My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel

by Dana Fitzwater Cornell

  People gathered in small groups, discussing what the future might hold and what could be done to combat it. Some people thought it was best to go along with the regulations while others felt it would be better to struggle against them. It was impossible to avoid partaking in the conversations; and my father couldn’t stop me because I wouldn’t let him. I just couldn’t ignore them like I did before the war broke out. I had to know what was going on around me.

  It seemed like my whole world was changing, but I was only seventeen and Warsaw was the only place I had ever known. I couldn’t fathom how my parents or my grandparents, who had called Poland their home for decades, must have felt. We were living in a ruined city amongst combative, racist strangers from Germany who were seeking to ever condense our rights.

  During this year my father broke down in despair and never fully regained his composure. One day, sensing something horrific was about to take place, he told me to leave his shop soon after I arrived, only to return home himself an hour later. He had barely walked through the doorway when he slumped down into a kitchen chair without bothering to take off his hat.

  “They took my business away,” was all he said to us as he untucked his shirt and loosened his tie. “They took my business away.”

  My mother attempted to console him, but nothing could be done to make the situation right. We didn’t dare to ask him questions. We all knew what had happened. From that point on, all of the life seemed to have been drained from him as he went through the motions of daily existence without consciously experiencing them. I’ve always wondered if he felt a tremendous sense of guilt for forcing us to live such a sheltered lifestyle prior to the war—for not coordinating plans for us to leave Poland while we still had a chance of escaping before the Nazis restricted our movements. I would refer to that as the day my father’s soul died, even though his heart was still beating.

  Luckily, my father had earned enough money the previous year to sustain us, at least for a few months. Heeding the warning from Hanna, he had withdrawn our money from the banks and had stashed it in a tin can buried beneath some old rags in the bathroom closet. Because of that action, I know that he was more alert to the painful reality of the situation than he ever let us believe. Others weren’t so fortunate and when they were laid off they had to resort to taking their meals at local soup kitchens organized by groups like the Jewish Mutual Aid Society.

  When the construction of brick walls around Warsaw began in the latter part of 1940, our fears as a Jewish community quickly multiplied. When I walked past these construction sites I saw Jewish men, not German soldiers, laying the red and brown bricks. Now they’re making us build our own prison? I asked myself in disbelief.

  Meanwhile, Jews who had friends and family living in other parts of Poland spread the rumor (later confirmed) of a newly built quarantine area in Lodz. Could that be our fate as well, I wondered?

  CHAPTER 13

  By November of 1940, the construction of the walls was completed and our fears had come to fruition. Loudspeakers and posted notices with detailed maps announced the creation of a ghetto for the surrounding Jewish population. However, the German’s hesitated to use the term “ghetto” because of the negative context it implied so they simply referred to it as a “resettlement area” or a “Jewish quarter,” but all of us absolutely knew what it was.

  We were given little notice, perhaps a week, of the impending eviction from our homes, and this resulted in incredible anxiety. My mother became the family’s source of strength during this time since my father was so troubled. However upset she was with my father for preventing us from emigrating, mother never slapped my father in the face with the phrase “I told you so”. She let him keep his dignity.

  Mendel and I assisted mother in gathering together important items to carry with us to our new lodging. Blima, a small toddler by this time, luckily or unluckily depending on how you see it, remained oblivious to the world around her. As long as she had her favorite fuzzy brown and white stuffed bear, she was content. Hugging her, I wished I could be happy with so little, too.

  What would we need in our new home? That was a question everyone asked one another. Neighbors wanted to know what we planned to take along with us and we did the same. Some people naively thought that everything we would need would be provided for us. They only packed a few clothes and some food. Others felt that the apartments would be barren and even the basics would be needed.

  One brutally cold night, a couple from my parents’ card group stopped by after curfew with their eleven-year-old daughter, eight-year-old son, and newborn baby girl. The wife was wearing a headscarf but strands of blonde escaped from the sides of it, blowing in the wind. She was dressed stylishly but her tidy, clothed appearance betrayed her inner feelings. Her eyes were bloodshot and her makeup was smeared. Her eldest daughter stood stoically, as if lost in a trance-like state; her once black hair was bleached a snowy white and pleated into two long pigtails tied off with light blue ribbons. The middle child, always bubbling with pizzazz, appeared to be drugged as well. His hair had been grown out so that it fell below his ears and his usually masculine clothing had been replaced with a green dress and ruffled socks. The husband looked sallow and had aged a decade since the last time I had seen him; he wore a dowdy pair of pants and a wrinkled shirt. He was holding his infant daughter in his arms like she was simply a sack of potatoes, or a bag of groceries, something that was just another object, nothing special. Neither he nor his wife wore their armbands. The atmosphere was engulfed in a bizarre feeling; everything about the situation seemed out of place.

  “Janine will be staying with non-Jewish friends of ours, outwardly hidden in their home, posing as a distant cousin,” the woman said to us in a previously rehearsed manner. “We have made other arrangements for Levi, who will be staying with another family, disguised as a little girl, the family’s orphaned niece.”

  Occasionally, Jewish parents would dress their sons as daughters in order to protect them from Nazis who conducted searches to check for male circumcision. Mendel and I were too old to pose as females; our Adam’s apples were too defined and our voices were too deep.

  Swallowing forcefully and exhaling deeply the man then presented the baby to my mother. As he spoke his wife trembled, “I want you to take Rivka. We can’t find anyone else willing to take her. Families we thought we could count on have already agreed to shelter more people than they can support. I know you’ve always been good with children. You’re her last hope. She won’t survive our journey. She’s just a baby. It’s too cold and dangerous for her to come with us. We had hoped for a different course of action, but our papers…they failed to go through in time.”

  An empathetic word leapt from my mother’s lips and her nurturing hands gravitated towards the sullen woman. My mother gathered that the couple was going into hiding. We knew others who had done the same thing recently, including both sets of my grandparents, so their decision was not unexpected. We had even discussed the possibility of doing so ourselves. Although father never participated in these conversations, the rest of us weighed the pros and cons with heavy hearts for weeks. What was the best thing to do? Blima was still too young to understand the dire situation at hand and it would be complicated to coach her to comply with a bizarre set of new rules. Even though my mother’s parents pleaded with us to hide with them on a friend’s remote farm, we were unconvinced of the need to do so. In the end, we denied the pleas of those around us and decided it would be far too risky for all of us to be concealed together and we didn’t want to have to part. Some of my female “Aryan-looking” Jewish friends had been separated from their families when they were taken in by non-Jewish families who had offered to shelter them during the war. Mother said that those families probably wanted to utilize the girls as maids to help with the housework; she assumed that it would be more complex for Mendel and me to find an equivalent placement, especially since we did not “look Aryan.” After careful consideration, my family
felt that it was better to be all living together in the same home out in the open than to be split apart between separate rooms and closets in clandestine places. We were a family and we were going to remain as an undivided unit.

  Leaving a baby in someone else’s care, on the other hand, was not as common, although it did remind me of a horror story a friend had told me about a family living in Germany. Whether it was real or made up I had no way to verify, but it seemed plausible. The family—a man, a woman, a child, a baby, and two elderly relatives—was hiding under the ground floor of their home in a hollowed out area disguised by an area rug because the man was being summoned to Dachau, a concentration camp originally built to contain political and criminal enemies of the Nazi party. Word quickly spread about the nature of Dachau since in the beginning of its creation men were sent there for a few months and then returned home and spoke about their experiences, although they were warned not to. Through the confessions from former Dachau prisoners, we learned that the men were tortured in the freezing cold while being forced to perform pointless, repetitive physical exercises only to be set free when they made promises about emigrating or giving up their businesses; they returned home physically and mentally broken. The man in this case was a widely known Communist and therefore he was a threat to the Nazi regime. As the story goes, when he was required to report for deportation he never showed up at the meeting area. When Gestapo agents went to his residence to look for him, they overturned every table and bed, went through every closet, and could not find the man or his family. Sensing something was amiss, they remained in the house all night, waiting for any sign that would reveal the family’s whereabouts. The family waited it out pressed against one another in the dirt-covered space, holding their breaths, cautious not to make a sound. After awhile, the baby began to quiver and then it started to open its mouth to cry. There wasn’t time to see if it just needed to breastfeed; even the second it would have taken for the man to hand the baby to his wife and have her lift her shirt would have been too long. At that moment, the man had to make an immediate decision to risk the lives of his entire family by letting the infant cry or to stifle the cries before they began.

  What would I have done in that situation? What would any of us have done? In the end, the man chose the welfare of the group rather than the individual and so he suffocated the baby, his own flesh and blood. By doing so, he spared the lives of his wife, daughter, parents, and himself. He escaped deportation to Dachau. I often wonder how his wife responded to the incident. Did she stay married to the man who squeezed the life out of her child?

  Thinking about this, I tuned back in to the conversation my mother was having with the family at our door. The couple was persistent in their desire to hand over their baby. I couldn’t imagine how awful they must have felt for making that decision. If Rivka was anything like Blima, her crying would reveal the couple’s location almost as soon as they were concealed. They knew that she would be a hindrance to their survival. But what would we do with a baby? How could we afford to feed another mouth when we were barely able to sustain the five of us?

  “I’m so sorry about your papers,” my mother replied. “Of course we’ll take her.” She didn’t hesitate in her response nor did she ask where the couple was stowing away. When people went into hiding they were cautious about who they told for fear that their secret would be exposed and their lives would be endangered. Even sincere friends found it difficult to trust each other; the reward offered by the Gestapo for selling out someone consisted of items like sacks of sugar or money, which made it far too tempting given the depressed economy. My family had looked on as pairs of Jews were snatched from homes, ratted out by friends they had confided in. As they were being ripped away from their homes by the Nazi soldiers, they looked back at their so-called friends with looks of betrayal, their facial muscles tense with disbelief. It was a time when most people could only rely on their own immediate family, or at least they hoped they could.

  That was it. After a round of emotional embraces, the couple kissed us goodbye and as I watched them disappear from view I couldn’t help but stare at the woman clinging to her husband’s chest, staggering awkwardly as she wailed. There was a moment when she pushed away from him and turned her body back towards our apartment, the veins in her forehead raised and her mouth opened as wide as it could open, and she screamed. Her husband then covered her mouth with his hands and pulled her back in the opposite direction, but her legs had gone flaccid and the top of her feet dragged along the ground. I felt as though I was witnessing a private moment, the moment when she realized that there would forever be a void in her heart that nothing would ever be able to fill. It struck me as a particularly poignant sight.

  Once they faded from my field of vision, I turned my focus back on the newest addition to our family. She was so tiny and fragile and she would never remember her real mother. It was a sad reality. My father, who had remained quiet throughout the ordeal, walked into the living room and reclined in a chair. Without a word, he pulled his silver cigarette case from his shirt pocket, struck a match, and settled into his nightly routine of thinking, smoking, and rolling cigarettes. He kept his hands particularly busy that night as he fumbled with Herbewo wrappers.

  We hurried to gather together the items we deemed important enough to take with us to the ghetto while my father sat in his chair. My mother, meanwhile, attended to the needs of baby Rivka and young Blima while at the same time carefully packing the significant articles of our home. She had made arrangements with a neighbor to keep an eye on our apartment while we were away. The neighbor agreed to water our plants in exchange for the use of our oven, which was more modern than hers. Mother also handed this neighbor some of our finer items for safekeeping, like the bronze statues and paintings she and my father had collected over time but wouldn’t need in the ghetto, in case, in our absence, our home was vandalized. We made calculated plans for our possessions but not for ourselves. How naïve it was of us to view property damage as our biggest concern.

  My father was still in a state of shock, unable to be of any assistance to us. He wandered in and out of the apartment, intermediately joining us for a meal. Despite this, when he was home he worked tirelessly, bent over his worktable in the corner of his bedroom in utter silence, carefully crafting each of us a new pair of shoes. The only time he spoke to us was when he called us into his room for fittings. I offered to help him with this project more than once, but he always denied my assistance, preferring to work alone. When his work was complete, he made a production out of revealing them to us. The shoes he gave to each of us, even little Blima, were of exceptional quality with either sturdy buttons or thick laces. Father continued to hold onto Blima’s pair, admiring them with a pleased little half smile. Adorned with two small hearts burnt into the outer sides of each and etchings of butterflies on the inner sides, they appeared to be several sizes too large for her tiny feet. It was apparent that father had spent the most time on Blima’s shoes, even making sure that they would only need to be closed by one button each rather than by a string of laces. All of the shoes were made of thick, well-groomed leather, and durable soles. The familiar smell of leather wafted through the air, covering up even the smell of the doughy potato and cheese pierogies mother had just cooked. During the presentation of these shoes, he gave a short speech about how shoes were “essential” to our survival.

  “With shoes you can walk and work, and therefore you can live to see another day,” he said. He went on to tell us that shoes were a necessity, not a luxury. We slyly smiled to each other as my father continued to talk about shoes. I would soon learn how right my father was about their true importance.

  When we had finished packing the night before we left, a large pile of items filled the entryway of our apartment: our silver cutlery, a few choice family heirlooms, mounds of clothing, cookware, a kitchen table, linens and bedding, and other personal items. We then sat at the table running through our list of items, making su
re nothing had been forgotten. I didn’t sleep at all that night. Tossing and turning, I feared what life would be like in my new home. Would it even feel like a home? I contemplated running away and dragging my family with me, but I had nowhere to go but to the ghetto.

  The next morning—clad in our new shoes—we moved.

  CHAPTER 14

  Mother insisted we leave the house spotless so that when we returned we wouldn’t have to fuss with tidying up. With a flick of her wrist, she told us to make our beds and put the dishes away before we departed. Even the grandfather clock was wound up and double checked for accuracy. The few framed pictures we had were left perched in their usual places. Mother and father’s wedding picture, housed in a delicate silver frame, remained resting in its prominent spot in the middle of the mantle. I wanted to bring along our most recent family portrait, the one that smiled back at me from my nightstand that I loved for its imperfectness—Mendel was mid-sneeze and Blima was pulling at mother’s hair—but mother wouldn’t allow me to take it. She was afraid that one-of-a-kind photographs would get damaged or lost during the transition. Plus, we didn’t have room to jam additional delicate items into our sacks. “Keep them here so they’ll be safe,” she told us. Those photos encapsulated who we were in the millisecond it took for the camera to flash. I loved them because they captured the raw emotion from one moment and displayed it forever. Obeying my mother, I reluctantly put the picture back, never to see it again. Even after all of these years, I can still visualize every detail of the circumstances surrounding that photo. How we arrived late because mother ran around the apartment looking for her purple purse and then realized she didn’t even own a purple purse—it had gotten ruined the winter before and she had thrown it away—and how father scorched a cigarette hole in his jacket when he was swatting away a fly. That was the last time we were relaxed as a family. We didn’t hone in on the details of the day like we usually did. We just went with the flow. Thinking back, I suppose the photos weren’t as important as the memories they represented. Maybe if I still had that family photo I’d overanalyze it and find flaws with it anyway, whereas without it I just focus on the happy experience I remember. In any case, it doesn’t matter.