March 19, 2012
From Fordham University professor Keller's interviews with Werber comes the expertly-told tragic story of a short-lived and star-crossed marriage during the Holocaust. Werber's tale begins in Radom, Poland where she shared a two-room apartment with her mother, father, and brother. In 1941, Radom was established as a ghetto and the family was required to move into a one-room apartment with Werber's aunt, uncle, and cousins. The next year, she was forced to live and work at an ammunitions factory at the age of 15. It was here that Werber met Heniek Greenspan, a Jewish man working as a police officer at the factory. In the span of a few months, they fell in love and surreptitiously married. She cannot recall exactly how long they were married before he was betrayed by a fellow officer and, presumably, sent to a death camp. He knew he was to be sent away and he brought his wedding band back to her, hoping she might sell it and increase her chances of survival. Throughout the warâincluding a horrific tenure in AuschwitzâWerber managed to hold on to both wedding rings and her wedding photo. Werber survived, married again, made it to the U.S., and had children, but the two rings serve as constant reminders of Heniek and their brief and hopeful love. B&W photos.
January 15, 2012
A dramatic Holocaust memoir about young love and survival. Though told in Werber's voice, the book was written by Keller (Director of Graduate Studies/Fordham Univ.; Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England, 2006). Werber's son urged Keller to interview his mother and write about her experiences of World War II. After 60 years of reticence, the Long Island-based Werber revealed the entirety of her hardships, including the loss of a first husband whose existence she had theretofore kept secret from her children. Born in Radom, Poland, at age 14 Werber was forced to live in a small Jewish ghetto. A year later she was laboring in a factory, in conditions so brutal that mistakes cost workers their lives. "We were called the armaments workers," Werber explains, "but really, we were slaves, half starving, beyond exhausted." Within a matter of months, Werber's brother was killed and her mother, grandparents and most of her aunts and uncles had been taken away. At 15, Werber fell in love with a Jewish police officer, Heniek, more than 10 years her senior, who got her a new job in a kitchen. The two married quickly in the hopes of escaping as part of a new German exchange with Argentina. Away from the ghetto when the first "exchange" happened, Werber learned that all of the German hopefuls had been shot. After witnessing many deaths, Werber survived many close calls, as well as time at Auschwitz. Liberated in 1945, Werber moved to Germany, where she met her second husband, Jack, to whom she was married until his death in 2006. Werber's story is wholly engrossing, written with exceptional immediacy and attention to detail. A deeply affecting addition to Holocaust literature.
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February 15, 2012
Among all the shelves of Holocaust memoirs, this book stands out for the quality of the spare, honest, passionate narrative of survivor Millie Werber, now in her eighties and a matriarch on Long Island. With writer Keller, she tells a story of love, betrayal, and loyalty when she was a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Poland. After two years in the ghetto, Millie, at 15, married kind Jewish policeman Heniek, 27 ( I loved him. I did ). Then he was betrayed by another Jewish policeman ( They took him out. We heard the screams. I never saw him again ). Hiding under floorboards ( Will the rats eat her eyes? ), barely enduring the death marches ( Why go on? For what? To where? ), she finally, inevitably, in Auschwitz witnessed the worst humankind is capable of. Beaten and raped, she was saved by the kindness of strangers. And the shocks did not stop there. Coming to America after the war, she found that some members of her family did not want her. Always she was haunted Was God there? There is no answer. A story certain to spark discussion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)