Two Rings (2 page)

In writing Millie's story, I have had to decide how to present her character. Millie doesn't talk about her feelings, and she is not naturally given to introspection. Though she's absolutely fluent in English, her cadences and inflections owe a lot to a kind of Anglicized Yiddish—“you shouldn't know from this”; “too much I worried about these things.” Although I thought at first to restrict myself to her words only, I soon realized that, more than replicating the kind and range of sentences she speaks, my goal had to be to express what I believed was in Millie's heart, even when Millie herself didn't have the words to formulate or express it.

So I wrote what I intuited to be true of Millie's inner world—the desires and fears and hopes and judgments of a young woman, barely more than a girl. And then I read every word to her, every sentence, every revision. Sometimes I wrote things that made her uncomfortable, and we had to negotiate to decide what to keep in and what to take out. (Millie doesn't
like talking about herself as being attractive, for example, or having been attractive to men, though I can easily see how she was—and is—and the love scenes with Heniek still make her a little uneasy.) But every sentence that's written here is true to her; every sentence, though it may not so much sound like her, nonetheless to her mind bespeaks her heart, her truth, the reality she lives. “Yes,” she says, “it is true; what you have written is true.”

As for the historicity of what's written—I can say that everything that can be checked has been checked. The names of the factories in Radom, the names of the various people in charge of the ghettos and the factory where she worked and subsequently of the concentration camp where the laborers lived, the dates of the ghettos' establishment and subsequent liquidations, the death marches. Millie visited Auschwitz in 1987 and brought back a copy of a document that lists the names, birth dates, and occupations of all the arrivals on a certain day during the summer of 1944. Millie is listed, along with her aunt—both from Radom, Millie a “student,” her aunt Gittel a “seamstress.” And Millie, of course, has a tattoo—A-24542.

The rest is true to Millie's awareness and memory. She was often unsure of sequence and time frame, especially about the tumultuous winter of 1943–1944. She really has no clear sense of how long she was married to Heniek, perhaps months, though sometimes she says it was just a matter of weeks. I've tried to convey this uncertainty in the text, not pretending, after sixty-five years, that she has a full and clear purchase on the exact chronology of specific events. Millie has been determined to be as honest here as she can—about the depth of her love, about the persistence of her hate; about what she remembers
and what she doesn't; about what she has clear-cut evidence for and what she can only surmise. She knows she has no access to the causes of things—why the Germans proposed the exchange of Jews for Argentinean citizens, why there was an option of getting on a death wagon on the march to Tomaszów Mazowiecki, whether the way the Radomers put together the sequence of events leading to the death of the thirteen policemen and their families from the factory is really accurate. Millie knows that the story as she tells it is how she and other Radomers in the factory understood what happened. But however strong her accusations, she recognizes that she can't know with complete certainty what in fact did happen.

Though Millie can at times be fierce in her judgments, she herself fears the judgments of others even more. She dresses beautifully but simply, often preferring costume jewelry to gems, for example, because she doesn't want people to think her self-indulgent or, worse, that she's trying to call attention to herself. Once, despite her desire, she decided not to go to Israel for a wedding, because she had just been there a couple of weeks earlier for a long-planned visit, and she worried that people might think her extravagant, traveling such a long distance twice within a month. A gentleman friend asked her to dinner, an innocent gesture of companionship between adults who had known each other for more than a half-century, but Millie declined, concerned that others might think it unseemly for her, a widow, to dine with another man.

These are trifles, as she knows. But the fear runs deep, perhaps because exposure to judgment during the war was literally a matter of life or death. Millie never told her sons about her first husband, in large measure because she feared their judgment. She did speak about her experiences to some extent to her family, of course, and sometimes, too, in public, giving talks at synagogues and local Holocaust museums, speaking to schoolchildren, once even traveling to Germany to speak at a high school in Gütersloh, near to where she was interned toward the end of the war in a forced-labor factory. But she never spoke fully or deeply about her past, and she revealed episodes of her life only piecemeal.

This was true to some extent even with Jack. For sixty years, Millie shared her stories with Jack, who, having suffered his own experience of the war, understood whatever she said but was willing not to push when she didn't want to say more. Jack knew that she was briefly married to Heniek and that he was killed, just as Millie knew about Jack's first wife, Rachel, and their three-year-old daughter, Emma, both of whom were also killed. But they respected each other with silence, too, and never pressed the other for details.

Millie resisted telling her sons for a simpler reason—she feared their disdain. What would her children think of her if they knew about Heniek—that she was so young and so much in love; that she was caught in calamity and yet found, though only for a moment, a respite of tenderness and peace. She worried (wrongly) that they would think it improper.

But then it was fear of judgment of another kind that finally prompted her to relent. What if she died and her children never knew why she had kept silent all these years?
Might they suspect her of some wrongdoing? Might they think that she refused to speak because she had something shameful to hide? Though she knows her sons have never given her cause to worry about their judgment of her, she's been much affected by second-generation survivors whose books, to her mind, unfairly critique their parents' lives. Millie doesn't want others to wonder about her story; she wants to claim it for herself.

For sixty-five years, Millie has borne a secret, but she wants it known that her secret is both precious to her and pure. It was then; it is now.

HE WAS HOLDING A RING, TWIRLING IT BETWEEN HIS fingers. It wasn't much of a ring—a thin gold band flecked with a few diamond chips—but he was playing with it, and playing with me, saying, “Whose ring is this? Whose finger will it fit?”

It was early autumn, 1945. Jack and I were in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a small mountain town in southern Germany. I had gone there with my aunt Gittel—I called her Mima—several months after our liberation because we had heard that Radomers were there. Radom, the city we're from in Poland, had factories, like the Steyr-Daimler-Puch factory I worked in, and that meant that Radom had survivors—or at least a greater number of survivors than many other cities—because the Germans had needed workers to help make their
war. Hundreds of Radomers had made guns and bullets—the armaments of our own destruction.

Mima and I had spent the first few months after our liberation in Kaunitz, a little town down the road from where we had been freed, but when we heard that other Radomers were in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, we decided to travel the seven hundred kilometers to search for our families. I was looking for my father, and Mima was looking for her husband and son; we had last seen them about a year before, when the men and women were separated at Auschwitz. We decided to go to Garmisch-Partenkirchen even though we didn't really trust the information about the Radomers, because we had also heard that Jack Werber was there, and this we couldn't believe, because everyone from Radom knew that Jack Werber was dead.

Jack was twenty-five in 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland. Suspected of leftist leanings, he was arrested soon afterward and sent to Buchenwald on trumped-up charges of having held communist meetings in the back room of his family's store. I was only twelve when he was arrested and didn't know him, but my family knew his, and we all heard what had happened. Several months after Jack was taken away, his father was called to the offices of the Radom Judenrat and was told that Jack had died of dysentery. If he wanted, Jack's father was told, he could pay to have Jack's ashes sent back to Radom. Devastated that his son had died, Jack's father desperately wanted the ashes. He wanted to give his youngest son a proper burial in the city where his family had lived for a hundred years. So he paid, and several weeks later, a box arrived containing ashes marked as Jack Werber's.

We were so innocent then, so unready to understand what was happening. Jack's was a horrible but plausible story: He had been arrested, had been made to work at a hard labor camp, had gotten sick and died; Jack's captors had cremated his body, and out of some sense of human decency, they had offered to send his ashes home. A sane world, in wartime, might produce such a story. It made sense; it was a story his family was ready to accept.

Except Jack hadn't died. The Germans had simply found a way to extract money from unsuspecting Jews: All over Poland, Jews were told that their sons and fathers and husbands were dead and that they could have the ashes of their family members sent to them for a fee. Jack's father had buried some ashes, but not those of his son.

Had he buried someone else's child? Had he been sent the mixed remains of several people? Perhaps the ashes weren't even a person's. Perhaps Jack's father had buried a dog.