On
January 27, 1945, the Russian army came upon Auschwitz and its various camps
and subcamps.
What they
found was terrible.
Afraid of
anyone seeing what they had been doing in Auschwitz, the Germans went
on a killing spree before the arrival of the Russians. They also tried to
blow up the ovens where the murdered had been burned for years.
When the
Russians arrived, they found corpses and 7000 starving prisoners.
A
conservative estimate is that 1,000,000 people died there.
Here is a
poem I wrote about Auschwitz. It is based on an incident Tadeusz
Borowski, a survivor of Auschwitz, describes in his memoir This
Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Fear
During the war, there was only
work and death.
The work broke you down, filled
your stomach
with rocks and threw you in the
river to drown.
The work shoved a bayonet up your
ass
and twisted the blade till you
were dead.
In the camps, there was only what
we ate
and those we worked
with—sometimes women.
But we never made love. I’ll tell
you why.
Fear. I remember once a thousand
men
were working a field with sticks,
and trucks came
and dumped naked women in front
of us.
Guards were whipping them to the
ovens,
and the women screamed and cried
to us, pleaded
with their arms stretched
out—naked mothers,
daughters, and sisters, but not
one man moved.
Not one. Fear will blind you, and
tie you up
like nothing else. It’ll whisper,
“Just stand still,
soon it will be over. Don’t
worry, there’s nothing
you can do.” You will take this
fear to the grave
with you. I can promise. And
after the war,
it was the same. I saw things
that were as bad
as what happened in the camps. I
wish
I had had a gun there. I would
have
pressed it here to my forehead,
right here.
Better that than what I feel now.
This fear.
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