Two Rings Read Online Free PDF

floor for a few hours at night and then get up at three o’clock in the morning. It would still be dark, of course, and bitter cold, but if I got to the courtyard before there was even a hint of morning in the air, I had a chance of returning home with warm bread in my hands. On those occasions, I was triumphant: “Look, Mama, look what I have brought. A loaf of bread!” A treasure.

    I didn’t like to be on the streets. I didn’t really like to be anywhere outside our single room. Even before the ghetto, before the war, I was frightened of Poles. Jews were never accepted by them; we never felt a part of their society. Jews weren’t allowed to work in any official or government-related jobs—not in banks or on the trains or in the post office. Growing up, I knew to stay away from the Poles, the boys especially, who sometimes threw stones at us. If we saw Polish people walking down the street, we always crossed to the other side. If we ever saw a priest—I don’t know why we did this—we would always hold on to a shirt or coat button. There was somehow supposed to be protection in that small gesture. No priest ever accosted me or anyone I knew, but I knew I was supposed to be wary of priests, to stay away, to clutch a button.
    In the ghetto, the danger was real and routine. Once, coming home from the bakery in the early morning, I passed Chavela Mora, a cousin of mine, on the street. We were the same age and had lived in the same building before the ghetto was established. I used to envy her beauty, with her big brown eyes and a full head of luxuriant blonde curls; my hair was always fine and thin. But now I saw that she was utterly changed. She looked maybe half her former size; she was sprawled out on the sidewalk, her arm outstretched, begging for coins, and all her hair had fallen out. She clearly hadn’t eaten—or washed—in a very long time. Perhaps she had typhus. She looked desperately alone and bewildered, out on the street, with people passing by. What happened to her parents? Why weren’t they there, taking care of her?
    It’s hard to consider a question like this. It’s hard for a fourteen-year-old girl even to formulate such a question.

    I called out to my cousin, but her gaze didn’t move to meet mine. I was frightened, too frightened to approach her, though I wanted to and thought perhaps I should. I ran home and told Mama what I had seen, but no one could find Chavela after that.
    Maybe she had been taken away.
    They did that, in the ghetto. The Germans would take people randomly off the streets, and no one would ever see them again. People would go out in the day, maybe to try to sell something or find some food, and they would never return. This has to be a child’s greatest fear. Certainly it was mine. To be snatched away and never found.
    This is what happened to Motel Rafalowitz. Or something close to this, anyway.
    Motel had left his apartment early one morning to get his family’s ration of bread. Hours passed and then several days, but Motel never came home. Somehow Motel’s wife, Dina Rosa, eventually learned that Motel was in the Radom jail, having been arrested when he went looking for bread on the Aryan side of town, outside the ghetto. Then we heard—though I have no idea how this information got around—that Motel was going to be executed and that he was going to have to pass by the ghetto wall on his way. Everyone scrambled to see him. Dina Rosa, of course, but many others, too. I went with Mama; I think my brother came, as well. I remember several young boys trying to climb the brick wall that separated the ghetto from the outside world to reach their heads over the top to see.
    We waited for a long while, Dina Rosa screaming out her husband’s name at intervals. And then we heard him—the
boys on the wall said Motel was being held between two soldiers. They were passing by just on the other