Two Rings

I REMEMBER ALMOST NOTHING ABOUT MY LAST FIVE OR SIX months in the KL at Radom. After the ruin of winter, the earthquakes and aftershocks, what was left? Darkness, maybe; a sense of nothingness. My life had exploded in the tumult of those days, though surely I shouldn’t here be using terms drawn from the natural world to describe them. These weren’t natural disasters, not natural events even in the mystifying course of human history. Those several weeks during the winter of 1943–1944 were, for me at least, an eruption of the worst humankind was capable of; they tore from me any sense I may have had that life was for living, that life held in store riches and promise and pleasure. Having lost Heniek—and because of a Jew, no less—I felt I had lost everything. It felt almost an affliction to live, an emptiness to be endured.

In the late spring and summer of 1944, rumors began circulating that the Russians were advancing from the east. A man who worked with us in the factory but somehow had connections outside it—maybe he knew a Pole still living a relatively normal life in Radom—fed us information. He said the Americans had landed in France and that he was certain they would break through Germany’s forces in Western Europe. The Russians, he told us, were already in Poland, now just thirty kilometers from Radom.

It was the end of July, almost exactly two years since I had begun working at the factory. Two thousand men and nearly five hundred women were all now to be taken out, made to leave, made to go . . . where? We didn’t know. We knew only that we had to leave Radom. We were going to be made to walk.

I put on what I had—a sweater, I remember, maybe a blouse. We collected whatever we still had from the ghetto and could secretly carry. Szlamek’s mother wore a pocketed belt under her dress; I didn’t know then what she kept in it. Before she moved to the factory, Mima had opened a hollow space in the heel of one of her shoes; she then sealed in it a small ring of hers. I had the little pocket sewn into my panties; to the two gold wedding bands, I now added my only other treasure—the picture of me and Heniek.

In my whole life, I had been outside of Radom only once, when Mama brought me along with her to a spa in Busko-Zdrój, where she was treated for rheumatism. Other than that—and my little journey to Jedlińsk—everything else was Radom, the city of my family for generations. I remember in the ghetto seeing my grandfather cry for fear of a deportation that would keep him from having a proper Jewish burial in Radom. I think perhaps even more than dying, he feared not having his bones rest in Radom’s Jewish cemetery.

The factory, too, and the whole complex of the KL—they were known, familiar worlds by this time as well. Even the dangers were known—the factory machinery, the guards with their guns, the roundups, and the hunger and the disease and all the rest. I’d been working for two years already; I knew the world I was made to live in. Yet now we were to be made to leave. We were to be made to walk. We didn’t know for how long, or for what purpose. We were walking into the unknown.

We were given nothing for the journey—no food, no water. Just a massive column of people: men and women and a small number of young boys, too, walking closely together, too closely, I suspect, for the heat, looking about, looking down, all afraid, all exhausted before we even began, past the barbed-wire gates, and out onto the road. At first, I remember, I walked near Mima and Feter; perhaps my father was with us, too. I don’t remember anyone speaking, or conversations of any kind.

For three days, we walked in the ferocious summer heat. Perhaps we walked for four days; I don’t know. One loses a sense of time when all the world contracts into the single project of taking yet another step, step after step, for kilometers on end. And the heat all around, the heat burning down from the heavens and rising up in waves from under the road. All the world transformed into an oven, a terrific furnace, and all of us enveloped in it, burning in its belly, with no one to offer us relief.

We dragged ourselves along in that heat, people eventually stripping off whatever clothes they had put on under their camp uniforms. It was too hot for extra clothes, too hot to be walking, each step along the hard surface a new affliction in one’s legs. I know we walked close to one hundred kilometers, from Radom east, and slightly north, to Tomaszów Mazowiecki. At night, we lay in the wheat fields that lined the road, and the pointed tips of the harvested stalks pricked our skin as we sank into dreamless sleep.

On the second day of the march, or perhaps the third—I don’t remember, only that I had been walking forever in the unrelenting anger of that heat—we came upon a small village with ramshackle houses set apart from each other by patches of yard and fences built from splintered wood. An odd quiet suffused the place—no wagons on the road making way for the thousands marching through, no one hammering on a roof, no children playing in a yard. Everyone was inside, protected, hidden in safety—except for a single woman I saw standing at the threshold of her house, staring blankly at us, as we dragged ourselves along in the heat.

A frightful thought came to me then—that I was absolutely alone, even amid the many hundreds of others walking alongside me, alone and without consequence in the world. That no one would want to protect me. That there was no safety left anywhere. I was alone and exposed on the open road.

A young boy was walking somewhat ahead of me. I didn’t know him; I didn’t remember having ever seen him in the area of the barracks, but I remember noticing that he was walking by himself, no mother with an arm around him hurrying him along, no father holding his hand. Seeing him made me wonder about another motherless boy I knew, a boy we called Shulem Szpitalnik, whom I and several others had taken care of in the barracks. I didn’t see Shulem Szpitalnik at all on the march, and I wouldn’t see him again until we arrived at Auschwitz.

But here was this other boy walking ahead of me. He knelt down by a puddle at the side of the road. Where did this puddle come from, I wonder? Certainly, there had been no rain. Perhaps someone had dumped a pail of dirty water from a house. Perhaps some water had splashed out of a bucket as someone was returning home from a nearby well. A puddle of dirty water—a miniature oasis in the summer heat. The boy knelt down and bent his head to the ground to take a sip. To lap up a drop of water. But this was not permitted; we were not allowed to linger in our march, even for a moment. Did he know this? I wondered. Did he know the cost of his desire for relief?

The boy knelt down and bent his body to the ground. A German guard came up to him, stood over him, impassively watching the boy lick the water. He took his gun from its holster, held it out before him, and then, without reprimand, without a word of any kind, the soldier shot the boy in the back of the head. The boy fell over onto his side. No one made a motion toward him. No one cried out or ran to pick up his body. We all just walked on, under the blazing sun.

At the back of the march, there was a horse-drawn wagon. It was a simple enough contraption, just a horse attached by harness to a wooden cart. A soldier sat on a plank above the cart and drove the wagon on. Several others walked alongside. This wagon, we were told, was provided for our comfort: If any of us felt tired, if we felt we could walk no longer, we were welcome to drop to the back of the march and ride on the wagon.

Mr. Goldberg was the first to get on. He was an older man, maybe sixty or more. My family knew him a little from Radom. He was wealthy before the war and generous, too: I know he had money with him in the KL; I heard that he was able to buy bread from the Poles and that he shared it with others in his barracks.

I am trying to figure this out, if there is some logic here. Of course, nothing like this occurred to me then, but now, in my reflection, in my telling this little story, I have to wonder about the logic of that wagon. What idea underlies an order instructing soldiers to shoot on the spot anyone who bends down to lap up a tongueful of dirty water from the road, but then also orchestrates an elaborate farce about offered aid, about a free ride on a wagon, only to turn that wagon into a vehicle of death? The Germans were so meticulous about things. They kept records of everything. There’s a book detailing the minutiae of the Radom deportations; they calculated exactly how many calories the Jewish workers in the factory should consume in a day. So in what meticulous plan did that wagon play a part? As much as they wanted to exterminate us, as much as by this time they had put into effect their Final Solution, still they needed workers. Even at Auschwitz, we were known as the “ammunition workers,” and every so often, some number of us would be selected and taken away to an armaments factory in Germany to work, as I eventually would be, in the winter of 1944–1945. They wanted to kill us all, I suppose, but still leave themselves just enough Jews to provide the slave labor they needed to keep the war machine alive.

So they weren’t intent on murdering every one of us on that march; they were content to let die those who fell from exhaustion; they were content to kill outright those who could no longer bear the ordeal. But still, why the wagon? Why seduce us with the offer of comfort only to turn that offer into a means of murder? To this day, I cannot comprehend the reason for that wagon.

Tannenbaum was the informer, the one who boasted that he and his family would survive the war on an island of safety while all around them everything would be burning. He had such confidence, this Tannenbaum; he was so sure that the Germans would protect him for his services to them. Tannenbaum thought he was safe from what was happening to all the other Jews. But he was made to go on that march, too; he was sent to Auschwitz, just like the rest of us.

Tannenbaum walked along in the heat with his family. His twin girls were maybe two or three years old at the time, too young to walk on their own. So Tannenbaum carried one of them on his shoulders, and the maid carried the other one. And I suppose it got too hard for him, carrying his child all that distance. So he told the maid—her last name was Helfand, I remember; she was a Jew, too, a girl from our town—he told her to put the child she carried down on the wagon and he would put the other one down, too. And that’s what they did: They put the two little girls on the wagon.

I didn’t get to see what happened after that—if the little girls cried as their father left them. Perhaps they thought they were being treated to something special, to ride along on a wagon while everyone else had to walk. What did he say to them as he put them down? What could he possibly have said? I don’t know. I didn’t see. Nor did I see what happened with his wife, if she went crazy in anger or fright, if he had to calm her or try somehow to justify what he had done. Had she concurred with this plan? Had she agreed to his putting their children on that wagon?

There were too many horrors happening to think of these things, to consider the weight, the meaning of these things. Of a boy shot for thirst, of a father giving up his babies to die. A girl I knew, Luba Lastman, I saw run off into the high wheat fields, hoping to escape, I assume. She was the daughter of the family who owned the apartment building we lived in on Wolnosc Street. She was maybe twenty years old, young and strong; she must have thought she could outrun the soldiers. But the Germans followed her in with their dogs, sniffing, barking, straining at their leashes. I heard the shot in the near distance.

For me, it was my thighs. Walking in that impossible, scorching heat. I had taken off my blouse and sweater early on. I wasn’t going to escape—nobody could escape—so what need did I have for civilian clothes? But even just with the disheveled dress I wore, the heat was unbearable. As I was walking, with the sweat and the dirt, my thighs rubbed one against the other. With every step, they rubbed back and forth, catching against the sweat. All those steps, all those kilometers. Soon the rubbing raised sores between my legs, and the sores soon opened and bled. And there was nothing to do, nothing to ease the pain. I had just to keep walking, in that heat, with no water, my feet aching, my legs bleeding. My body pulled to the earth by the weight of its own fatigue.

So when was this? Still the second day, perhaps. Something broke in me, broke off in my brain and vanished. A will, perhaps, a determination to move forward, to get to the next place, the next stage of whatever path I was on. At some point, this no longer existed for me. And in its place, the question: Why go on? For what? To where? I couldn’t go on anymore; I couldn’t walk anymore in so much pain. The heat and the thirst and the searing fire between my legs—it was too much. I was done. I gave up. I was content to climb onto the wagon.

It was simple, really. I turned around and started to walk back, against the flow of the hundreds of people walking behind me. No one minded me, no one asked why I was walking in the wrong direction. They realized, they didn’t realize—who knows? Everyone was consumed in his own misery, as I was consumed in mine.

I reached the wagon. It was a relief to me, that wagon. A place to rest, a place to find an end to the torture down my legs. Not a place of death, no, just the opposite. The wagon was respite, an end to the ordeal of walking. It was where the pain would stop, where the bright lightning down my legs would cease. I craved that wagon more than I had craved anything in my life. It was my sole focus, the concentrated point of all my energy, to climb onto that wagon and find my rest.

I lay my hands on the wooden boards, taking a step or two in time with the wagon’s movement so I could hoist myself up. No thinking now, no reflection. Walking in time with the movement of the wheels, with the clopping of the horses’ hooves, myself synchronized with the wagon and about to get on.

What followed is indistinct to me, a memory muffled in an emptiness that didn’t go away. I had been brought back from the edge, but I have no sense, even now, that I was grateful for the effort. I had given up, and even in my return, I remained as I was, drained of all effort, spent, exhausted, done.

We had heard rumors about the gas. Nothing was certain, but we had heard that there were places like Treblinka, where the Germans were sending Jews to be gassed to death. So when the women saw their men herded into this factory, they thought this was it, this was the place where their husbands and brothers, their fathers and their sons, were going to die. The men would be shoved into this building, and the gas would be turned on, and they would be forced to suck in the poisoned air. It was, in the end, just an abandoned building, but the women didn’t know that then.

Women exhausted, women on the verge of collapse, were suddenly transformed, erupting with an energy all but absent moments before. Shrieking, crying, “Where are you taking them? What is happening to my husband?” Calling out, wild-eyed, as we were driven into this warehouse, some hundreds of women pushed into this cavernous building. After the torment of the march came the nightmare of women watching their men and boys being sent to what the women thought was their death.

The warehouse was windowless, dark, and it smelled stale. We sat down wherever we could—on the floor, on benches—it didn’t matter. We had marched for days; we were locked in an airless and barren place with guards standing outside the doors; we didn’t know what was going to happen to us or what was happening even now to our men. But we were being allowed to rest. That, at least, was a gift.

Then came the lice. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, an invasion like the plagues in Egypt. All at once, everyone was up and shrieking, frantically tearing at their skin. The lice were all over us, swarming about our heads and over our bodies. I remember jumping wildly, trying in vain to push them off, to swipe them down and off of me. Nothing worked. The place was infested, and soon so were we.

When I was growing up in Radom—before the ghetto, before the war—I used to walk to school every day with another girl, Mila Rosenbaum. I would stop by her apartment on my way and wait for her to collect her things so we could go off together. She was the youngest in a large family with many brothers and sisters. The next child up was a boy named Heniek; there were older siblings, too, but I didn’t know them as well, because they were so much older than I. One, I remembered, Leon, worked at the factory in Radom.

Mila and Heniek both survived the war; Mila settled in Israel, Heniek in Toronto. Jack and I kept in touch with them both. Once, many years after the war, Jack and I were visiting Heniek in Toronto—for a bar mitzvah, I think, or perhaps for someone’s wedding. We sat in his living room, talking about this and that, nothing special, when one of Heniek’s brothers, Leon Rosenbaum, came over to me and asked if I remembered him. Yes, I said, of course I did. He was one of Mila’s older brothers; I remembered him from their apartment when I used to wait for Mila on the way to school, and from the factory, too, during the war; I remember he worked at the kuznia. But this was not what he was talking about. “Don’t you remember,” Leon asked me, “that time on the march to Tomaszów? That time when I pulled you away from the wagon?”

I never thought much of my own stories. I don’t think it ever even came up with Heniek, that story about the wagon. We were all survivors and everyone had stories; everyone had private horrors and near escapes from death. We talked about the war all the time—even today, we talk about it endlessly among ourselves. But it’s never a presentation, a detailed exposition, like, “Here, I’m going to tell you a story about what happened to me.”