Two Rings

Martin first proposed the idea of my interviewing his mother and writing a book about her wartime experiences. Though urged over the years by members of her family, Millie had been reluctant to speak in detail about her life. It can be that way with survivors, I'm told—not wanting to impose themselves on others, not wanting to burden people with the horrors of the past. But Martin thought that perhaps now, finally, Millie might be agreeable, and he thought that the two of us might hit it off. He had a feeling about us, I suppose.

I was reluctant, too, at first. I'm an academic, a professor of English literature, not a history buff and far from a Holocaust scholar. And though Jewish, my family has little connection to the traumas of the war. No one in my family died in the Holocaust. Three of my four grandparents were born in the United States; the fourth came from Hungary late in the nineteenth century. Growing up in suburban New York, I barely had any experience of anti-Semitism: When I was in high school and played violin in a county orchestra, my stand partner, a devout Catholic, asked me once if she could see my horns. But this was harmless, a parochial silliness; whatever malevolence lived in the age-old slur she had heard, none of it lived in her.

So I was tentative starting this project with Millie, because I could see no way in; there was no clear connection between Millie and me that would make such a project viable. If I had experienced nothing of real anti-Semitism, nothing of true hardship, nothing of danger or the kind of dread that keeps you awake and trembling in your bed at night, how was I to understand Millie, who was forged in these things, who was made by them and still lives them? How was I to understand the experience of what she would tell me, the feeling of her experience?

Nonetheless, we decided to try. We agreed that I would visit Millie regularly in her home, an elegantly appointed ranch on suburban Long Island.

"Where shall we begin?" I asked the first time. And without further prompting, the stories came pouring out. Like a dam undone, a torrent of stories, jumbled together, all intermixed. One ran readily into the next, the contours wholly unclear. After holding back for so long, it seemed, Millie wanted to tell everything. Something had been unleashed, and it was running—not wildly, not chaotically exactly, but with such profusion it was difficult to sort. I was lost in the surge, and Millie was, too, I know. Our first session lasted four hours; many hundreds more together followed.

But Millie's inner life was harder to find.

To reach inward, I realized, much would be required of us both: We needed time for Millie to tell and retell her stories; we needed honesty and candor, too, and a growing, mutual trust. Above all, we needed to believe that somehow it would be possible, despite our differences, truly to know and be known by the other.

And for that we needed love.

I decided to step back and let Millie speak without much direction from me. I asked open, broad-based questions—what was on her mind that day; what had she been thinking about as she waited for me to arrive; what drifted through her thoughts as she lay in bed the night before? I didn't want to rush her; I wanted to let her mind go wherever it willed. And slowly I began to figure out the patterns underlying the associations of her memory, the emotional keystones that structure her experience of the world.

We soon started to see each other quite frequently, some days devoted to interviews, some devoted to fun. We found ourselves becoming friends—a Holocaust survivor in her early eighties, a suburban New Yorker touching fifty. We'd go to Lord & Taylor—one of Millie's favorite places—where we'd survey the recent arrivals, assessing the season's styles of cut and color. We'd stroll arm in arm through the departments—dresses, sportswear, accessories—and then take the elevator to the third-floor restaurant and eat grilled vegetable sandwiches among the white-haired ladies sitting with their shopping bags. We went to an eight-week film series on Holocaust movies from the 1940s at the Manhattan Jewish Community Center; we went to matinees on Broadway; once, we went to hear La Traviata at the Met in the middle of a violent snowstorm. I introduced Millie to YouTube, and we watched videos in her den—clips from the Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball shows, and Lily Tomlin playing Ernestine the Telephone Operator.

And we talked for hours, holding nothing back. Whom we have loved in our lives, how we have loved. The fire of a first kiss, and what it takes to sustain a marriage over decades. What we have wanted for ourselves, for our families; what we believe in and what we fear. What started as a series of formal interviews—"Tell me about the ghetto: Where did you live? How did you get food?"—turned into something else.

Millie now calls me the sister she never had. I demur: I'm thirty-three years younger than you, I say. Why not call me the daughter you never had? She gets the point and laughs. But she prefers sister. And that's fine with me.

But Millie then showed me some things I hadn't seen before—the dried, yellowed petals of a chrysanthemum, remnants of a flower given to her by Jack on their wedding day; a pair of gold rings, one with the initials HG engraved on a little medallion on the top of the ring; a small, tattered photograph of a young couple looking expectantly toward the camera. "My Heniek," she said, "this is my Heniek."

She gave the rings to me to look at, and then she told me what she had never spoken of before—how she had managed to save the picture and rings through the war, where she had kept them for the many decades that followed, what she did with them, secretly, throughout her life, who knew about them, and who didn't. Millie had told me much about Heniek by then, but she hadn't told me this. When I saw the look in her eyes as she held the picture out to me, her finger gently tracing the creases and ripples on its surface, I knew that here was the heart of Millie's story, that hers was not in its essence simply a survivor's story of suffering and loss, but more deeply a story of young and ardent love in the midst of the horror—in spite of the horror—and one that in some quiet way has continued unabated ever since.

So I wrote what I intuited to be true of Millie's inner world—the desires and fears and hopes and judgments of a young woman, barely more than a girl. And then I read every word to her, every sentence, every revision. Sometimes I wrote things that made her uncomfortable, and we had to negotiate to decide what to keep in and what to take out. (Millie doesn't like talking about herself as being attractive, for example, or having been attractive to men, though I can easily see how she was—and is—and the love scenes with Heniek still make her a little uneasy.) But every sentence that's written here is true to her; every sentence, though it may not so much sound like her, nonetheless to her mind bespeaks her heart, her truth, the reality she lives. "Yes," she says, "it is true; what you have written is true."

As for the historicity of what's written—I can say that everything that can be checked has been checked. The names of the factories in Radom, the names of the various people in charge of the ghettos and the factory where she worked and subsequently of the concentration camp where the laborers lived, the dates of the ghettos' establishment and subsequent liquidations, the death marches. Millie visited Auschwitz in 1987 and brought back a copy of a document that lists the names, birth dates, and occupations of all the arrivals on a certain day during the summer of 1944. Millie is listed, along with her aunt—both from Radom, Millie a "student," her aunt Gittel a "seamstress." And Millie, of course, has a tattoo—A-24542.

The rest is true to Millie's awareness and memory. She was often unsure of sequence and time frame, especially about the tumultuous winter of 1943–1944. She really has no clear sense of how long she was married to Heniek, perhaps months, though sometimes she says it was just a matter of weeks. I've tried to convey this uncertainty in the text, not pretending, after sixty-five years, that she has a full and clear purchase on the exact chronology of specific events. Millie has been determined to be as honest here as she can—about the depth of her love, about the persistence of her hate; about what she remembers and what she doesn't; about what she has clear-cut evidence for and what she can only surmise. She knows she has no access to the causes of things—why the Germans proposed the exchange of Jews for Argentinean citizens, why there was an option of getting on a death wagon on the march to Tomaszów Mazowiecki, whether the way the Radomers put together the sequence of events leading to the death of the thirteen policemen and their families from the factory is really accurate. Millie knows that the story as she tells it is how she and other Radomers in the factory understood what happened. But however strong her accusations, she recognizes that she can't know with complete certainty what in fact did happen.

These are trifles, as she knows. But the fear runs deep, perhaps because exposure to judgment during the war was literally a matter of life or death. Millie never told her sons about her first husband, in large measure because she feared their judgment. She did speak about her experiences to some extent to her family, of course, and sometimes, too, in public, giving talks at synagogues and local Holocaust museums, speaking to schoolchildren, once even traveling to Germany to speak at a high school in Gütersloh, near to where she was interned toward the end of the war in a forced-labor factory. But she never spoke fully or deeply about her past, and she revealed episodes of her life only piecemeal.

This was true to some extent even with Jack. For sixty years, Millie shared her stories with Jack, who, having suffered his own experience of the war, understood whatever she said but was willing not to push when she didn't want to say more. Jack knew that she was briefly married to Heniek and that he was killed, just as Millie knew about Jack's first wife, Rachel, and their three-year-old daughter, Emma, both of whom were also killed. But they respected each other with silence, too, and never pressed the other for details.

Millie resisted telling her sons for a simpler reason—she feared their disdain. What would her children think of her if they knew about Heniek—that she was so young and so much in love; that she was caught in calamity and yet found, though only for a moment, a respite of tenderness and peace. She worried (wrongly) that they would think it improper.

But then it was fear of judgment of another kind that finally prompted her to relent. What if she died and her children never knew why she had kept silent all these years? Might they suspect her of some wrongdoing? Might they think that she refused to speak because she had something shameful to hide? Though she knows her sons have never given her cause to worry about their judgment of her, she's been much affected by second-generation survivors whose books, to her mind, unfairly critique their parents' lives. Millie doesn't want others to wonder about her story; she wants to claim it for herself.

For sixty-five years, Millie has borne a secret, but she wants it known that her secret is both precious to her and pure. It was then; it is now.