Two Rings Read Online Free PDF Page A

them well and helped them save up to buy sewing machines for themselves. That was a big deal, a sewing machine. It was transportable, first of all, so no matter where you had to go, no matter what the situation, you could take the machine with you and earn a living. When the ghetto was established in 1941 and we had to leave our apartment on Wolnosc Street and move in with Mima and my uncle and their two children, Mama brought along her sewing machine. She had hoped that she could continue to work, even in the ghetto. But there was no room to sew—eight of us at that point were living in a single room—and after the first month or two in the ghetto, there were no customers. One of the girls who worked for Mama managed to leave Poland before the war began. She went to Paris, and she brought her machine with her so she could work, so she could live.
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    Mama is second from the right; Mima is sitting beside her

    Mama wanted me to learn to sew so that I would have a trade. Sewing and embroidery were the two professions acceptable for girls. Mama was successful in her business—she kept us housed and fed—but it seemed to me that she worked all the time, until we lit candles on Friday night and then again as soon as Shabbos was over. When my father lived away, it was Mama who supported me and my brother. My father did send home some money, I think, and I know he sent occasional treats—canned sliced pineapple, for example, which I happily devoured between pieces of buttered cornbread—but it was my mother’s sewing business that kept our household together. I was young—barely a teenager—and Mama wanted to teach me, too. Perhaps she had a sense that a woman needed to learn to provide for herself, in case she had no one else to rely on.
    I once saw her reading a letter from my father. Sitting on our bed in the back of our apartment with the unfolded paper in her hands, she quietly, quietly cried. I hated that; I hated to see those tears. And I hated, too, to see how hard she had to work with my father away. I knew I didn’t want that for myself, to work all day at the cutting table, to spend every day with scissors and needles and thread.

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    Mima and Feter, 1932

    I didn’t want to work, but work is what saved me in the war.

    In the spring of 1941, when we moved to the ghetto, Mama took her sewing machine and one of the two beds from the back room of our apartment; she also took the feather blankets. Everything else we owned—the furniture, the dishes, the cutlery—we had to leave behind. Mima and my uncle—I called him Feter—had found a single-room apartment on
Szwarlikowska Street, in the area of the city that the Germans closed off to make the ghetto, and we moved in with them. We had three beds for the eight of us: Mima and Feter and their two children shared two beds, I still got to sleep with Mama, and my father and brother slept on the floor. We had no bathroom—there was an outhouse in the back—and no running water. The wooden floor was painted white; in the winter, the cold made the boards seize up and creak in the night.
    I was frightened of the ghetto, even from the start.
    I had never really known hunger before; we weren’t rich among the Jews of Radom, but we had what we needed—a meal every day with potatoes and meat, on Friday nights a chicken. In the ghetto, I began to learn what hunger is.
    We got ration cards, some kind of food stamps, and we had to stand in line for hours at one of the few bakeries still working for our small ration of bread. Sometimes, when we finally got our turn at the bakery window, we would be told that there was no more bread to be had, that they had already run out. So Mama suggested that we all go to different places to increase our chances. Mama sometimes sent me to stay with a cousin of ours who lived in a building whose ground floor housed one of the bakeries. I would sleep on our cousin’s