Two Rings by Millie Werber Read Free Book Online

midsummer—we were told by the factory supervisor, a German named Briti-cleiber, that we could return to the ghetto for several hours to collect and bring back to the factory anything we thought was valuable. He told us that something was about to happen and that if we wanted to bring things to keep for after the war, the Germans would save them for us. He didn’t say so explicitly, but we knew from this little speech that there would be another oblava in the ghetto, perhaps a large one this time.

    I walked back to the ghetto. Of course, we didn’t have anything of real value—my mother had her sewing machine, but what use would I have for that? We had no diamonds or gold or silver. But I went back because I was told I could go and because I wanted to see my family. I was determined not to return to the factory; I wanted to stay with my family in the ghetto, no matter what.
    When I got home, I spoke my mind: “I don’t want to go back. I just want to be with all of you. Please. I want to stay.”
    I was begging. I wanted to be grown-up for my family, to do what they asked of me, but I wanted my mother more, and all I could do was plead.
    My uncle insisted. He was adamant, cruel. I can still hear his words, his face red with pain and fury. “No,” he said. “Send her out. Throw her out from the house. She must go. She must go to work.”
    It was beyond comprehension, I thought, to drive a daughter away like that, to send her out on her own when all she wanted was to be home. I was lost, conquered by the clarity of his conviction.
    I cried. Mama tried to comfort me. She kissed my cheek.
    â€œYou must go, Maniusia. It is for the best.”
    Mama asked me where I slept, and I told her about the cold cement ground. She handed me our feather blanket to take back.
    That was my valuable, Mama’s last gift to me, and that was the last time I ever saw her, sending me off on my own, back to the German ammunitions factory. It felt like banishment; it felt like desertion.

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    The next day, the large-scale deportations began. We knew something big was going to happen, because the Germans set up floodlights in the town, so many lights and so bright that even a couple of kilometers away, as we were, it seemed like daylight in the deepest hours of the night.
    The city of Radom was almost entirely liquidated of Jews in two large deportations during August 1942. Before the war started, about thirty thousand Jews lived there, comprising one-third of the total population. The first deportation occurred on August 5, when the Glinice Ghetto was liquidated; that was the smaller of the two ghettos the Germans established in Radom and the one where my family lived. Eleven days later, and over the course of three days, from August 16 to August 18, the large ghetto was cleared out. My brother was killed during this deportation, executed because, with his limp, he was considered unfit for work. My mother was taken away; she had been working in a shop, which should have protected her, but the soldiers came in anyway, and rounded up all the workers to fulfill some quota they had. I learned this later from my uncle. My grandparents and most of my cousins were taken away that day, as well.
    In all her life, Mama had never traveled, had never been on a train to anywhere. Like her parents and grandparents, my mother, Dvora Ajchenbaum Drezner, was married and lived all her days in Radom. The first time Mama got on a train was the last time, too: Her first train trip was in the cattle car that took her to Treblinka.
    After the deportations, few Jews remained in Radom. For another year or so, until November 1943, the ghetto still stood, populated mostly by Jews who had found work in the
stores and workshops the Germans had taken over; some Jews also got sent to the ghetto from the surrounding villages. Mima and Feter stayed for nearly a year longer in their room on Szwarlikowska Street before they,