Two Rings by Millie Werber Read Free Book Online Page A

too, came to the factory, in November 1943.
    After the deportations, though, I no longer wanted to be in the ghetto. My brother had been killed; my mother, my grand-parents, and most of my aunts and uncles—they had all been taken away. What was left there for me? I didn’t understand the grown-ups, why they continued in their pathetic daily routines. Searching for bread, scavenging for wood, finding a mitten, maybe a scarf, to keep warm. Why did the world not end? I didn’t understand this. Mama was gone; my brother was dead. Why did life go on?
    Â 

    Majer, Mama, and me

    No one sat shivah for my brother or for anyone else. Death was everywhere, yet no one mourned in any way that I could see. This I couldn’t bear. Not because of the religious part—not because of some religious obligation to perform a ritual. Even then, this is not what mattered to me. But because it felt as if no one were willing to think about the meaning of things, to make the deaths and the deportations echo in some way. Perhaps I am able to see it differently now: With so much death, how could one sit shivah? One would be sitting shivah continuously for years. But at fifteen, I thought it a meanness of some kind, an intolerable indifference, a crusting-over of the soul, and I was too young for that, despite my surroundings.
    After the deportations, I hated to be in the ghetto. I went back a few times—for the ring, for the wedding—but I no longer had, and wouldn’t have again for years to come, anything I could think of as home. The ghetto was now to me only a place of loss, of fear, and of death. I preferred the factory, with its numbing routine, with Mama’s feather blanket, and, at least for a time, with Heniek.

3
    HENIEK GREENSPAN WAS A POLICEMAN.
    They were Jews, these policemen, and generally well respected in the community, or at least they had been before the war began. They were men in their prime, able-bodied and agile, and most of them had achieved their matura diploma at least. The Germans used them to carry out their policies in the ghetto and the factory. The policemen would designate people for forced-work details, guard the perimeter of the ghetto, and oversee the distribution of our meager food rations. Though they didn’t carry guns, they were given certain privileges for their services to the Germans. They could go into and out of the ghetto, for example, without explicit permission, and in the factory, some had separate rooms of their own—they didn’t live as the rest did, in crowded barracks. Not all of them, certainly, but most of the Jewish police felt that they had special protection as well as privileges with the Germans, and given the circumstances, the police tended to look upon themselves as better than everyone else.

    Nojich Tannenbaum, for example, was this way. He was an informer as well as a policeman, and he would boast to us that his family—his wife, their young twin girls, their Jewish maid, all of them—would survive on an island of safety while everything else around them burned. He patrolled the factory grounds, supervising—spying, really—looking for anything he could report to the Germans. Maybe someone was hiding extra food; maybe someone was not where he or she was supposed to be. No one ever wanted to see Tannenbaum or be seen by him; certainly no one trusted him. He was a Jew, but he was working for the Germans, seemingly with the wholeness of his heart. I was told that Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Blum, the SS officer who planned and carried out the liquidation of the ghettos, was the godfather of his twins.
    Tannenbaum didn’t know it then—when we were in the factory, none of us did—but the Germans would save no special treatment for their informers and police. In the end, those who had served the Germans would be used and murdered just like the rest of us. Tannenbaum was murdered, though not by the Germans. He was killed by