Two Rings by Millie Werber

grounds? Did he get sent to a camp to be worked to death? To Auschwitz, perhaps, or to Treblinka? Perhaps he starved to death. Perhaps he was gassed.
    Was he beaten?
    Did he suffer? Did my Heniek suffer?

    Heniek was my first love. For sixty years, I was married to Jack and I loved him. Jack was my everything—my strength, my purpose, my partner in life. But Heniek was my first love. There was nothing normal about our love—we courted under the eyes of our enemies; we married as a means of escape. We were husband and wife for only a few months; we never had a
home, never dreamed of a family. Nothing normal, but maybe for all that, nothing ordinary. I was sixteen and in love with a charming and beautiful man, a man who had chosen me out of hundreds of women, a man who made me feel vibrant and alive in the midst of war. I was alone and frightened in a dangerous place, and Heniek entered my life to protect me and love me and teach me the fullness of pleasure. He was the center of my life. His love woke me in the morning, sustained me during the hours of empty labor, and sent me to sleep at night. He cared for me and looked out for my needs. He got me into the kitchen, where I could sit during my shifts, where I didn’t have to listen all day to the screech of the drilling machines, where I could occasionally sneak a slice of potato. He spoke to me with the knowing calm of a mature man, a man I could admire without restraint. Heniek loved me with a sweet and assured warmth that I had never known before, and with all the intensity of a young girl awakening into adulthood, I loved him back. I loved him. I did.
    I loved Heniek Greenspan. And Duvid Norembursky took him away.

    I want to think for a moment about the weight of judgment. Of who deserves to be judged, of who has the right to act as judge. I am not speaking here of public trials, of the court of public opinion, even of the judgments laid down by history. I am thinking of the judgments that reign in one’s own heart, that prompt humility or hatred, that make one grateful for a kindness or make one ache in the night for revenge.

    I feel free to judge the Germans for what they did during the war. And I find I even feel some satisfaction in being able to accuse them of their crimes.
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    In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, I was invited to return to Lippstadt, where I had spent several months in another ammunitions factory we had been sent to from Auschwitz. Sometime in the 1980s, I think it was, a high school had been founded in Gütersloh, the neighboring town, for the city’s very top students. The Anne Frank School, it was called. The students had been doing a good-works project—cleaning up a dilapidated old Jewish cemetery in Lippstadt—and as they were cutting back the weeds, clearing out the overgrowth, they had come upon a gravestone they didn’t understand. The stone marked the grave of an infant who had died in 1945. This was odd, they thought, because the students had been taught that the last Jews had been evicted from the town by 1938; from 1938, they had been told, there were no Jews in Lippstadt. It was judenrein . So where had this child come from?
    The students started researching their city’s wartime history and eventually discovered that Jews and Russian prisoners of war had been made to work at an ammunitions factory that existed there. The gravestone marked the burial of a Jewish couple’s baby who had died in 1945, just before the couple immigrated to Palestine. No one had ever told these students from the Anne Frank School—not their parents, not their grandparents—what had gone on in Lippstadt during the war, how prisoners were used as slaves to make weapons for the
war. It had been erased from history. Until the gravestone of a Jewish baby brought that history to light.
    The school decided to try to locate whomever they could who had worked in the factory. It