Two Rings (23 page)

I have envied people their faith. I know some who survived the war and maintained their belief in God, a God of justice and wisdom and mercy. My sons believe, and I am happy for it. They have studied Judaism well, its traditions and its texts, and they are committed to lives bounded by their faith. I marvel to see it, and it makes me proud to watch them in their knowledge and their devotion.

But not me. I cannot muster faith anymore. I wish I could; truly, I wish I could. I think it's easier to live with faith, to believe that in some way, perhaps in a way that surpasses our understanding, justice exists, to believe that there is a God who watches over us and, as our liturgy implores, who hears our voices in prayer. But I do not believe it. I cannot.

Years later, I was listening to a rabbi speak about God. He was talking about God's omnipresence, saying that God is always everywhere—everywhere and at all times aware of the
goings-on in the world. To make his point, he said that God was there, too—in the camps, even the death camps of Poland and Germany. How could he say this? Who was he to say this, that God was aware, that God was there? A God who knew and yet did nothing—this was not a God for me. I walked out. I couldn't listen to such a thing.

The only intelligent thing I ever heard a rabbi say about the Holocaust is this: There is no answer; there is no answer to tragedy.

TOWARD THE END OF 1944, MIMA AND I WERE TRANSPORTED one thousand kilometers by sealed boxcar to Lippstadt, Germany, to work at another ammunitions factory. We hadn't seen my father or Feter or my cousin Moishele since the day we arrived at Auschwitz six months before. We had no idea what happened to them. Mima and I were among the last to leave Auschwitz from our original transport of women from Radom; there were maybe two hundred of us taken by train to Germany. On the day we were to leave, we were given some things: socks—I got one red and one gray—an overcoat painted on the back with a large yellow X to identify us as prisoners should we try to escape, and, in a final token of utter insanity, a tablespoon of sugar poured into our palms. We were told, incredibly, that it was in honor of Hitler's birthday.

Sugar!

People licked it up. I tore a strip from my tattered dress and carefully poured the grains onto it; I wrapped it up, a neat
package, and held it close, a small stash against the future. I kept my bit of sugar for months: If I felt faint, if I felt I was about to black out, I would unwrap the folded cloth and touch the tip of my tongue to the tiny mound to taste a few grains of something sweet. When we were liberated three months later, I still had a tiny bit of that sugar with me.

 

 

 

From Christmas 1944 until my liberation on April 1, 1945, I worked in Lippstadt. I knew it was Christmastime, because the Hungarian commander of the women at the factory somehow managed to put together a little Christmas scene in the barracks: a bare twig for a tree and a misshapen candle standing beside it. It was heart-breaking, really; I hope it gave her some comfort.

When we first arrived, all the women who had traveled together in the boxcar I was in were put into quarantine. The Germans had heard one of us coughing violently and concluded that she must be suffering from typhus. It was a friend of mine, Ruzka Richtman, and all of us knew she was coughing because she had worked in the kuznia in Radom and that breathing the sooty air of the foundry had burned her lungs. We tried to tell the guards that no, it wasn't typhus, that her lungs had been ruined from the kuznia, but they weren't interested in our explanations. So for three weeks, fifty women were made to live in a sealed barracks to wait and see if we would all get sick.

Those weeks were interminable. Mima had been put in a different boxcar on the train to Lippstadt, so she wasn't quarantined with me. I had lost my partner; I had no one to talk to.
There was nothing to do. We couldn't go outside, we couldn't shower or clean ourselves in any way. Once a day, a guard would open the door of the barracks and hand us something to eat.

We sat. We lay on our bunks. We walked from room to room.

There was nothing to do.

I got boils. Large pockets of pus swelled up in the creases of my body, under my arms and in the folds of skin around my groin. I couldn't sit upright for the pain—my thighs pressing on the boils at my groin. When the boils broke and the pus ran out, all I could do was rip off bits of my dress and dab the infected filth with the dirty cloth.

My body was repulsive to me. I was disgusted by myself.

From time to time, the women fought. There was a big argument, I remember, about the sexual status of one of the women. Some women were saying that she was not really a woman, that she wasn't made right, that someone's mother knew someone else who had heard that this woman had gone to Warsaw to get an operation “down there.”

“No! It isn't true! I'm married even.” She begged the women to stop, to let her be. But they dismissed her, pestered her, mocked her feeble protests. Idle women, scared for their lives, quelling their fears, relieving their boredom through meanness.

Others exchanged recipes—different topic, equally absurd—how many eggs they used in a bobka, how hot to make the oven to get the best crust on a challah.

I didn't understand this, gossiping about scandals, chatting about food. Did these women think that we were going to live? That there would come a time when we would live lives in which a question about the number of eggs you used in a
bobka had meaning? It seemed so foreign to me, by this time, that there might actually exist a world somewhere where gossip and idle chatter about food mattered.

To me there was only loneliness, and there was sorrow, and there was death. In those three weeks, I gave up whatever fight I still had in me. I was consumed by my loss of Heniek. I cried for Heniek, and for myself, too. To be honest, I cried for Heniek more than I cried for Mama. I recognized the disparity then, and it pained me, because I loved Mama so very much. But my thoughts were all of Heniek and of the love and passion we had shared. For those few months with him, I had found happiness. I had let myself believe in the future and in promise and possibility. Even in the midst of war, of liquidations and executions and cruelties beyond imagining, I had let myself believe that all was not darkness and death. Heniek had let me believe in life.

Now, for three weeks with nothing to do, alone, with no partner to talk to, my mind turned inward. A thousand times a day, I watched Heniek being led out of the Konzentrationslager, walking away from me, accusing Norembursky of his crime. My mind turned all to death, to the end of everything: Heniek's death, my death. How will I die? How much will it hurt? These thoughts were my companions in quarantine.

 

 

 

After three weeks, when we were finally released—Ruska, of course, did not have typhus, and she survived the war, though just barely—we were taken to the factory in Lippstadt, where for the next ten weeks I worked again making munitions for the Germans. Not much remains with me from this time: I don't remember the exact nature of my work, though I know I
got to sit at a machine to do it and that Mima and I were on alternate shifts; she worked nights and I worked days. I don't think I saw Mima even once.

What I remember most clearly from my time in Lippstadt is the remarkable kindness of a German, a man whose name I never knew, whose face I never saw—a man who belonged to the people who sought to destroy me but who, in defiance of his people, offered instead generosity and solace.

He gave me a piece of sandwich.

I always took a little rest when we were given our break between shifts. Just two or three minutes to lay my head down and close my eyes after I had gotten my small portion of soup. This was better to me than trying to get extra soup. When the women would run up and fight each other for the
repeta
—seconds—if it was offered, I would rest instead, lay my head down and sleep, even just for a moment.

One evening, when I picked up my head, I saw a little package wrapped in brown paper lying beside me. I looked at it, but I didn't touch it, because I was worried that someone was testing me, trying to find out if I would take it, only to accuse me of stealing. So I ignored it and went back to my work. The next evening, the same thing happened—a package was left, and I refused to touch it. On the third evening, as I was resting, I suddenly felt a callused hand on my mouth; another hand covered my eyes. A man spoke to me, quietly but urgently. “Don't scream. Don't scream,” he said. “I am the one who puts down this package for you. It's me that's leaving you this package.”

He was speaking to me in simple German, simple enough for me to understand. He said, “I just want to ask a few questions.”

I didn't move, terrified at what this German might want from me.

“Is it true what I am hearing in the underground? Is it true that they are killing Jews? That in Auschwitz they are gassing Jews to death?”

Who was this man assaulting me with his hands on my face? Why was he asking about what the Germans were doing to the Jews?

I didn't trust his tone; I didn't know what to make of the sound of disbelief in his voice. He was a German; he was my enemy. Yet his voice was full of horror as he asked his questions. And he had left something for me, or so he said; he had left me some kind of gift.

He took his hands from my face. I sat motionless, afraid of whatever it was that was happening. I wanted to open the package, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I couldn't look at him; in all the years of the war—and for years after it, decades—I never looked a German in the eyes.

He tried to calm me; he could see I was terrified. He spoke gently now, still quietly, more plaintive than insistent, trying to convince me that he was on my side. He said, “You can answer me. I am here working in this factory just as you are. I am not out fighting for Hitler. I am against Hitler. Don't be afraid of me. I have been watching you, and I see that you never go for seconds. I thought you might need this more than the others. Here, look, I left this for you from my sandwich.”

And he unwrapped the little package himself and showed me what was there: a third of a sandwich, maybe. A piece of salami between slices of brown bread. A feast, this was—meat and bread to bite and chew, meat and bread to be rolled on my
tongue, the salt and the fat of it. Two bites, three bites—it was a banquet.

I don't think I had much to tell him. I confirmed, eyes down, lips barely moving, yes, they are gassing people in Auschwitz. But what else did I have to say?

He came every night and gave me a portion of his sandwich. And he came with news, too: that the war would soon be over, that the Americans and the English were on their way, and that the Russians, too, were coming from the other side.

I did believe him about this, because for some weeks already, we could hear the bombs falling not far off. We figured the Allies knew that there were slave-laborers at the factory, because the bombs landed all around, but never in, the factory complex itself. The German civilians must have known, too, because people from the town came to the factory during the raids to hide in the bomb shelters there. The Jews and Russian prisoners, of course, had to stay in the factory as the bombs fell. I told my friend Fela that I wouldn't mind dying in a bomb blast; it would be quick at least, and I suspected it wouldn't hurt too much.

Every night, I took the piece of sandwich and shared it with Fela; she was the girl who some months later would discourage me from spending time with Jack when we were in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Fela had a little gold ring that she asked me to offer to the German; she wanted to give him something to thank him for the piece of sandwich he was giving me. When I offered it to him, I explained that I was sharing the piece of sandwich with my friend; she and I were partners and shared everything we had. I could tell that he was impressed by this—that I was sharing what little he was able to give me. I know
he wished he could have brought more for us to eat, but he said he couldn't bring another sandwich with him to the factory; he was checked by the guards every morning. He wouldn't take the ring. He said we should keep it, in case we might have need of it in the future.

The following evening, when I opened the package, I saw that this man had given me a full half of his sandwich, so there would be more to share. He was now taking less for himself—he was giving up even more—so that I could share his gift with another Jew.

This was astonishing to me, the kindness of this German, the good-heartedness of this man who wanted to do what he could to help two Jews eat. I have thought about this man many times over the years. I am sorry that I was too scared to look at his face; I am sorry that I never asked his name. This man risked his own well-being for my sake—for surely he would have been punished had he been caught giving food to a Jew. Zwirek had extended such goodness two years before; Katz had done so as well. Now, yet another. A Pole, a Jew, and a German: men with kindness harbored in their hearts.

I know that I did not deserve their kindness, any more than I deserved the miseries I was made to suffer. Nothing that happened in the war made sense like that. The world I inhabited was not one in which rewards and punishments were handed out according to reason, according to any standard of justice I could discern. Life and death were the result of happenstance, of luck, of fortune—random events that never added up to anything I could count on.

BY THE END OF MARCH 1945, IT WAS AGAIN TIME TO LEAVE. The Germans at the factory apparently knew that the war would soon be over, but they didn't seem to know what to do with us: Lippstadt would fall and they would flee, but they didn't want to leave us behind to work for their victors. The soldiers assigned to the factory floor spent the hours pacing, watching us work; we could almost smell their nervousness. One evening, just before my shift was over, the young officer in charge of our group called us into the yard in front of the factory and told us we were leaving. Immediately. I could tell this was a relief to him, this decision, finally, about how to dispose of us. Instead of returning to the barracks, we were going to walk out of the compound, out of Lippstadt, and head south. The others—like Mima—who were on the night shift were called from their barracks to join us. We wore our frayed, striped dresses and the old coats we still had with us from Auschwitz.