Mima and I had spent the first few months after our liberation in Kaunitz, a little town down the road from where we had been freed, but when we heard that other Radomers were in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, we decided to travel the seven hundred kilometers to search for our families. I was looking for my father, and Mima was looking for her husband and son; we had last seen them about a year before, when the men and women were separated at Auschwitz. We decided to go to Garmisch-Partenkirchen even though we didn’t really trust the information about the Radomers, because we had also heard that Jack Werber was there, and this we couldn’t believe, because everyone from Radom knew that Jack Werber was dead.
Jack was twenty-five in 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland. Suspected of leftist leanings, he was arrested soon afterward and sent to Buchenwald on trumped-up charges of having held communist meetings in the back room of his family’s store. I was only twelve when he was arrested and didn’t know him, but my family knew his, and we all heard what had happened. Several months after Jack was taken away, his father was called to the offices of the Radom Judenrat and was told that Jack had died of dysentery. If he wanted, Jack’s father was told, he could pay to have Jack’s ashes sent back to Radom. Devastated that his son had died, Jack’s father desperately wanted the ashes. He wanted to give his youngest son a proper burial in the city where his family had lived for a hundred years. So he paid, and several weeks later, a box arrived containing ashes marked as Jack Werber’s.
We were so innocent then, so unready to understand what was happening. Jack’s was a horrible but plausible story: He had been arrested, had been made to work at a hard labor camp, had gotten sick and died; Jack’s captors had cremated his body, and out of some sense of human decency, they had offered to send his ashes home. A sane world, in wartime, might produce such a story. It made sense; it was a story his family was ready to accept.
Except Jack hadn’t died. The Germans had simply found a way to extract money from unsuspecting Jews: All over Poland, Jews were told that their sons and fathers and husbands were dead and that they could have the ashes of their family members sent to them for a fee. Jack’s father had buried some ashes, but not those of his son.
Had he buried someone else’s child? Had he been sent the mixed remains of several people? Perhaps the ashes weren’t even a person’s. Perhaps Jack’s father had buried a dog.
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 vel
vet 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.
This story—and the many others like it—drew me to Jack. He seemed truly heroic to me, a real hero of a man, and not only because of the obvious—in 1944, he had helped save seven hundred boys who had come to Buchenwald destined for death—but because of this determination to be a mensch in the world, no matter what the context, no matter what the result. I was proud to know him; I was proud, truly, to be associated with him among all the Radomers in our group. And I found myself wanting to make him happy, to try somehow to make up for all the miseries he had been made to suffer.
But I wanted nothing more—nothing more than the stories and the quiet time in conversation. So when we were sitting together one day, and Jack took that ring from his pocket, rolling it around between his fingers, I didn’t respond when he asked me whom it might fit. I knew what he meant. But I couldn’t answer his question. Maybe I just smiled a little and bent my head away.
You see, liberation for me didn’t feel like a new beginning. You watch these old-time newsreels now of towns across Europe being liberated by the Allied troops, and everyone is out on the streets looking happy and relieved, and women are throwing themselves at the soldiers and hugging and kissing them. As if liberation were the end of it all. As if liberation meant a fresh start. As if it meant real, uncluttered freedom. But that’s not how it was—not for me. I had been “liberated,” yes. But into what? Liberated into an abyss, an oblivion, into a life without moorings.
My brother, Majer, had been shot to death by German soldiers during the liquidation of the Radom ghetto in the summer of 1942. Mima had watched it happen. She told me, too, that my mother and grandparents had been taken away at the same time—to Treblinka, as we later learned. My father and uncle had escaped the deportations because they, like my aunt and me, had managed to find work, but Mima and I hadn’t seen the men since our arrival at Auschwitz. And Heniek, my husband, was dead. That I knew. That I could feel as a certainty in my blood.
My brother, Majer Drezner, circa 1927
At the moment of my liberation, two thoughts came upon me, very clear and very precise. The first was laced with bitterness, and I spit it out like some bad taste that had lingered in my mouth for years: “I don’t want to be Jewish anymore; it’s a death sentence to be Jewish.” The other thought rose in me more forcibly from my gut, like a tight knot at the bottom of my belly, a query rather than a claim: “To whom do I belong, and who belongs to me?”
That question had sounded in my head every day since my liberation. I enjoyed being with Jack; I felt comfortable with him. But I refused to let myself fall in love, and I knew I would never marry again. There had already been too much love in my life, and too much loss. I couldn’t risk another loss. And I wouldn’t betray my first love. To be true, I couldn’t fall in love with Jack because I was still so deeply in love with Heniek.
I must explain this love, I know. I was barely more than a child, just fifteen when I first fell in love. The world was falling to pieces, and I was lost and frightened and on my own. I loved a man twelve years my senior, and at sixteen I married him
with joy in my heart. In some way, and secretly, I have loved him ever since.
To tell this story, I have to go back, closer to the beginning.
I have to go back to the ghetto.
2
MY MOTHER WAS ALWAYS WORKING. THIS IS MY CLEAREST memory of her—Mama at the sewing table, cutting fabric freehand, without patterns, sewing pieces together, making miracles out of bits of cloth. I am a young girl watching her, and I am amazed by the magic of it—that she somehow knows where to cut, where to stitch, as if the material has some kind of inner logic that she is able to follow without the bother of paper patterns. The swoosh of the dark material as it glides and comes to rest on the table where she works; the dust of the marking chalk floating in the air; the girls who work for her gathered together in focused concentration. It is a mystery to me and a wonder, how Mama can turn these flat and lifeless waves of cloth into the clothes her customers so desire. And how beautiful the clothing is! The dresses and blouses and skirts, all understated but somehow elegant, too. The ladies from the town arrive, Jews, of course, but Gentiles, as well, wearing their fur-trimmed coats and carrying leather handbags. They love my mother’s clothes. I know they give her money for her work, but sometimes I see they give her bread instead. One time, maybe this is early in 1941—I am not yet fourteen years old, we have just moved to the ghetto, and there are still a few Polish customers who come to see my mother—a woman arrives carrying a thick book in her gloved hand. I know this woman; she has been coming for years. She is a bit formal perhaps, but kind as well, friendly even to me, as I watch the goings-on from the back of the room, trying not to get in the way. The woman lays her book down on the table to remove her gloves and set down her purse. I look over to see the title: Mein Kampf.
Two Rings Page 2
