Winter Dreams -- Buchenwald Concentration Camp, 1944

By the winter of 1944, my father had been in Buchenwald for 3 years. 

He thought the war would never end and he would die there, some cold winter morning. I wrote a long sequence of poems about that winter. The sequence is called "Third Winter of War: Buchenwald" and it's in my book Lightning and Ashes.  

Here is one of the poems from that sequence: It's about the nightmares my dad had in the camp. They continued until the day he died 53 years later. Theywere always with him.

XVIII.

He dreams again his hands are cut
to pieces. He dreams he is falling.
He dreams he is an old woman
eating the fingers of a young boy
who died when his horse reared
up crazily and crushed him.

He dreams he swims in a river
he can’t escape. It is the blood
of the devil, thick and dark
and like acid to the tongue.

He dreams of eating human flesh,
of women copulating with corpses,
of dogs licking his fingers,
of soldiers spreading manure
around the red and white roses
beside the church in his village.

He dreams he swims in a river
he can’t escape. It is the blood
of the devil, thick and dark
and like acid to the tongue.

_____________________

The statement on the gate at Buchenwald reads "Jedem Das Seine."  It is German for "To Each His Own."