Abaddon

Deportation… Birkenau… Auschwitz… soup and crusty stale bread… crowned teeth and rusty spoons… Yom Kippur… SS… selection… miracles… empty wounds… childhood… a corpse

Deportation

We were to leave street by street… no longer talking of god…we were weeping… deserting their homes…a bag on our backs, some food, a few clothing… dragging their lives; Nothing else

Birkenau and Auzchwitz

Molten lead began to settle in the veins… men to the left, women to the right… the limbs, the brain… no question of wealth, social distinction, and importance… to lay with a Polish girl; only people all condemned to the same fate

Soup and crusty stale bread

Flames in the air that smelled of burning flesh and screams of children… crowned teeth and a rusty spoon…into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Yom Kippur

Why should I bless his name? The eternal… a prayer to the god in whom I no longer believed… Lord of the Universe… was silent… there was no longer any reason… in Gods silence

Empty Wounds

A bell… a trace of terror in his face… barbed wire of another concentration camp…nothing but two pits of terror and all round me death was moving… it came from the depths of the soul and there until death

Childhood

What childhood… of morphine…in a concentration camp where work is liberty… parting away from my mother and Tzipora…a childhood… for my father that lived body and soul for each other… I brought him more satisfaction in a few gulps of hot water than my entire childhood 

Corpse

It has never left me…the idea of death began to fascinate me… I had changed from the concentration camp… and it pained me that I could not weep, but I had no tears … the look in his eyes which gazed back at me…

Found poem from Night, arranged by Matthew FJ Mason