Two Rings (8 page)

The women were all smitten with Heniek—he was slim and tall, with thick, wavy dark hair and the softest brown eyes. Even I could tell that he was handsome. He spoke to the women gently, quietly, even when he came to give us orders. I saw that the women competed to do things for him, maybe sewing a button for him or asking to polish his shoes with a bit of cloth. This was very strange to me: why they should want to go out of their way for him. The police were to be feared, not courted, even the handsome ones. The best hope was simply to stay out of their way.

Then one day—what possessed me then? It was against my nature, surely. One day, as Heniek was walking by, I suddenly blurted something out to him.

“Why are they doing this? Why are the women doing these things for you? I would never do you such favors!”

“
Smarkata
,” he shot back. “Snot-nosed brat.” That's the best translation I can think of. Smarkata. You say it to an unruly child, to someone who is no threat, but just a nuisance, someone whom you brush off without a second thought.

“Smarkata,” he said, “you'll see, one day you'll want to do something for me, too.”

And I said, “No, never.”

He kept walking.

Never mind. He came, he went. We worked.

I wasn't much thinking about boys then, anyway—about men. What I was thinking about, what was ever on my mind, was food, and hunger, and danger, and death.

At first, I didn't eat. I had never been much of an eater, anyway. Perhaps this is why sandwiches made from buttered cornbread and sliced pineapple were such a treat for me. But Hitler taught me to eat; that's what I say now. In the ghetto, meat didn't exist. We lived on bread—we were allotted one hundred grams per person per day—and occasionally a potato if someone was able to get one. At the factory, we were fed twice a day, once before our first six-hour shift, and once after our second. In the mornings, we got what they called coffee—though no one thought what we drank actually had any coffee in it—along with a slice of brown bread. After our twelve hours of work, there was a watery soup of some kind that sometimes had little bits of meat floating in it.

I was hungry at the factory, hungry in a way I hadn't known in the ghetto. But even though the hollow pull of hunger never left me, I knew I couldn't eat this soup. The soup was unkosher; it was
traif
. My family hadn't been especially religious—my father didn't wear a beard, and neither he nor my brother went to synagogue on Shabbos—but we followed all the observances of Jewish ritual, just as everyone around us did: We didn't work on Shabbos, the women kept their arms and legs covered, and, of course, we kept kosher. There was never a question about these things; it was how we lived and how our families had lived for as long as we knew. This soup at the factory was traif, and I knew for a certainty that if I put it to my lips, I would choke.

People around me tried to get me to relent. “You have to eat,” Sally Apel said. “You need to eat whatever they will give us.” But I couldn't; I couldn't put that meat in my mouth.

Until I did.

I remember taking that first spoonful. I fully expected to gag. It wasn't a lightning bolt I anticipated; I didn't think God would strike me down from above. Instead, I really thought my body would not accept the traif; I thought my throat would close up. I thought I would die.

I held my nose as I put the spoon to my tongue. I let the warm liquid linger in my mouth for a moment, and then I swallowed.

I didn't die. The broth tasted good to me, slightly salty, faintly smoky.

Maybe something broke in me then, something very small, probably unnoticeable. A Jew could not eat traif, and yet I did. Traif was supposed to be poison for a Jew, and yet this traif had not poisoned me. Was this the beginning of the end of my faith? I can't know such things. I know only that I came to crave the flavor of that traif, that barest hint of meat, that slight remembrance of real food in our daily portion of watery broth.

Some months later, I found out what it was we were eating in the soup. Every so often, some men would bring into the factory kitchen the carcass of a horse to be butchered. The main parts of the meat would go to the Germans, of course; the workers got the bits scraped off from the bones. The first time I saw a carcass brought into the kitchen—the whole animal, heavy and draped across the shoulders of two men laboring under its weight, its head slightly bobbing with each step the men took, eyes wide open and bulging, staring intently at absolutely nothing—it looked ghoulishly alive. I knew then that this was where the scraps of meat in our soup came from,
and I shuddered to think that this was what I was eating, what I in fact was craving. Even now, when I see a horse trotting through a field, I see the same swollen, vacant eyes, at once focused and drained of life. I ate the soup; I learned to love it. It was food; it was life.

 

 

 

The days in the factory quickly became routine. I worked twelve hours at the machines, I was fed twice a day, I had a shower maybe once a month. We didn't think much about what we were doing; certainly we didn't talk about it. We were, after all, working in an armaments factory, helping our enemies, helping to make the very munitions that were being used against us. We just did our work. We did what we were told to do. We were trying to survive.

Even now, I don't know exactly what type of armament I was involved in making; the division of the factory I worked in was called the
celownik
, which means “aiming device.” At first the work went very slowly; I knew my measurements had to be exact. I was always scared that the holes I drilled would be too deep or too shallow or too wide. I stopped after every other piece to measure and check, and this, of course, slowed down my pace. I didn't know how to do this kind of work. I was fifteen, small-boned, and just over five feet tall; the machine I worked at was enormous. I had to stand on a box so that I could maneuver the drill bit.

I have no idea what went through my head during all those hours. The clank and constant roar of the machines made talking impossible, and it was forbidden to speak with anyone during work, in any event. All those hours—drilling, measuring,
drilling, measuring. The metal shavings that came off the slugs accumulated on my hands, became embedded in my palms, around my fingernails. My hands turned black; it took nearly a year for the flesh of my hands to return to their normal color. I was afraid of the monster of a machine I worked at—afraid of its size, its noise; I was afraid of working too slowly; I was afraid of working too fast. I was afraid of making a mistake.

I ached for Mama. Hour after hour. Day after day.

 

 

 

After I had spent two months at the factory, the Germans decided to make a point. I don't know why. Were we not working enough? Had someone tried to escape? Or had the Germans simply awoken that morning in the mood for murder?

It was Yom Kippur, September 1942.

A German officer came onto the factory floor. That was unusual in itself. The floor supervisor was a Pole named Zwirek. He was formal with us, but he never treated us cruelly, and he offered us some kind of buffer from the German soldiers and officers who were in control. This German's presence on the factory floor was therefore clear cause for alarm. He told us we must stop working and gather outside in the yard.

The machines were turned off, their gears and motors whirring down. Nobody spoke, though I could tell everyone was filled with questions. The place was suddenly heavy with silence: You could touch the quiet in the thickness of the air. We all left our stations and hurried together down the stairs and into the courtyard in front of the factory building. Someone—a policeman, perhaps—lined us up in rows in the yard, several
hundred of us. The smaller ones, myself included, were put in the front, taller ones behind. Everyone was to watch; everyone was to see what was about to happen.

There was a man, maybe forty years old, standing about thirty feet away from us. He was tied with a thick cord to a tall wooden pole that seemed to have been set into the ground for the occasion. I didn't know him, though others around me told me he was also from Radom and that he came from a good family.

In a line in front of and facing this man were fifteen or twenty German soldiers, each holding a rifle.

The officer then addressed us.

“I know,” he said, “this day you call Yom Kippur is very important for you, a day of sacrifice.”

He held himself very straight, very rigid. He barely moved as he spoke.

“Today is your day of holy sacrifice,” he said. “So today I have chosen a sacrifice for you. I have chosen a man, and he will be your offering.”

He spoke to us flatly, without emphasis, without the slightest whiff of drama. He spoke as if he were doing us a favor, taking on himself the obligation to offer a sacrifice on a Jewish holy day.

Then he turned to the soldiers and gave a command. At his order, the soldiers lifted their rifles and took aim.

The man was bound tightly to the wooden pole, a stake in the ground like those used during the Inquisition, when people were tied to the stake and set on fire. Martyrs go to their deaths this way, bound to a stake. What could this man have been thinking then, knowing that he was about to die? I
hoped absurdly that he would run, as Weinberg had. Weinberg at least was running, desperate, crazy, perhaps, to think that he might have a chance, that running could possibly mean escape. But at least Weinberg was running when he was shot; at least he got to try to avoid the bullets. But not this man. He was forced to stand and watch as his killers raised their guns to him; he had to stand and wait, even if only for seconds, for the guns to go off.

Standing in the front row, I felt the shots. I thought the bullets were hitting me; I thought I could feel each bullet slam against my body as they slammed into his. The shots were so loud, so piercing and hard, a reverberating smack of a sound in a factory courtyard.

The man buckled at the knees and crumpled down the pole.

I watched, silent, stunned. I had never before seen anyone killed at such close range. If the German officer had wanted to scare us, to let us know that he could do anything he pleased and that we must do whatever he said, he certainly accomplished his goal.

When it was over, then what? When it was over, then nothing. It was over. We were sent back to work.

 

 

 

I had been at the factory for maybe two months, and in that time, I had seen two men murdered—one supposedly for sabotage, the other, I supposed, to scare us into compliance. Though I had been sent to the factory to live, the murder of these two men made me realize that I, too, would die, that the work I was given to perform might delay, but would not
prevent, my death. I didn't precisely give up on life; it's important to understand this. I didn't invite death, as some people did, especially later in Auschwitz. But at some point, I simply understood with a certainty that astonished me that my death was inevitable. And what consumed me, what made me afraid, was not the fact of my dying, but its manner. Would it hurt? Would it be quick? Would I have to stand and watch as soldiers raised their rifles to me? Once these questions entered my mind, I couldn't let them go, or to be more accurate, they wouldn't let go of me. I thought of these questions always. Will it hurt? Will I be in pain when I die?

I was a girl of fifteen. I was not courageous. What should I have been thinking of?

 

 

 

Soon after the Yom Kippur “sacrifice,” I had my own encounter with death. It came when I made a mistake I was not allowed to make.

Zwirek, the Pole who supervised the celownik, came up to me one evening as I started to work at my machine. He had never spoken to me or addressed me in any way before. Sometimes when he passed by in front of my row of machines, I could see that he was smiling slightly, as if he were indicating his approval of my work. But I didn't want his attention; I wanted to stay hidden.

He was trim and fit, I remember, and very tall; I reached just below his shoulders.

“I have to speak to you,” he said, quietly and without anger, but firmly, too, with some urgency.

What could he mean? What could he possibly want to speak to me about?

He continued, “Do you know what you did?”

What did I do? What could I have done? I always did as I was told: I stood on my little box in front of the enormous machine and drilled holes, for twelve hours a day, six days a week.

“You know,” he said, “all the fifteen hundred pieces that you made last night—they are no good. Every one you put in the box is wrong.”