Two Rings by Millie Werber Page A

took some doing, but they managed to find me and six or seven others. When they called me from Lippstadt inviting me to speak before the students during the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration, the school officials couldn’t have been nicer. Would I like to bring my family along? Of course, we will pay. Your son is coming and eats only kosher food? We will get him a private chef to prepare whatever he would like. Please, remember that it’s very cold and rainy here; don’t forget to pack galoshes. Galoshes! Can you imagine? A German worrying about me that I shouldn’t freeze or get my feet wet in the rain. I was dumbfounded.
    Really, they were very kind, very solicitous.
    When I spoke at the school, I wanted above all to make it clear that I wasn’t accusing them—the students and teachers. The students were just children, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old; the teachers were perhaps thirty or forty. All of them, of course, had been born after the war. But I did want them to think about their parents and their grandparents: I wanted them to ask their families what they had done.
    â€œLook,” I said, “I didn’t come here to accuse you of anything. All of you are young, and I will not judge you. But if you want to hear the truth and not just learn what is written in the histories of this town, then ask your parents directly. Ask your fathers and your grandfathers: What were you doing then? Every German wants to say that he was fighting the Russians, that he wasn’t involved in this, he wasn’t a part of what was done to the Jews. But how could that be? Some of
your grandparents were murderers. And not only your grandfathers—your grandmothers, too. The women could be the cruelest of all. Tell your grandparents that you want to know, that you are interested to know: What did they do, and what did they know during the war? Perhaps they will not tell you these things, but you should ask, because you should know who your grandparents were.”
    This was so satisfying to me, saying these things directly to these young people. It was so good to speak what was in my heart, to not hide, to not dissemble to them, even despite their overwhelming generosity to me and my family. It was a cleansing of some kind. Oddly perhaps, the young German students and teachers to whom I spoke seemed fully open to what I had to say, eager even to hear a survivor bring testimony to the history of their city, a history that the city itself had previously wanted to erase. That impressed me deeply, and still does.
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    But then, what about the Jews? Am I to judge my own people in the same way? Jews were the victims, not the criminals. Jack used to say that when history reflects on this time hundreds of years from now, it will be seen that, given everything, the Jews—as a whole, as a people—acted appropriately and generally with honor. That may well be true. But there were those among us who did unspeakable things to save themselves, to save their families—or tried to. Is there any justification for that? I am thinking here not of history, but of my own life: Am I supposed to forgive someone who damns others to save himself?

    I have forgiven some; in my heart I have. I feel no hatred for my cousin Elkanah Morgan, whom I will speak about, or for Chiel Friedman, who had been my uncle’s friend. What these two men would do to me in the KL could easily have led to my death, but somehow I find that no enmity rises in me now at the mention of their names. But it is different with Duvid Norembursky. Though he was a Jew and thus surely in some way a victim, too, can I not raise my fist at his selfish cruelty? Can I not cry out at the horror of what he did? Of what he did to Heniek and the others? Of what he took from me?
    Some years after the war, when Jack and I had settled in America, I did try to get some small justice, even to exact some small revenge against Norembursky and his