DIE MAMME LAGER* (The Mother Camp) Your perfect Polish protected you, no trace of Yiddish to give you away, a gift of life through assimilation: outrageous lesson. In Auschwitz they never knew, let you steal close enough to harvest rotten potato rinds, to sustain yourself, hair white before you were twenty, emaciated, dizzy with typhus, without youth. I must know right now what you did to survive the stench of burning flesh, the ritual abuse, and the days haul of bones and ashes to tell me nothing, that nothing can ever frighten you now, that you stood in line, naked, frostbitten, craven, your veil of hair routinely shorn after the selection. Brutal bedtime stories like toxic gifts to stoke my own nightmares with, stroking my lucky camouflage-blonde hair. I know and I know all these things and more and although Ive gazed at it throughout my life, and never shrank when it encircled me in childhood, I cannot recall one number on your tattooed forearm. A network of fine lines and cracks marks history into your face, once beautiful, my first view of Heaven. Its threshold too is broken, patched roughly with the same brutal mortar, a wide ribbon of blood and many questions. How did you handle the volume of corpses? After a while even the Nazis could not handle them and were forced to shift body burning functions to larger crematoria in Birkenau. I need to understand how to, and if it is appropriate, to exercise which skills, and be the last alone precisely human. How did you survive the monotony of death, the cadaveric poison, your bottomless grief, and the radical indifference of G-d? You always say Schwer tzu Sein a Yid, (It is difficult to be a Jew,) shrugging as you often do with your utterly amnesiac gift and I respond simply, Schwer tzu Sein, Mamme, schwer tzu Sein: it is difficult, Mother, it is difficult just TO BE. © 2014 Wallis Stern *Poets Note: Eichmann called the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex The Mother Camp because it was lauded as the most efficient model of sub-human extermination.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 02:26:27 +0000
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