 

 

Of the twenty or so people in that basement jail, only three or four made it out alive. I did, and Zosia, too, and a couple of others I heard about later. The rest were killed. Katz was killed, having saved my life. The girl Greenspan, who was said to be pregnant at the time, was beaten so badly that all her teeth were knocked out, before she, too, was killed.

When I got back to the compound, I saw scores of people waiting behind the barbed-wire fence, looking out, watching for my return. They must have heard that someone was going to be released from the place from which no one ever returned. A miracle was to happen, and people wanted to see. So there
they were, dozens and dozens of them, people I knew and people I didn't know, standing at the gates, watching me.

I didn't want to see anyone. I knew I was not allowed to speak to anyone. I walked into the compound and went silently to my barracks. Mima was there and greeted me calmly and with affection. She asked, but I wouldn't say anything about what had happened—not then, and not for years after. The Germans had frightened me so, telling me not to tell. That order embedded itself so deeply in me that I didn't—really, I couldn't—tell. Eventually, only long after the war was over, I told Jack, but only a very little, only the outlines.

This was the second time my life had been saved by a stranger. Unprompted, unrequited, first Zwirek and now Katz had offered up on my behalf acts of real goodness, of human, selfless good-heartedness. But I cannot say that the two were the same for me. I was alive, but, truly, so what? I was alive, but Heniek, I had to assume, was dead. I was alive, but to what end? To build what future? With whom?

Yes, I was relieved to have been saved. I do not wish to diminish the weight of this. But I was broken, too.

SOMEHOW DUVID NOREMBURSKY HAD MANAGED TO GET Polish papers—papers that identified him and his family as Polish rather than Jewish. He kept them as a kind of insurance policy, a backup plan in the event that his status as a member of the Jewish police might one day no longer protect him. When, soon after he arrived in the Konzentrationslager, Miller's two policemen came from the kuznia looking for him, Norembursky realized that this day had come. Miller, it turned out, was still in power; the girls whom he had abused in the kuznia had been punished—most had been killed—but Miller had managed to avert punishment for himself. Now, it seemed, he was out for revenge; he was looking to get back at the one who had reported him for committing Rassenschande. Norembursky had planned to protect himself by getting into the factory compound. Suddenly, he saw that everything was burning under his feet; the place wasn't safe for him at all.

The papers he had stashed away were for himself, his wife, his paternal aunt and uncle and their little girl, his cousin, who was perhaps eight or nine years old. He had hoped to save others besides himself. I need to remember this, because it helps me remember that there was once some humanity to the man. He didn't start out heartless.

I don't know if that makes it better or worse.

When he heard that the police from the kuznia had come looking for him, Norembursky knew he had to find a way out of the KL. To save himself, he was willing to abandon everything—his family, his humanity, too. For every one who escapes, twenty will be killed: Norembursky knew this; we all did.

He took his wife and ran.

The other three whom he had papers for, who were supposed to go with him—the aunt, uncle, and their child—they ran, too, but only after Norembursky and his wife had already left, and by then it was too late.

Norembursky and his wife escaped. I don't know the details: how they managed to escape the KL, where they hid—if they did—or whether they were easily able to pass as Poles. I know that eventually they made it to America, and I know they raised a family under changed names. I do not know about any perils they may have encountered on their journey. I do not know if they were ever afraid. I do not know if they ever suffered from nightmares for what they did. I just know that they escaped. I know what happened afterward.

They escaped. Damn them! They escaped.

The police found Norembursky's aunt, uncle, and little cousin, and they were brought back to the KL the next day.

Then the killing began.

We were made to come out to the yard—I was working my shift in the kitchen at the time. We were brought out into the fresh air, pressing together against the inevitability of what we knew was about to happen. We were made to watch.

The soldiers had with them the three who had been caught, and lined them up against a wall. The little girl was holding her mother's hand. The Germans raised their guns; someone yelled an order; they fired. Three bodies fell to the ground—a man, a woman, a child.

But the Germans needed more. Someone must have told them about Norembursky's wife's family; they were in the KL, too. So Norembursky's mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and nephew, a young boy who, I remember, was on crutches for some reason—they were found and brought to the yard. The Germans then added seventeen more, people they grabbed out of the barracks for no reason we could figure, people, as far as we knew, wholly unconnected to Norembursky or his wife. Just people, just Jews. But now there were twenty; beyond the three killed for trying to escape, there were now twenty gathered in the yard to be executed because of Norembursky and his wife.

 

 

 

I have tried, all these years, to understand the choices Norembursky and his wife made. They knew that others would be killed if they managed to get away. (And truly, there should have been forty, not twenty, according to the Germans' threat.) Did this not matter to them? When Norembursky feared for his own life, when he learned that Miller was after him and that his
position as a policeman would offer him no protection, in the immediacy of that moment did he think at all? Did he reason like a man, weighing what his escape would mean? Or did he act then only in accordance with some older, baser nature?

If you act as a beast in a moment when it matters, is it possible ever to become a man again? But then, I do not think that even beasts do this—betray a parent to save their own skin.

I heard a story once, a terrible story from Warsaw. A Jewish policeman was ordered to round up some number of fellow Jews. He did his job, but for some reason, when he was finished with the roundup, he was one man short. He needed to make up the number; otherwise, he himself would be killed. So the man went to his father and asked if he would go. Would he, the father, allow his son to take him to the Germans so that his own life—the son's life—might be saved?

I try to imagine this. I try to envision the scene:

“Father, I have come to ask you for something.”

“Yes, my son. What do you need?”

“Father, I need one more man to give to the Germans. If I do not bring them one more man, they will kill me. You are old, Father, and I am young. I am asking you, Father, will you go for me?”

How does the mouth form this question? Does the man look in his father's eyes when he asks this? Or does he turn his head away, torn between damnable desire and ferocious shame? And what is in the father's heart when he responds? What is in this father's heart when he says yes, when he agrees to go, when he submits to death so his son might live?

How is it possible for one to ask this of another human being? How does one ask this of a father?

 

 

 

Norembursky, of course, didn't even ask. He ran with his wife, knowing others would pay for their freedom.

How could they ever be free after that?

Those who died because of Norembursky did not perform an act of silent martyrdom. No one here went willingly to their death.

The soldier dragged Norembursky's mother-in-law from the barracks. Frenzied with fear, she was crying hysterically, screaming through her tears. She called out to us gathered to watch her execution.

“If any of you survives,” she shouted, “if any of you makes it out of here, you must find my daughter and tell her she will never be alone. The souls of her mother and her family will haunt her always; they will swirl around her and never let her be. This is my curse!”

That is how she died, cursing her daughter, begging us to tell her, should we ever find her, that her mother died with this curse on her lips.

These words—word for word—they have stayed with me exactly; I can recite them today just as I heard them, many decades ago.

 

 

 

Jack used to say that we cannot condemn what the Jews did during the war. The fear of dying was so great, how can we judge?

I don't know. I don't know.

I think about my own mother.

I missed my mother so desperately when I was at the factory. I didn't know if I would see her again, and I so longed for her love. A daughter needs her mother's love. Does a mother
not need her daughter's love as well? A daughter's devotion? Do we not owe our mothers some obligation, a life lived in some conscious gratitude for the life that they gave to us? Our mothers made us. How can a daughter knowingly cause her mother pain?

Soon after we were liberated and came into the town of Kaunitz, an American soldier saw that I was hungry and that I owned only the frayed dress and coat I had been given when we left Auschwitz. The American soldier took me into a small house so I could find what I needed, so I could take whatever I wanted for food, for clothes. The Germans had lost the war; the Americans had won, and now the victors could take whatever they chose. This American man was trying to extend a kindness to me. He wasn't out to terrorize anyone; he wasn't out to cause any pain. He simply thought I needed clothes. But when we entered this house, the woman who lived there was overcome with fright—her hands were shaking, her eyes wide; she kept taking steps backward to move herself farther away from this foreign man in army uniform.