Two Rings (16 page)

I could have had anything I wanted from that house: food, clothes, shoes—whatever I needed or desired, I could have taken. But when I saw that German lady cowering in such fear, all I could see was my mother, a vision of my mother as the Germans barged their way into her tiny room in the ghetto when they came to send her to Treblinka, my mother trembling and hopeless and miserable, knowing she was vanquished, knowing she was helpless in her enemies' hands. I saw my mother in this German lady's fear, and I ran. I couldn't take anything from her; I couldn't be the cause of her terror.

 

 

 

Did Norembursky's wife have no misgivings about the terror she caused her mother? Did she run envisioning her mother's despair?

Oh my daughter! What have you done to me?

When Norembursky and his wife fled, did they think of their families at all? That first night, did nightmares of gunshots wake them from their sleep? Norembursky and his wife escaped, and in escaping, they consigned twenty others to death. They bought their lives—first in coming to the factory and then in escaping from it—they bought their own lives with the lives of others. They paid for their survival in currency that wasn't theirs to give. Heniek and twelve other policemen along with their families were taken away so that Norembursky and his fellows could move to the factory; now twenty others were executed because Norembursky and his wife escaped.

All these lives, all this blood, is on them.

Norembursky and his wife survived the war, and I found them, several years later, after we had all immigrated to America. Jack and I were living, as squatters essentially, in a mostly abandoned building on Lewis Street, on the Lower East Side in New York. My father had found work in the garment district, and one day, he came by our apartment and told me that he had seen Norembursky's wife working in the garment district, too, but now living under an assumed name. This outraged me—not just that Norembursky had managed to survive, but that he and his wife were living in New York
with new identities. Norembursky was living as if he could erase his past and all the things he was accountable for. In a world of infinite injustice, this struck me as intolerable.

There was no explanation for who survived and who perished—I knew this even then, just as I know it now. I survived by luck and happenstance and several times by the unprompted kindness of strangers. Zwirek had saved my life; Katz had saved my life. Why did the SD let me leave that jail? What could it have mattered to them, even if they knew, even if they were convinced that I was not the Greenspan they were looking for? So what? The Germans killed indiscriminately; they never waited for just cause to commit murder. So why did they let me go?

I cannot fathom a reason for my survival. I was innocent; I survived. These are two truths, but they are separate truths; no logical chain of thought connects them. One cannot draw a line that gets you from how you lived to whether you died. Some innocents lived; many innocents—hundreds, thousands . . . millions of innocents—died. And the guilty, too. It is no different for them. Some were killed, yes—even by Jews—as Tannenbaum was beaten to death by Jews when he was taken with the rest of us to Auschwitz. But being guilty didn't mean that you would die. I knew this then; I know this now. And yet. It was, despite this, an outrage to me that Duvid Norembursky was alive and living under an assumed name. In a world of infinite injustice—truly, I did understand that I wasn't going to find justice for what had happened—still, I could not let this be.

I went to the Office of Immigration. I was just nineteen at the time. I spoke almost no English; I didn't know how to talk
with people in offices, people who sat behind desks with an air of authority. I wasn't one to demand things, to look people in the eye. Still, I went to the Office of Immigration to make a protest, to let them know that there was someone living in New York under a false identity, someone who had committed crimes and must now be called to account. “His real name is Duvid Norembursky,” I said, “and he has the death of many Jews on his hands. He doesn't belong here; he has no right to live here. He's pretending to be someone he's not.”

What proof did I have? they wanted to know. How could I demonstrate that he was not who he claimed to be? For crimes committed in Poland, in Germany, they could do nothing; they had no jurisdiction over things that happened in other countries. But they could pursue the false identity, if I could prove that this man was not who he said he was.

How could I do that? Not that I didn't want to, but what proof did I have? I knew who he was; I knew what he had done. But I had no way to prove it, however much I wanted to.

Still, word must have reached them that I was trying to have them found, hoping to get them deported, because one day, Norembursky's wife showed up at my door on Lewis Street. She pleaded with me, begged me to let them be, to leave them alone to their new lives in America. The war is over, she said; it's all in the past now. Just let us be. Please, please—you must let us be.

I knew I would not be able to succeed in getting them in trouble with the authorities. But I could do one thing: I could tell Norembursky's wife what her mother had said as she went to her death. And I did. I told her. Your mother died cursing you, spitting your name in agony. I will never let you be, she
said, my soul will haunt you, will swirl around you and never let you find peace.

I told her this, and—let me say it, because however horrible, however cruel, it is true—I was glad to do it; I was glad to give her this pain. It gave me some satisfaction to know that she would now have to face the full weight of what she had done. She would live with the certain knowledge that, in effect, she had killed her own mother, that her mother knew this, and that her mother had cursed her for it. And—I am trying to be honest here; I am trying to say honestly what I feel—I do not regret doing this, even now, even all these years later. Still, the world is one of infinite injustice—Heniek is still dead, the mother is still dead, the brother, the nephew, and all the others, too—but I was able to say just a little so that those deaths were not without consequence, not without a sound.

The horror you cause shall cause horror to you.

THE WORST PART WAS THE RATS. I WAS PETRIFIED THAT they were going to eat my eyes.

Several days after the Noremburskys' escape, a man I knew came into the barracks to give me some news. Szlamek Horowitz was his name, and he worked as a
Schreiber
—a secretary of some kind—in the administrative office of the Konzentrationslager. I didn't know him well, but sometimes we would chat for a moment or two when he came to the barracks to check on his mother. When he approached me that day in the barracks, I thought perhaps he simply was stopping by to say hello. But, no, it was something else.

Not long before this, soon after the KL had been established, our factory, which made munitions, was joined to an adjacent one, which made baskets. The two factories had previously worked as separate entities, with separate administrations, separate barracks, and separate kitchens, but now their living quarters were enclosed in the same compound, behind
the same barbed wire. Szlamek told me that the Germans had decided that the two kitchens were to be merged and that all those who worked in my kitchen—the butchers, the vegetable peelers, and the two or three men who managed the place—were now considered superfluous. Tomorrow morning, there would be an oblava: We were all to be rounded up and taken away.

An oblava. And I was to be a part of it. This time, there would be no confusion about my name. They knew who worked in the kitchen. I was particularly known, because Heniek had somehow made special arrangements to get me there. I was going to be taken away. From the kitchen, from the barracks, from Mima and Feter, from anything I had known. And taken where? To be again alone, exposed, unprotected. A meager slip of a girl, buffeted by winds.

Is it possible ever to accustom oneself to a daily threat of death? It had been days only—maybe two, maybe three, certainly not six or seven—since I had been taken to the jail. Everything at once—all that treachery and death and trembling fear. How does anyone absorb that? I was so very young, and everything about me was so huge in its proportions. I was married and then my husband was taken from me; I was to die in a hellish jail, and then I was saved; and now again—just minutes later, it felt like—not even before I could learn again to breathe, I was to be brought to the threshold of death. Again. How is it possible for a life to be composed of crisis upon crisis with no room in between? How is it possible to maintain one's balance in such a dizzying world?

Szlamek said to me, “Look here: Your name is on this list of workers who will be liquidated. I will do what I can to erase
your name, but you mustn't count on me. I don't know what I can do. It may not be enough. You must try to do something for yourself. Take off this dress; put on whatever you have from home. Maybe you can escape.”

What? Escape? How? Where? Where could I go? I could never escape, especially not after what had happened with Norembursky. What could I do? All of us were required to go to our appointed places of work every morning; no one was allowed to stay back in the barracks. But once I got to the kitchen, Szlamek said, I would be taken with everyone else.

I ran to find Mima and Feter. What should I do? Szlamek Horowitz, the Schreiber from the office—you know him, yes? He said he would try, but I mustn't rely on him, he said; I must figure something out on my own.

That night is an utter blank to me. Did I sleep? I wonder. Did I pray? Perhaps I sneaked into Mima's bunk and buried myself in her arms; perhaps she tried to comfort me, to assure me that I would be safe. How she could have mouthed these words, I don't know; I can't imagine I would have believed them.

In the morning, I stayed behind in the barracks when everyone else went out to work. It would be trouble if I got caught dawdling in the morning routine, but I knew it would be worse if I left for the kitchen. I couldn't stay where I was, yet there was nowhere I could go.

Mima and Feter came into the barracks.

I could hear the Germans in the yard, starting to call out the names of the workers from the kitchen.

Feter turned to me: “You must hide. We have to hide you.”

The barracks we were made to sleep in were fairly shoddy, built by forced labor to house the several thousand people who
worked in and for the factory. The structures had no foundation under them and no cement or concrete flooring. Wooden planks had just been laid onto the ground, set down side by side on the packed dirt, and nailed roughly together.

Feter went over to the side of the barracks, and with a single, strong heave, he ripped up the floorboard underneath one of the bunks. “Here,” he said. “Quickly. Get in here. Come quickly.”

He was holding up the floorboard, motioning for me to get in.

I did as I was told. I went over to where he was standing; he grabbed me and pushed me down toward the small space of ground exposed by the torn-up floorboard. There was barely enough space for me to fit—twelve inches, maybe, between the packed dirt underneath the building and the wooden floor built on top. I shimmied myself in, using my hands to jostle my body into place. I lay flat against the cold ground, looking up at my uncle, who was holding the floorboard above me.

“Maniusia,” he said. “You must not move. You must not make a sound.”

I was terrified. It was not in my nature, hiding like this, doing anything that was against the rules. I wasn't brave; I wasn't one to take risks. I did as I was told, never trying to put myself forward, never strategizing about how to make my chances of survival better. It's not that I didn't want to survive; it's that I wasn't built to take risks, to push my way forward. I was always hiding, I suppose, in some way—hiding in the crowd, hiding to escape notice. But hiding like this—hiding beneath a building when I was supposed to be showing up for kitchen duty—this just wasn't like me. I never
would have hidden on my own; I never would have even thought to do it, let alone figure out where.

Feter lowered the floorboard over my head. I could hear him push it into place with his foot and then walk away.

I was alone.

It was completely dark, and the place smelled musty and stale and damp. I had to be still; I had to be quiet, but I was petrified and I could hear my heart hammering in my chest.

And then I heard the scratching. Little scraping noises all around me. Little feet, tiny feet scampering in the dirt. Lots of them. Rats. Rats, scurrying all around—beside me, along my legs, up onto my torso. They climbed on my face. I saw them, looking into my eyes, their noses twitching, their whiskers against my cheeks, their tails back and forth against my neck. My God! It was horrible, horrifying.