Two Rings (3 page)

When Mima and I arrived in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, we found Jack living in an apartment with his cousin Itamar. Itamar, too, had survived the camps. He had set up a little boardinghouse in an apartment building in the center of town. There were about fifteen people in the place, all from Radom—mostly men, plus two of Jack's cousins, Zysla, who was eighteen, like me, and Renya, who was about ten years older.

Mima was ready to move on almost as soon as we arrived, wanting to search for her husband and son and for my father, who we had heard had all gone to Bari, Italy, the port for boats
smuggling Jews to Palestine. I wanted to go, too, but Mima thought it better for me to stay in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. I wasn't happy about this, being left behind with people who were pretty much strangers to me, but Mima assured me that Jack would look after me. Jack Werber had a good name, she said; I would be safe with Jack.

I didn't have much of a choice. I did as I was told; I stayed behind.

After Mima left, Zysla and I moved out of Itamar's building to an apartment of our own. It seemed awkward for two young women to be living together with so many men. And I wanted to pay my own way, as it were, to not feel that I was relying on the group for my support. It mattered to me that I not owe anyone anything, that I not be in a position of being asked for something I might be unwilling to give.

So Zysla and I set up in a little apartment down the street, and we came by to Itamar's apartment every morning. We had all been given food stamps, and these entitled us to a certain amount of bread every week. It wasn't enough, but everyone seemed to have a way to get a little extra here and there. One man from Itamar's group, Srulik Rosensweig, worked at the kitchen for the American army, and every few days, he would bring us some cans of soup. Zysla and I used these rations to make breakfast for everyone in the apartment. In the mornings, we would open the cans and skim from the top the little bits of fat floating on the surface. Then we'd spread the slick morsels on the bread we were able to buy with our food stamps. A carbon copy—an
odbitke—
that's what we called it: We'd press two pieces together, the fat would blend from one side to the other, and we'd have carbon copies of bread flavored with
fat. It was delicious, we thought, this breakfast. And it was exquisite to be able to eat, to have something to chew, in the mornings.

 

Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1945. Jack is in the back row, third from the left; I am third from the right

In those days, everyone was looking to start over. The young men wanted to settle down, take care of someone, and have someone take care of them. They wanted other things, too, of course, but it was marriage most of all that they were looking for. If you had a two-minute conversation with a man, he was ready to make a proposal. Even back in Kaunitz, a young man I hardly knew—we had taken an evening stroll together once or twice—gave me a letter offering me “a piece of [his] heart.”
Maybe he wanted to marry me—I don't know; I had no interest in that. But all around me, there was matchmaking going on: “How about this one? Do you like her?” “What about so-and-so? He's interested in you.” People were trying to inch forward into life.

Once we settled in with the group of Radomers, it seemed there were quite a few men interested in me. I find it embarrassing to say this, mortifying even to admit it at this point in my life. Somehow it feels unseemly to speak of myself in this way, as desirable to men. I prefer to say it more discreetly: I was always lucky with people. And that's true, I was. But it's also true that there were men who wanted me, or wanted to make a match with me. I was fairly young, and there were many more men around than women, and, well, that's the way it was. One man tried to get Jack to speak to me on his behalf—Jack joked to me later that this was like asking the cat to give his milk to the mouse. Another man from our group sometimes would come up behind me, if I was standing at the sink washing dishes or maybe tidying up around the apartment. And then he would start to sing softly to me, just by my ear, so only I could hear. He must have thought his singing was a kind of courtship, that he could woo me with his voice. But I wasn't interested in his attentions, or in anyone's. I had been married once already; I knew I wouldn't marry again.

It was different, though, with Jack. He and I were “just friends,” as the young people say today. I was fascinated by him, by his stories, and by the simple fact that he was alive.

A woman among the Radomers—Fela Gutman—advised me to stay away from Jack. She claimed that Jack was sickly, even before the war. His mother had died from tuberculosis when he was only seven years old, and except for his brother
Mannes, who had moved to America before Jack was even born, all of Jack's brothers and sisters were dead. Reared in a house that people thought was tainted by disease, growing up without a mother, eventually the only living member of his immediate family in Europe, and then made to endure five and a half years in Buchenwald—Jack was surely fragile, Fela claimed, somewhat worn out, somewhat spent.

Later I learned that Fela was speaking on behalf of the man who would sing to me—that he had asked her to try to dissuade me from spending time with Jack. But I wasn't convinced by Fela's warnings. I was intrigued more than put off by Jack's history of hardship. What kind of man could have endured what he did? What kind of man could have survived all that? Of the thirty-two hundred Jews and Poles who were taken to Buchenwald with him, only eleven made it to the end of the war. I thought there had to be some kind of strength, something unbreakable inside him, that made it possible for Jack to have survived.

So Jack and I would spend some time together every day—sometimes a walk in the park if the weather was pleasant, sometimes just moments together on the old velvet couch in the apartment's sitting room. Jack would tell me his stories about the war, reluctantly at first and only in response to my pressing him to go on. But eventually his talking eased, encouraged by my interest, and I would listen to him speak, filled with admiration and pity, in equal measure.

For the first fourteen weeks that he was interned in Buchenwald, Jack was made to work in the rock quarry. Twelve hours
a day in the frigid German winter, Jack hoisted boulders onto his shoulders and then carried them up the 150 steps to the upper rim of the quarry, where he would dump his load onto a rock pile. He wore only the single thin layer of his ragged uniform and on his feet cumbersome wooden clogs, whose hard, unbending bottoms made it nearly impossible for him to walk steadily over the uneven ground. I knew these clogs; I too suffered from them in Auschwitz: They became, literally for me, the stuff of nightmares. The punishment for falling down in the quarry or for resting from one's labors was either a beating or immediate execution. As far as Jack knew at the time, there was no purpose to this work, only the intent, precisely, to break the backs of the prisoners. He told me that dozens of men died every day in this detail, either from physical exhaustion or from getting shot by one of the fifty soldiers standing guard. One day, he told me, three hundred men left the barracks for work in the morning and only two hundred returned at night.

Jack claimed not to know how he managed to survive his fourteen weeks in the quarry—or his five and a half years in Buchenwald—but as I listened to his stories in the weeks after we met, I came to see how he managed.

In the quarry, for example, every time Jack reached the bottom of the pit, he told me, he would make a quick inspection of the stones before choosing one to lift, trying to determine which ones might look heavier than they really were. He couldn't actually test them out, by shoving them around with his foot, say, to feel their weight, because that would risk his getting noticed by a guard. He had to figure this out by sight—maybe one stone had an indentation on the bottom, maybe
another was shaped in a way that made the weight easier to distribute across his shoulders. He observed, he experimented, and over the days and weeks, he learned which stones were the best to lift.

One time, he got caught.

Jack was working in a building detail that involved carrying materials—bags of cement, heavy stones, and such—to and from a construction site. He and a partner carried their loads by holding on to the ends of two horizontal poles attached to the sides of a large wooden box in which the materials would be stacked. They bore all the weight of the box in their uncovered hands: blisters formed, then opened, and still they had to carry the box with its load bearing down on their raw and oozing palms. Jack devised a contraption to ease the pain: Scavenging among some discarded building materials, he found a bit of rope, drew it up one sleeve, across his shoulders and down his other arm; then he tied the ends of the rope to the poles. When the stinging in his hands got too much to bear, Jack would loosen his grip and let the rope across his shoulders carry the weight. An ingenious device—simple and effective and secret.

Until it was not so secret. A guard spotted the rope and charged him with sabotage for stealing the property of the Third Reich. The rope was garbage, but that was apparently irrelevant. Jack was taken to a tree, his hands tied behind his back, the rope tying them together tied in turn to an outstretched limb, and he was left to hang there, along with two other “saboteurs,” dangling backward, his shoulders slowly being pulled from their sockets.

Jack. Dear Jack. What he was made to suffer. Whatever I had been through, I had not been through anything like this. I
could feel my heart softening to him, his cleverness, his uncompromising virtue.

An SS officer accused a man Jack was working with of being lazy and, on a whim, set as a punishment that Jack should bury the man alive in a deep hole near the place they were working. When Jack hesitated, the officer told the other man to bury Jack instead. Fearful, Jack supposed, of what punishment might result from his refusal to follow the command, Jack's partner obeyed the order. He pushed Jack into the hole and began to shovel in the dirt heaped up in a mound nearby, with the officer calmly watching. As the dirt piled up, past Jack's waist and then up to his chest, Jack started to take very deep breaths, expanding his lungs to their capacity each time, hoping to create some space to breathe. Jack's fellow prisoner kept shoveling, stopping every few minutes to stomp the dirt down with his feet. He had been given a job to do, and he was trying, Jack supposed, to do it well. When the dirt reached Jack's neck, the officer, perhaps suddenly changing his mind or perhaps just tiring of the spectacle, told the prisoner to dig out all the dirt and release Jack from the hole. He scolded Jack for being unwilling to bury the man who was so quickly willing to bury him. Then the officer beat the other prisoner with his baton and walked away.

It was a lucky escape. The officer could just as easily have chosen to let Jack be buried alive as release him.