Two Rings (10 page)

These comforts, these minor pleasures—the barest hints of normality—I owed to Heniek, who had done I-don't-know-what to get me there.

 

 

 

Heniek came into the kitchen every now and then, as I have said. It was at the end of my work shift one day that he told me he had something to discuss and we should go outside.

It was getting dark, and he spoke to me in the shadows of the fading light outside the kitchen building. It was hard to understand what he was saying, what he was proposing. It was so wild a thought, so drastic, so miraculous, so frightening.

Heniek told me that the Germans were organizing an exchange. Anyone with Argentinean citizenship living in Poland would be allowed to leave with his or her family and return to South America; Argentina, in turn, would presumably release any German nationals living there. Heniek himself was Polish, of course, but his sister had married a man with Argentinean citizenship, and this man, Heniek's brother-in-law, had offered to register Heniek as his brother. Heniek would then be able to take his own family with him and escape to South America. Heniek was proposing to take me. He was proposing that we get married.

Outside a barracks kitchen in the diminishing light, hidden in the shadows so that no one will see, I feel faint at Heniek's side, suddenly overtaken by an idea I don't fully understand, by questions I don't know fully how to frame. To escape this! And with Heniek! To be with him, to go someplace safe, someplace not here. To live a life, to go where we please. Might there really be a future, Heniek, for me? Might there be a future, Heniek, for us?

But Argentina. Where is this place? Far, far away—this I know. Across a wide expanse of sea, another world entirely. I have heard stories, Heniek, from my childhood. Bedtime horror stories about this place. Men come to Europe from
Argentina, and they entice girls off the streets and lure them back to South America and turn them into whores. How can I go to a place like that? And can I leave my family behind? Mima and Feter, and my father, too—there are so few left to me. Am I to desert them?

I need to think; I need to find a resting place from the dizzying swirl of questions in my head. I should be back in the courtyard exchanging playing cards with my friends. I should be back on Wolnosc Street helping Mama make Friday night dinners. I should be spending my nights warm beside her, pestering her to make me a new dress. How am I to make a decision like this? I'm only sixteen; I don't know how I am supposed to figure this out.

I must get to the ghetto, to see my aunt and uncle and my father. I need to ask them what I should do.

I sit here now from this long distance across the decades, trying to understand how the mind of a young girl goes. I am trying to find her, to ask her how this plan, this proposed exchange, could have made sense. But it wasn't just me, of course; it was all of us—what we were willing to believe, what we willed ourselves not to know.

To be fair, there had been a precedent, two even. I think it's fair to say that there were two.

A Radomer woman who had immigrated to Mandate Palestine before the war had returned to Poland at some point on a British visa. Golda Graucher was her name. She had two sons with her, but one of them—Natan Chaim, just ten years old—
had died while they were in Poland. Sometime before Heniek spoke to me about the exchange with Argentina—it might even have been a year before—Mrs. Graucher had been allowed by the Germans to return to Palestine, and she had managed to take with her a ten-year-old Radomer boy, Eli Gottlieb, on her dead son's visa. So here was an example of the Germans letting someone, even a Jew, with a foreign visa leave the country.

Did I think of this story then? This boy was Eli Gottlieb, not Natan Chaim Graucher, and yet he had made it out of Poland. Did I reason it out, that if they let Eli Gottlieb leave, they might also let me leave? Eli Gottlieb made it to Palestine, changed his name to Eliyahu Ben-Elissar, earned advanced degrees at the University of Paris and the University of Geneva after the war, and eventually became the first Israeli ambassador to Egypt. All this because he had managed to escape Radom by pretending he had both a nationality status and a name that weren't in fact his own.

Then, too, there were those from Argentina itself. There was a young girl I knew from the ghetto; her name, I remember, was Henia Friedman. I later found out that she was part of Heniek's brother-in-law's extended family, but I didn't know that, of course, in the ghetto. I knew she had been born on a boat in Argentinean waters and that she therefore had Argentinean citizenship. I don't imagine I understood what that meant in any official way, but I knew that citizenship gave her certain privileges in the ghetto. She was not required to wear the armband bearing the Magen David that identified us as Jews. She was able to keep—and even to wear—her leather coat. And she was allowed to leave the ghetto without getting
specific permission. It was astonishing to us that she could come and go through those ghetto gates, that she could pass by the police standing guard there, without any problem at all. It was as if she weren't even a Jew, as if she were free.

So there was some logic here. I have to believe that logic played some part in our readiness to accept that this exchange could take place and that some number of Jews would be allowed to leave.

Heniek arranged for me to return to the ghetto one afternoon. Another policeman escorted me there—I wouldn't, of course, be allowed to go alone, and I preferred not to go this time with Heniek. The policeman left me at the ghetto gates and told me to meet him there a couple of hours later. That's what I would have—two hours to figure out my future, two hours to decide if I should leave what family I had remaining to me, leave the only place I had ever known, and travel across what seemed a limitless ocean to a place I had barely heard of.

My family seemed to think there was less to discuss than I did. No one asked me if I loved Heniek, if I would be happy trying to build a life with this man who had asked to marry me. That didn't matter. Only one thing mattered—that the exchange was a way out of Radom, out of Poland, out of the war.

“Go,” Feter said. “If you have a chance to go, then you must go.”

Feter had thrown me out of the apartment in the ghetto the year before, to force me to return to the factory; now he was pushing me out of the country.

They were desperate, I see that now. Since almost the entire population of the ghetto had been deported, rumors had begun to spread about what deportation meant. A Pole had been paid to follow a train on his bicycle to see where the trains went. Jews were taken from Radom on trucks; from trucks they were loaded onto trains. But where did the trains go? The Pole returned with news of a camp of some kind near Treblinka village. He had heard it was a place where Jews were killed—gassed or shot, hundreds at a time. He had heard that thousands of Jews entered the camp, but none ever left.

Feter must have been thinking of this Pole. My uncle was adamant. I must go. He must have been desperate to keep me from Treblinka. Perhaps, too, he was thinking of his own daughter; perhaps he was thinking of Chava.

Chava had been killed the year before.

Chava had been petrified living in the ghetto. She was six years old and wracked by nightmares in that cramped room on Szwarlikowska Street. She would wake in the night, clutching at her mother and screaming—shrieking, really—“The Germans are coming! The Germans are going to kill me!” Mima would gather her up in her arms, stroke her hair, and try to lull her gently to sleep.

“Hush, my child, hush. Everything will be all right.”

Mama and I, in the next bed, would return to sleep to the sound of Chava's whimpers.

Feter, I think, was more aware than the rest of us of how truly dangerous the ghetto was. More than the rest of us, he was always working to see if he could find a way out for the family. He had made that trip to Russia early in the war to try to arrange passage for Mima and their children. When he returned to Radom after that didn't work, he eventually found
and paid a Polish family to hide his children—Chava and Moishele—for the duration of the war. Both were too young to be accepted for work, and so both were in special danger. He knew how frightened Chava was living in the ghetto. Chava and Moishele lived with the Polish family for some months—perhaps even half a year—but several days before the large deportations in the summer of 1942, the woman of this family came to the ghetto to give the children back. She must have heard that the deportations were coming and decided it was too dangerous to shelter Jewish children.

Desperate and with no other options available, Feter decided to hide his children at the local tannery where he worked. By this time, Feter had already forced me out of the apartment to work in the factory; he told me what had happened only later, after it was all over.

When the deportations came, Feter had the children with him in the tannery. They were hiding somewhere near him, though I don't think he told me precisely where. Perhaps they were secreted in a closet; perhaps they cowered behind a heap of leather. When the Germans entered the building to search for anyone not supposed to be there—like children—Chava suddenly found her nightmares coming true. The Germans had come, and they were going to kill her. All of six years old and terrified for her life, she bolted from her hiding place and ran.

She was caught, of course, before she could even get out of the building. Feter watched as his daughter was grabbed up by a soldier and carried out, kicking her legs and crying out to her father for help.

Later that day, Feter was told by a friend what happened next. The tannery abutted a small park called the Peltze Guten, and there the Germans had dug—or, more likely, had
had their workers dig—a large ditch. The soldier threw Chava into this ditch, and then he threw in a grenade.

Was Feter thinking of Treblinka when he told me one year later to go to Argentina with Heniek, a man he barely knew? When he told me that I must get as far away from Poland as I could, was he thinking of Chava?

My two hours were up. There was no debate. Feter announced it, and Mima and my father agreed: I had to go.

 

 

 

I returned to the barracks and found Heniek. I was frightened, of course, frightened of everything—of the venture, of leaving my family, of being a wife at sixteen. But I was excited, too; I must acknowledge this—I was excited for the vibrant possibility of it all, for the joy of saying yes.

Yes, Heniek, yes. Yes, I will marry you. Yes, I will go with you to Argentina.

Heniek took me in his arms and looked at me with such a searching gladness in his eyes that I really did believe that we could escape that place and live together somewhere in deep and unburdened love. And then he kissed me on my lips—a wondrous, lingering kiss. I pledged myself to him and he to me—that we would love each other always, wherever we would be. And I was happy—it is so hard to say this, even now, even after everything—I was happy in my Heniek's arms.

We agreed on a date, just a few days later. We would be married.

 

 

 

I returned to the ghetto one more time to get a ring. My family thought it important that I be able to give Heniek something.
Not a dowry exactly, but some material token of my family's thanks for the escape Heniek was offering me. Feter gave me a little money, and I went to a friend of the family's, a goldsmith named Menashe Friedman, who had managed to keep a small, secret business going in his ghetto apartment. I asked him to make a ring for me—a band with Heniek's initials, HG, engraved in low relief on the outside.

Menashe didn't want to take my money; it seemed he wanted me. He said he would make the ring for free, only, he said, I mustn't go to Argentina.