Read Two Rings for Free Online Page B

factory, alone.
    I wanted desperately to go with her, to return to the ghetto and stay with her and the rest of our little family. I wanted to be able to sleep beside her, to feel her warmth surround me. Always that, maybe mostly that—the warmth of Mama’s ample body in the night. Despite the oblavas, the unprovoked brutalities, the sickness and the hunger and the dread that were upon me, still, I wanted only to be with Mama in the ghetto.
    Yet I was not allowed. I was made to stay at the factory. Feter said, and the family agreed, if you work, you might live. So, at fifteen, I began to work in the ammunitions factory, and after that first day at work, I never spent another night with my mother again.

    The factory was a large building a couple of kilometers out of town. Poles had worked there previously, but they were paid, whereas we were available as slave labor—unpaid and barely fed—so the Germans brought us in to replace the Poles. We were set to work at enormous machines for twelve-hour
shifts, six hours at a time with a fifteen-minute break between. We worked either 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. or 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. I worked at a machine drilling holes into little metal slugs. I was given measurements—the hole had to be so wide and so deep—and it had to be exact. I was required to drill fifteen hundred pieces per shift—one after the other, hour after hour, day after day. No talking, no sitting. Just drilling holes into metal slugs, precisely so wide, precisely so deep, and placing each one as I finished it into compartmentalized wooden boxes at my side. If I worked, I could live. I was grateful for that. But I knew I could not make a mistake. Mistakes would not be tolerated.
    This I learned within days of arriving at the factory. There was a young man, Weinberg was his name. He was a friend of my brother’s—probably eighteen or so at the time. One day, I saw Weinberg running fast across the grounds, toward the gates of the compound. I wondered why he was sprinting; he, of course, had nowhere to go. Then I saw the soldiers running, too, carrying their rifles, raising them to shoot. And then they did—shoot him, I mean. They raised their rifles and shot this young man dead. Just like that. He crumpled into the dirt, the force of the bullets first propelling him forward, as if pushing him onward for a moment in his desperate stride, but then, and really all at once, because it could have taken only a second or two, Weinberg collapsed on the ground.
    Feter! You told me that working would protect me, that if I work I will live. I am here in this factory, I am here drilling these holes. The dreadful noise of these monstrous machines, the metal dust in the air, the monotony of the endless hours, the loneliness, the fear. My legs ache from standing so long.
All so I can live. But what about Weinberg? Weinberg has been working, too, yet he has been killed.
    Weinberg, it seemed, had made some kind of mistake; that’s what the Germans said. They said he was trying to sabotage the ammunition. When the Germans accused him of this crime, he knew what it meant and so he ran. Then he was shot. Then he fell. Then the Germans dragged his body away.
    Alone in the factory, I knew I must not make a mistake.
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    During the first several weeks that I worked at the factory—while they were building barracks on Skolzna Street for the twenty-five hundred workers who eventually came there—we were housed in a building that seemed something like a horse arena. I don’t really know what the building was, what it had been intended for, but after the summer of 1942, it became a place for the women, Jewish slave-laborers, to sleep. It was an empty, cavernous structure with a hard cement floor and, around the perimeter, something that looked like a trough. We used this as our latrine. We slept without bedding, without blankets, on the floor.
    After a few weeks—this must have been