Two Rings (29 page)

This is the dream. I told it once to a German psychiatrist—back in the 1950s, the German government sent me to doctors and to a psychiatrist in New York when it was working out its reparations to survivors—and the psychiatrist who heard my dream told me he thought it was “fascinating.” Then he advised me to put the past behind me and get on with my life.

Jack would try to comfort me when I awoke from the dream. He would hold me, and I would cry in his arms, and he
would make a little joke about something as he always did, and I would eventually find my way back to sleep.

 

 

 

I don't dream the dream so much anymore. But sometimes I do. Sometimes it returns, vivid and visceral as ever. And then I am again in Auschwitz, fearful of taking even a single step.

I AM OLD NOW; THERE'S NO DENYING THAT. MY SKIN IS translucent, like tissue paper; I can see my veins down the underside of my arms. My hair, baby fine to begin with, thinned out nearly to nothingness decades ago. I had a small stroke a few years back, and sometimes now I'm unsteady on my feet, but I am determined to walk without a cane.

 

 

 

It's hard to be alone. I have friends who are on their own now, widows after decades of marriage. Somehow they seem to manage, though truly I can't say what they feel deep down, in the quiet of their nights. I know for me, it is hard—really, I think, unbearably hard. I don't understand why life is set up this way, why one partner should die and leave the other all alone. True partners should die together, at one and the same time.

 

 

 

I loved Jack, and I loved the life we worked so hard to create. We built a business over decades: Jack and I made all the financial decisions together; I did a lot of the labor on my own. In the early years, even with two small children to care for, I cleaned apartments and saw to their furnishing, and I would
travel often by subway and almost always at night to collect rent payments from our tenants. I wasn't afraid; I had been through worse. Jack and I were trying to make something of ourselves, for ourselves and for our family, and we were doing it together, as partners.

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.

PublicAffairs is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.

 

I. F. STONE, proprietor of
I. F. Stone's Weekly
, combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history. At the age of eighty, Izzy published
The Trial of Socrates,
which was a national bestseller. He wrote the book after he taught himself ancient Greek.

 

BENJAMIN C. BRADLEE was for nearly thirty years the charismatic editorial leader of
The Washington Post.
It was Ben who gave the
Post
the range and courage to pursue such historic issues as Watergate. He supported his reporters with a tenacity that made them fearless and it is no accident that so many became authors of influential, best-selling books.

 

ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN, the chief executive of Random House for more than a quarter century, guided one of the nation's premier publishing houses. Bob was personally responsible for many books of political dissent and argument that challenged tyranny around the globe. He is also the founder and longtime chair of Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world.

For fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner Morris B. Schnapper , who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee, Truman, and about 1,500 other authors. In 1983, Schnapper was described by
The Washington Post
as “a redoubtable gadfly.” His legacy will endure in the books to come.

Peter Osnos,
Founder and Editor-at-Large

Poem on page 208 translated by Yehoshua Aizenberg

Copyright © 2012 by Millie Werber and Eve Keller.