Two Rings by Millie Werber Page B

wife. He didn’t deserve the life he got. He had killed Heniek to get it. Or, perhaps better, perhaps more honest: He had caused Heniek to be killed. Was there to be no consequence? Was that murder to make no sound? To drop silently into the same abyss that every other murder had? How powerless it feels to sustain a blow and be unable to fight back. It feels like suffocating, like the natural back-and-forth of breath suddenly is no more. It feels like nothingness.
    Heniek was gone, and I could not make him come back. Who was there to love me now? Who was there to shelter me?
    And there was more to come.
    The next day, I was arrested as well.

6
    I WAS IN THE KITCHEN, BACK AT WORK, AS I HAD TO BE. How could I be, I wonder? How could I sit again my on my little stool and peel my daily quota of potatoes after Heniek had been taken away? I had to do my work as if Heniek were still with me, as if he might walk into the kitchen to check on me, as if he still might meet me after my shift for a few private moments. He would do none of those things, but still I had to do my work. The factory, the kitchen—it was no different from the ghetto: Terrible things happened, and no one could stop to mourn. My life had ended, and yet still my life went on. I don’t know how that was possible.
    I was in the kitchen, and my second cousin, Elkanah Morgan, came in. We called him Kunah. He had been a member of the ghetto police, and he had come with Norembursky and the others from the ghetto when they had replaced the factory police just a few days earlier. I had known Kunah for years, of course. He lived not far from my own home, and when I was
young, before the war, I was sometimes permitted to go to his family’s apartment, not so much to visit him, but to spend some time with the wonderful thing he had built—a radio with earphones. This was a big deal in those days: Not everyone had a radio—we certainly didn’t—and the earphones added wonder to the invention. Not often, but occasionally, and when I could, I would go and sit and listen with my cousins to Polish songs playing on Kunah’s radio.
    So when I saw Kunah enter the kitchen that day, I wasn’t frightened at all. He was my cousin; he would never do anything to hurt me, to put me in danger. But then he came over to me and said, “Come with me.” Simple. Just like that. “Come with me. I must take you because you are Greenspan.”
    Greenspan was Heniek’s name, but mine was Drezner. There was no way to change my name legally when I got married. So although I was married to Heniek, I was still Mania Drezner, not Greenspan. Kunah knew this. But there was a girl named Greenspan—not related to Heniek—who was one of the girls Miller had chosen to work for him in the kuznia. She was several years older than I, and I knew that Miller had one day caught her kissing her boyfriend. I don’t know if Miller punished her for that. But after Norembursky reported Miller for having committed Rassenschande, the police were required to arrest all the girls who had been involved, dozens of them. And Greenspan was one, and she was arrested. Still, why arrest me, too? I wasn’t Greenspan, and I hadn’t—thank God—worked in the kuznia.
    Perhaps Kunah, like so many of the police, wanted to do more for the Germans than he had been asked. He had on his list of people to arrest one girl named Greenspan. But he
would outdo the list: He would bring them two. He wouldn’t listen to me.
    â€œI am not Greenspan. You know this, Kunah. I am Drezner and have always been. I have nothing to do with this. Tell them you know that I didn’t work in the kuznia. I have nothing to do with them.”
    But he was implacable. There was no convincing him. “Come,” he said, “you have to go.”
    And I did. I always did as I was told. So my cousin took me out from the kitchen and led me to the gates of the KL compound,