my mother says, twisting the diamond ring on her left hand. This is not her wedding band, that stays in a box on her dresser. This ring, with its tiny diamond chip worn flat, is handled with gentle reverence.
My mother studies it now, slowly turning the ring on her own small hand. Her knuckles above the ring are swollen, too large to slide the ring across. It doesn’t matter, she never takes it off: not to bathe, do the dishes or rub lotion on her hands.
Memories, memories, this ring is all about a lost, sad time. It reminds my mother of the woman who wore it last, a woman my mother yearns for, a woman she loves more than the rest of us. She has never told me this, except today I see it in her seated stance, how her shoulders roll forward over her hand: a protective, downward sloping curve. In this pose her jowls sag and press extra wrinkles around her smile.
My mother looks at me now, her brown eyes tinged with longing. “My grandma raised me when the war began. My mother was working—too busy.”
Plus she had a boyfriend. Within days after the Nazis took my grandpa to a labor camp, my grandma fell in love, a grand sweeping passion that was as scandalous as much as dangerous. That’s the reason, the secret reason, why my mother was raised by her grandmother. The older woman spirited my mother away to her tiny farm in the foothills of Austria.
“There was never a child more loved than I,” my mother says.
The words spill out now, flecks of fact and fancy. I’ve never been able to tell the difference and I no longer try. My mother is talking to me, and these are the stories I want to hear.
She tells of how the Germans finally came for their family, of how uncles and wives first tried to escape, then hide. She tells how their farm was eventually stolen, how those remaining were crammed into cattle cars that rattled and bumped along rails. She tells of Theresienstadt (Terezin), the barracks where she lived for three years. She describes wooden stalls over the camp’s mortuary, where the dead lay stacked for mass burial.
She tells of seeing one small girl, face waxy yellow, stilled by the violence of the camp. “It was no big deal,” she later told her grandma. My mother: numb to death before the age of 7.
Still, there was that ring, a powerful circle that drew my mother and her grandmother together. “She protected me and hid me through the years we were there,” my mother said as she stroked the ring. My great-grandmother gave her food and grew thin, she gave her coat and lost fingers to frostbite.
One bitter autumn day, when the leaves were whirling off the trees and breaking underfoot, when the reds and greens and golds were the only signs of wealth left on that blackened hillside, there came the word, a whispered rumor: liberation.
Less than a week later my mother's grandma was shipped to Auschwitz.
My mother stood on the tracks and watched the train crunch slowly out of sight. With it went her love, her heart, her hope. For years that train returned in her dreams, finally dragging my mother’s sanity down those dirty tracks.
I gently lift my mother's hand, touch the ring myself. Her warm fingers briefly curl over mine, then let go.
“How did you get the ring?” I ask. Jewelry, artwork, even the fillings in their teeth, all routinely stolen from the Jews.
My mother shrugs. “My mother--your grandmother--I don’t know how. But she gave it to me, for luck, when I was pregnant with you.”
My mother stares at her hand, then back up at me. “It’s my most valuable possession.”
by Susan Rich, (c)2014 All Rights Reserved
