Two Rings (17 page)

I squeezed my eyes tight; I wanted to shield my face with my hands, but I was wedged in too tightly—I couldn't bring my hands up from my sides. I wanted to shield my eyes so the rats wouldn't get at them. I thought they wanted to eat my eyes.

I was hidden from the Germans, but utterly exposed to the rats. I tried to compress myself as compactly as I could: legs forced against each other, arms tight against my sides, hands squeezed hard into fists. I pressed my lips together, I screwed up my eyes. I was a single, rigid entity, a board lying stiff under the boards. I tried desperately not to move; I tried barely to breathe. Still they came—over my face, over my eyes, into my hair.

I lay there forever, resisting every urge to thrash about. Two hours it maybe was, or maybe ten minutes—forever.

Then came a noise from outside. Someone had entered the barracks. I heard the hard thudding of someone walking with
determination, someone intent and angry. A few steps, then pause, then a few steps more.

“Where are you? I know you're here!”

It was Chiel Friedman, the Jewish policeman in charge of the KL. I had had no dealings with him personally, but I had often heard him barking his orders to us—to go here or line up there or to hurry along. His coarse, throaty voice was unmistakable—like sandpaper on stone—and there was no mistaking it now. He knew that I was one of the kitchen workers, because Heniek had had to go through him to get me transferred from the celownik to the kitchen. He had come to the barracks knowing I must be there—there was nowhere else I could be.

“Come out from your hiding! You know I will find you!”

His voice was scratchy but driven, a knife cutting into the quiet where I lay. The rats startled at his rough call and seemed to pause for a moment in their scurrying.

Don't move; don't move, I told myself, squeezing myself even tighter, contracting myself inward, my body tense, vibrating against its own pressure.

I heard his footsteps, the dull creak of the wooden boards as he walked around the floor.

Oh God! Oh God! Please don't find me. Please don't look for me here.

The rats were swarming again, crawling over me as if I were part of the ground, as if I were a piece of the earth. I willed myself not to move.

He was marching now, up and down the aisles of the barracks. He started to scream, furious that he hadn't found me. “You whore! I know you are in this barracks! I'm going to find you, Heniek's little whore!”

Was it not enough that he was hunting me down? Did he have to debase me as well? Dirty me with the stink of his slur? I wanted to scream back at him: “Heniek's wife, you animal! His wife, not his whore!”

It was some poison in Friedman, some venom in his blood that he was spewing out at me. I wanted it off. As much as I wanted the rats off, I wanted that word off me. It was an outrage I didn't deserve.

Friedman looked for me everywhere, but somehow he didn't think to look where I was. Somehow he didn't look under the floorboards, where a young girl lay trembling in fear and fury under a coat of rats.

He strode out of the building.

Feter must have been waiting outside, because he returned to the barracks almost immediately and ran to lift the floor above my head. The rats fled with the sudden light, and I pulled myself up into the air. The oblava was over.

 

 

 

The Germans seemed not to care. Now that the workers from the other kitchen took over the work in ours, I was given a job back in the munitions factory, lifting and cutting long and heavy steel bars. The job was too hard for me—I was too small to be able to maneuver the bars effectively—and somehow, though I don't remember how, I was able to use the money Heniek had given me to get transferred to another part of the factory—it was called the
montage
—where I put together some of the pieces that made up revolvers. It seemed not to matter to the Germans that I had escaped the oblava. After that one day, they didn't send anyone to come looking for me.

But it mattered to Chiel Friedman. He resented it, resented that I had managed to elude him. I think he had wanted to show the Germans how good he was at his policing job, to show them that he could ferret out the young girl who tried to avoid capture. So it angered him that he was unable to do this, that a mere girl had won. He never said anything to me about it, but whenever I saw him after that in the KL compound, he would stare at me with an intensity that frightened me, a ferocity that said, “I know who you are. I know how to harm you.” I would look away, pretending not to have seen him, not to have noticed the menace in his eyes.

Friedman was the one who had slapped my uncle and had told him that he was to be called “Commander,” to distinguish himself from everyone else. He was the one to whom my uncle would say, when they were liberated together from Dachau, “For me the war has ended, but for you it has just begun.”

So it was for Friedman. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him after the war. He went to Garmisch-Partenkirchen along with the many other Radomers, but people didn't want to know him. People had so many things against him, he was afraid even to leave his house.

Eventually—and reluctantly—he married a woman he thought beneath him. Like most of the Jewish police, Friedman had his matura. He was intelligent, educated; he came from a family rich enough to send him to school. Before the war, he would have been considered a good catch. But this woman he married was
prost—
common, vulgar; she came from
a lowly family, barely more than peasants. She was strongly built and burly, like someone made for physical labor. People said she looked like a cow. In Poland, before the war, she might have been his maid.

Friedman married her—Chava was her name—but only because he saw that he was a lost man, that he had no chance in Germany. I think he believed that at some point, the Jews might even kill him. Chava had family in Canada, and she proposed to him that if he married her, he could go to Canada with her and start over, away from the Radomers who reviled him. He was reluctant, but he was desperate: Chava offered a way out.

Here is the amazing part. When he married Chava, this woman he didn't love, this woman he believed was so much beneath him, he actually invited Jack and me to the wedding. Jack, it turned out, was a cousin of his, and Friedman had no other family to invite.

Had Friedman forgotten what he had done to me? How he had searched for me and cursed me as the rats ran over my face?

We declined the invitation.

Years later, he came to my house. It was probably the 1970s by then. Jack and I had become close to his sister, Luba, and once, when she was visiting from Israel, she asked if her brother could meet her at our house in New York. Luba had not seen him at all in the decades since the war. She never talked about him with us, and we never asked her what she knew about the things he had done. I supposed she asked us to meet him in our house because she wanted to see him somewhere where their own conversation might be moderated
by others around. Chiel (as we called him by then) flew in from Toronto, and we offered to pick him up from the airport and bring him over for a couple of hours so he and Luba could talk. Mima and Feter were living next to us at that time in Jackson Heights, and I kept from them the news that Chiel was coming—Feter would never have permitted it; he never would have sanctioned Chiel's stepping into my house.

I have to say, even after everything, I felt sorry for him: He suffered so much—from fear, maybe, or from guilt, I don't know. When Jack and I met him at the airport, I could see that he was looking around, checking all about him to see if anyone was out to get him. He was in New York, a city of millions, and yet he was afraid that some Radomer might be lurking somewhere in Idyllwild Airport, waiting in a corner to pounce on him.

He came to the house, sat in my living room, and spent two hours complaining. How he was being so badly mistreated by the Radomers, how people were exaggerating the things he had done, telling lies about his past. What had he ever done that was so bad? That deserved such treatment? And who, after the war, he wanted to know, had done so much for someone else?

It was true, that part. Chiel had been married before the war—his wife and son both died in Auschwitz—and this woman, Chiel's first wife, had a brother who had paid a Polish family to take in his young daughter during the war. But the father, Chiel's brother-in-law, didn't survive, and after Chiel came to Canada, he spent a lot of effort—and I'm sure a lot of money—tracking down this girl in Poland. At first, the little girl didn't want to go with him—she had been raised Catholic
by people she thought of as her parents—but she did eventually agree to go, provided that Chiel would promise to take care of her Polish family. He sent a sewing machine to the little girl's “sister,” and he sent monthly packages to her “parents.”

Chiel took in his brother-in-law's daughter and raised her as his own. Yes, this is true. But why did he do this thing? He claimed it was proof of his goodness, that only a good man would have gone to such trouble for a child not his own. But I think he did it for himself, to make himself feel better about whatever he had done during the war. I don't even think he was trying to atone, because that would have meant coming to terms with his past; that would have required some inner reckoning, some recognition that he had done wrong during the war. I don't think Chiel was ever capable of that kind of self-reflection or self-knowledge. His habit was to make excuses for himself: He had been afraid for his life; he had wanted to protect his wife and his son. Of course, he never said these things—not to me, not to Jack. I don't think he would have said them to anyone. But I believe he said them to himself, at night, perhaps, when maybe it would have been hard to fall asleep. Then maybe he would remind himself, again and again, that he had raised his niece as his own, which surely proved that he was a good man, after all. Wrapping himself in half-truths, trying to bring comfort to his quiet hours, to bring calm to his conscience at night.

 

 

 

All of us, I suppose, tell ourselves stories about our lives, stories that make it easier to live with ourselves and the choices we have made. If you tell yourself a story long enough and often
enough, you might in fact come to believe it: “I didn't have a choice. I was only trying to protect my family. And look, I raised this child.” You might even come to substitute the good version of yourself for the truer but more insidious one. But I don't believe that in a sane mind, in a sane man, that substitution can ever be complete; some part of you must always know the cruelty at your core. And that must be hell.

Though I could never soften to Chiel, I believe I eventually forgave him. It was so clear to me that he was living in a jail after the war. That jail was built by the Radomers, to be sure, but all his self-justifications, all his storytelling—these were part of his jail, too. He wanted to turn his back on the truth of his past in order to find some peace for himself in the present. To the day he died, I don't think he found it.

I REMEMBER ALMOST NOTHING ABOUT MY LAST FIVE OR SIX months in the KL at Radom. After the ruin of winter, the earthquakes and aftershocks, what was left? Darkness, maybe; a sense of nothingness. My life had exploded in the tumult of those days, though surely I shouldn't here be using terms drawn from the natural world to describe them. These weren't natural disasters, not natural events even in the mystifying course of human history. Those several weeks during the winter of 1943–1944 were, for me at least, an eruption of the worst humankind was capable of; they tore from me any sense I may have had that life was for living, that life held in store riches and promise and pleasure. Having lost Heniek—and because of a Jew, no less—I felt I had lost everything. It felt almost an affliction to live, an emptiness to be endured.

Still, I must remember Zosia; I must remember Katz. And Szlamek, too, and Feter, who told me where to hide. I must
remember their simple goodness when my own life was imperiled, for their goodness was true, too, flickering in the dark.