Two Rings by Millie Werber

Author:Millie Werber [Werber, Millie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2012-02-01T13:00:00+00:00

8

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.

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