My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel

by Dana Fitzwater Cornell

  Why aren’t we blessed with foresight?

  CHAPTER 7

  One snowy, bleak day in December of 1938 I was at home ill with a coughing spell when our mail carrier handed my mother a letter that caused her face to fall and her skin to flush, as if she were the one who was sick, not me. She stood in the doorway leaning on the doorframe for support, slowly shaking her head, her cheeks reddened. She didn’t seem to notice the snowflakes that were finding their way onto her hair. Right away, it was clear that mother had received unsettling news.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked her with hesitation, my eyelids heavy from the recent shot of vodka mother had given me to quiet my cough.

  “No, Henryk, it’s not,” she sniffled.

  Then she slipped past me and went into her bedroom, leaving me without answers, wrapped up in a cocoon of blankets on the sofa. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I remember is seeing my mother and father hunched over the letter at the kitchen table. I remember how somber the mood felt and how dimly lit the room was. The only lamp they had turned on was the smallest one in the room; it provided barely enough light to illuminate the brown paper of the smudged letter.

  Mendel must have been spending the night at one of his friend’s houses, as he frequently did, because I can’t recall him being in this memory. I felt like a small child as I tried to remain as still as possible under the mask of my blankets, barely opening only one of my eyes so that I could see what was unfolding in the adjacent room. Had Mendel been there, he would have done the same thing. Ever since we were young, we always pretended that we were asleep when we wanted to listen in on our parents’ conversations. Now that I think about it, I bet they always knew that we were faking it. I’m sure our whispers gave us away.

  Words like “Nazis,” “Jews,” and “regulations” were mentioned frequently during my parents’ discussion. These words caught my interest, so I held my breath and swallowed back coughs, continuing to lay as still as possible, all the while begging my ears to cancel out all the sounds other than the ones coming from the kitchen. Despite my best efforts to remain undetected, several minutes into my eavesdropping I made the mistake of reaching my hand out to the side table for my glass of water. I miscalculated how far away it was from my fingertips, which resulted in it cascading to the floor. Damn, I thought. So much for being slick. My cover had been blown.

  My father, still dressed in his dark overcoat, seemed oddly happy that I was awake. He called me over to the table, told me to leave the glass on the floor, and pulled out a chair for me. I sat down, and my mother gave me a worrisome smile. They then read me the letter and gently described in detail what it meant. They explained that this was not the first such letter Hanna had sent, but it was the most disconcerting.

  “Do you understand what we are telling you, Henryk?” my father asked.

  I looked at both of my parents, stunned, unsure of what to think.

  My father tried to pacify me. “We called you over because we’re upset that your mother’s friend is in serious trouble. Bad things are happening over in Germany. We’re worried about her and the other Jews living there. It’s horrible what’s happening and you’re old enough to know about it. We’re really scared for them, but there’s no reason for you to fear for our safety. I know we’re Jewish, too, but we don’t follow Jewish customs. Besides, we live in Poland not in Germany. We can’t let events in distant places consume our thoughts. We have nothing to worry about here.”

  At this point I suppose it’s important to tell you that I was born into a nontraditional Jewish family. We were Jewish on paper, but I never actually felt as though I was Jewish growing up. My family didn’t attend synagogue, follow ritual customs, or celebrate most of the high holidays. My family came from a long line of Jews but we respected all religions. In fact, although we observed Hanukkah, we also celebrated Christmas. As a child, being Jewish wasn’t something I really thought about. Just like you don’t choose your height or your hair color, you don’t choose what religion you are born into. However, when the war broke out, a nonissue became a paramount issue.

  Unlike father, mother was unconvinced of our security. Her nervous tic of twisting her ring made an appearance during our discussion. She cast her gaze downwards at her hand movements and let out a deep breath, gathering her thoughts. After a few brief, heavy moments she began to speak. I don’t remember her words literally, but when I piece together the threads of my recollection, her soliloquy was similar to this:

  “My letters to Hanna have been my one source of privacy. We treasure our correspondence and we confide in each other; some things we don’t even tell our husbands. Over the years she has shared trivial details of her life as well as deep-rooted secrets. For the past five or six years her letters have depicted an underlying somber mood. I assumed maybe she was suffering from malaise, but it turns out it’s something far more serious—something outside of herself that is the source of her sadness. Up until this letter she would lightly write about changes occurring within Germany that were displeasing to her, but changes that didn’t seem to be too taxing to assimilate to or to overcome. The situation has progressively gotten worse. It began with new laws and has now escalated into violence. It’s a very dangerous time for the Jews in Germany. You’d never know it if you just listened to the radio and read the newspapers. I’ve been concerned for quite some time because of Hanna’s letters, but other neighbors are getting letters from their friends in Germany, too, and now we’re very worried. Hanna said that the maltreatment started out slowly. When Hitler came to power Germany rejoiced. As time went on he became more and more powerful, becoming Chancellor and establishing the secret police force, the Gestapo. Soon after, he started his systematic attack against the mentally ill and physically incapable. New laws were put into place that outlawed all existing political parties except for the Nazis. People were incarcerated. The Nazis consider the Jewish race to be inferior. Now the Jews have to register and carry identification cards and women have to add “Sara” to their name and men have to add the name “Israel.” The Jews are discriminated against in public places and it’s challenging for them to find work as they can no longer keep their businesses. It is incomprehensible to me, but Hanna said a new subject is being taught in schools that is about comparing the physical traits of Aryans to those of the Jews. Her children were humiliated because they were forced to stand up in the front of the classroom as their teacher placed a ruler on their faces and measured the angles and lengths of their features as the other children insulted them, laughing as they pointed to them and then to the pictures in their textbooks. During breaks at school the children play board games, including one where the goal is to force Jews out of the country. At other times, the teacher reads to the class from anti-Semitic picture books. Exaggerated caricatures are being drawn of the Jews and the propaganda is everywhere. The other children tell them that they are ‘Christ killers’ during Christian holidays. Can you imagine how they must feel? It’s beyond horrible. The Jews can’t even have bank accounts without declaring how much they have, which is very limited. And now, the latest news is that in the beginning of November there was a massive attack on Jewish synagogues, businesses, and houses. Buildings were burned to the ground. Mobs of people entered Hanna’s apartment complex, trashing Jewish homes. They even tore apart her bedding, sending feathers flying all over her bedroom for no reason other than spite. Thousands of Polish-born individuals have already been expelled from Germany. Hanna’s husband can no longer maintain ownership of his tailoring business and her children have now been forbidden from attending school. Even valuables that they have collected over the years are not safe from Nazi confiscators. The nation is in pandemonium. Jews have been the target of deadly attacks and public hangings in the streets. Hanna and her family are living in fear for their lives. She doesn’t know how they will pay for food or rent. She, like so many others, never believed that a nation could turn and stab its citizens in the back. But it did
happen; it’s happening right now to people just like you and me. And to make matters worse, she spent months fighting to get the necessary papers for her family to emigrate, but she couldn’t get permission to enter another country because so many others were filing at the same time that quotas had already been filled. She had hoped to go to Palestine or America, but she looked into going to many other countries, as well. However, even if her paperwork had been approved, she hadn’t amassed enough money to leave Germany. Her family is trapped in a country that doesn’t want them.”

  Following this lengthy, emotionally charged explanation, which I’m convinced must have included many more details concerning the grim situation in Germany, my mother began to cry. She was certain that Hanna was in imminent danger and that we might be, too. I knew that Poland bordered Germany, but I didn’t believe that Hitler cared about Poland. Why should he?

  My father expressed nonchalant viewpoints about the issue and sent my mother to bed with cooing noises and a glass of warm milk. He always found it easier to skirt around sensitive issues than to confront them straight on.

  I soon learned that my mother’s fears were justified.

  That was the last letter we ever received from Hanna. We never heard from her or her family again. Those three sheets of paper with her grave words, along with a desk drawer full of letters, were all my mother had left of her, and even those crumbled and decomposed over time.

  CHAPTER 8

  Within months of receiving Hanna’s letter, I noticed a sharp rise in anti-Semitic behaviors in my town. The social climate was changing rapidly all across Poland. Hostility was increasing. I became scared.

  In an attempt to preserve our normal day-to-day routine, father devised an ever-stricter list of rules to contain us. Errands were combined and pre-approval to leave the house was required. Our routes to and from the house were carefully plotted such that we would avoid notoriously bad problem areas around the city where Jews were frequently hassled. While my father’s minor changes were annoying, I considered them to be reasonable, at least in the beginning. However, he soon forbade us from listening to the radio or spending unnecessary time away from the house altogether. He became consumed in his own thoughts. When he wasn’t in his workshop, he spent the entire time we were gone staring out the front window—chain smoking and mumbling to himself—waiting for us to return home. We went from gathering together in the living room around our precious Philips tabletop radio soaking up the entertaining programs and news broadcasts for hours on end each night, to turning it on for only a few minutes every couple of days, to not listening to it at all. As far as father was concerned, radios had mutated from family-friendly appliances to propaganda delivering devices. He warned us about the dangers of listening to such nonsense, which he said had one goal: to evoke fear.

  Despite father’s warnings, mother couldn’t help herself from tuning in and listening. I caught her with her ear pressed to the speaker, the volume barely audible, more than a few times. When she realized that she was being watched, she would casually sweep her hands across the walnut finish, complaining about how dusty it had become from lack of use. Father must have gotten wind of her cleverness because one day the radio was gone. The living room seemed empty without it. In response to our questions about its disappearance, father answered us with silence.

  By the spring, when anti-Semitic posters were plastered all over the city and Poles were declaring their disdain for goods offered in Jewish stores, he even limited my time at his shop, insisting on teaching me from our home on most days. When our Jewish neighbors invited us to attend private roundtable discussions about the changing political and social climate, he declined their invitations while mother stood by, her lips parted, eager to protest, but she never did. Father didn’t want to believe that our lives were in danger and he certainly didn’t want us to discuss hypothetical situations with “irrational” individuals. His aim was to keep us as sheltered from the outside world as possible, thereby limiting our exposure to the mounting anti-Semitism around us. Like a turtle, he wanted us to tuck our heads into our shells and drown out the hateful stares, the malicious jibes, and the vicious actions. What he didn’t know was that by forcing us to live in a dreamland he ultimately cheated us out of the ability to react to the changing landscape. By failing to react, we weren’t able to adapt, and by not adapting, we were unprepared for the future.

  At some point, the invites stopped.

  When friends and neighbors began pouring out of the area, we remained cowered together in our home. Because my mother respected my father’s role as the head of our household, she eventually gave up pleading with him to address her concerns. I wish she had listened to her own intuition and stood up to him, telling him that despite his eternal optimism—or more aptly, despite his eternal stubbornness—we had to flee the country. The only occasion when my parents ever interacted with others was when their friends dropped by for card night. But it wasn’t the same jovial, relaxed gathering it used to be. Father insisted that conversations be kept to lighthearted banter; couples who broke this rule, mostly by mentioning Nazi-related worries, were shown to the door and banned from returning. Tempers flared as the violators, usually the men, with their voices cracking from disgust, yelled phrases of warning as the door slammed behind them, such as: “You can shut me out, but you can’t shut out reality!” and “Damnit, Stefan! Wake up and look around,” and “Make your preparations to leave before it’s too late!” The wives would clutch their purses looking embarrassed and apologetic as they followed behind their husbands. Mother remained seated at the table, nervously rubbing her fingers or fanning her cards. Father would suck on his cigarettes as if everything was on an even keel. By that point, the frequency of these get-togethers had decreased and, for obvious reasons, eventually no longer took place. When we began receiving letters from friends who had already left Poland, my father tore them up and put them in the trashcan before my mother had a chance to read them. We became even further secluded from the outside world.

  In quiet moments when my brother and sister were asleep and my father wasn’t around, my mother continued to confide her concerns to me. During these encounters she spoke to me as if I were her peer, her ally, and told me to always fight for survival no matter how difficult. She wanted to leave Poland like her friends advised us, but she didn’t want to question father’s judgment.

  My mother became ever more concerned about our safety after our local baker was found murdered in the alley behind his store. She was unrelenting in her belief that our family would be faced with life or death situations in the near future. I sipped up her words of advice like tea.

  She became obsessed with our survival.

  “If given the chance, always choose life,” she admonished one night. “Even if all around you people are giving up and giving in to the easier path, you must continue fighting. Pain is temporary, death is permanent.”

  Why couldn’t she talk to father the same way she spoke to me? Would it have made a difference? Why didn’t I confront him?

  I had never heard her speak like that. It frightened me. It still baffles me how my mother knew what words and advice I would need to hear then in order to pull me through situations in the future where I would stare death in the eyes and say “no.” I promised her that I would survive no matter what the future held. In truth, I was unconvinced of my self-survival skills; but I told her what she wanted to hear.

  Her words made me think about the capabilities of my body. That night I tossed the topic over in my head, thinking about how much pain I could endure, how much stress I could deal with, and how much heartache I could tolerate before I crumbled and cracked under the pressure. I had no idea what my body’s limitations and thresholds really were. On a pain scale of one through ten, I’d probably only experienced a two, maybe a three. However, during the following years I would find out what a ten felt like. Beyond that, the pain was immeasurable.

  Even so, to sit here and blame my fath
er for our fate would be indecent of me. He loved us and he did what he thought was best for us. Based on his later actions, I believe that he was aware, to some degree, of what was to come. Ultimately, he just wanted to keep us from panicking. If we panicked, perhaps he would have, too. Did he make the right decision? It’s impossible to know. How could any of us have known the true horror that would transpire? The idea that millions of us were in danger just didn’t seem plausible, much less possible. No, I can’t fault my father for our fate.

  I’m still haunted by the fact that we could have left Poland before the war, but so much was clouding our minds at the time. Even though people were leaving, so many others were staying.

  By the time father changed his mind on the issue, it was far too late. Hitler’s wrath had paralyzed the approximately three million Jews as well as other “inferior” groups in our country.

  CHAPTER 9

  The day my mother had predicted—the day that irreversibly changed my family’s life—arrived on September 1, 1939 when Germany unleashed its military manpower on Poland in a series of well thought out attacks. The Nazis rapidly advanced along the countryside via the air, land, and water. A new type of fighting unlike anything the world had seen before was introduced—lightning warfare, or “blitzkrieg.” From kilometers away bombs and shellfire could be heard. The Polish Army scrambled to fight the invading Germans, but without adequate artillery to annihilate the Nazis, they ultimately fought a losing battle, though they fought valiantly nonetheless. The Nazis flew on reconnaissance missions, which aided them in attacking strategic locations. In fact, when the bridge over the Vistula River (a body of water bisecting Warsaw) was destroyed, rather than being deterred, the Germans utilized their men to repair it and then to cross over it. While living through the horror, I wasn’t aware of such details; I learned of them only later. All I knew at the time was that Germany was blasting away at my dear hometown, attempting to destroy it and its citizens.