Two Rings: A Story of Love and War

Judged only as a World War Two survivor's chronicle, Millie Werber's story would be remarkable enough. Born in central Poland in the town of Radom, she found herself trapped in the ghetto at the age of fourteen, a slave laborer in an armaments factory in the summer of 1942, transported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, before being marched to a second armaments factory. She faced death many times; indeed she was certain that she would not survive. But she did.

Many years later, when she began to share her past with Eve Keller, the two women rediscovered the world of the teenage girl Millie had been during the war. Most important, Millie revealed her most precious private memory: of a man to whom she was married for a few brief months. He was -- if not the love of her life -- her first great unconditional passion. He died, leaving Millie with a single photograph taken on their wedding day, and two rings of gold that affirm the presence of a great passion in the bleakest imaginable time.

Millie Werber is today the matriarch of a close and loving family. After moving to the United States in 1946, she and her husband Jack raised their two sons in Queens, NY., where together they built a real estate business. They lived happily together until Jack's death in 2006. Millie now lives on Long Island surrounded by her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Eve Keller is a professor and director of graduate studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England, and is a past president of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.