POETRY FRIDAY Smallest voices of the Holocaust

Terezin was the concentration camp gussied up for Red Cross inspectors and propaganda films about "relocated" Jews in their "model ghetto." Children attended school, where teachers encouraged art and poetry. More than 4,000 drawings and 42 poems survived, becoming the property of the State Jewish Museum in Prague.

The children didn't fare as well: of the 15,000 who passed through Terezin, fewer than 100 came back. The rest perished from famine or disease or were shipped to Auschwitz.

The following is from a collection of the children's poems and drawings, "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" originally translated into English in 1971, then expanded in 1993; it appears to be out of print now.

Terezin

by Mif, 1944

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads
To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

We've suffered here more than enough,
Here in this clot of grief and shame,
Wanting a badge of blindness
To be a proof for their own children.

A fourth year of waiting, like standing above a swamp
From which any moment might gush forth a spring.

Meanwhile, the rivers flow another way,
Another way,
Not letting you die, not letting you live.

And the cannons don't scream and the guns don't bark
And you don't see the blood here. Nothing, only silent hunger.
Children steal the bread here and ask and ask and ask
And all would wish to sleep, keep silent and just to go to sleep again ...

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads
To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

Comments

[elswhere]

Thank you for posting this. That's a wonderful book, sad and beautiful; I still remember seeing it as a kid.

There's a really good kids' book about the woman largely responsible for giving the children of Terezin the chance to create art out of their lives and memories: "Fireflies in the Dark, the Story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the Children of Terezin," by Susan Goldman Rubin.

[Anne]

Many thanks. I couldn't bear to put this book into storage, as dog-earred and yellowed as its become.

Thanks for mentioning the teacher too. I couldn't find her name in the pages and pages of itty-bitty end notes, but then I didn't have my glasses on.