The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979–2011

Three Women

42 Three Women —for Gigliola Sacerdoti I For me it is like a series of slides, The summer of 1943. I was almost five, Our family had gone to the beach, Too poor to flee to Palestine, When the deportations began. We lived with a peasant family As if we were their relatives, They must have been brave Though of course they were paid. I saw lambs being born And sheep killed. The farmer taught my father to skin them. Germans came to the front door, Partisans to the back, I was equally afraid of both. The partisans needed mattresses in the woods For the wounded, they said. We had double mattresses so my father Took one from each bed And when he took mine I cried and cried. One night the peasants told us to leave, We were in danger, They had dug a hole in the earth for us In the middle of the forest. Nobody explained it to me but I remember the silent packing. My mother put on the yellow dress she knitted For me inside out and didn’t listen When I cried and cried. All night we hid in the hole. In the middle of the night was noise. 43 My mother clamped her hand over my mouth. It was the Nazis marching over us. II When the camp was liberated some of us teenage girls ran away. We were a group of perhaps thirty. We discovered in the forest a deserted German house, like in a fairy tale. Very fine although full of cobwebs. Not a farmhouse but a “country” house with tall ceilings and large bathrooms, so the people must have been well-off. A gilded mirror hung in the hall and I went up to it immediately, wanting to see what I looked like now. I pushed my way through the crowd of hungry girls. And then, you know, it was too frightening, none of the faces in the glass was me. For a moment I thought: did I really die? By sticking out my tongue like a small child, I learned which of the faces was me. III Barbed wire higher than I ever saw. As I looked around I said to myself If there’s a hell on earth, this is it. One day when we were walking A woman in line jumped out and started shouting Children! Children! Of course she wanted to know About her own child. At that moment the SS Let go of the two German shepherds And they tore her to bits. Mengele was an Extremely good-looking, very well polished Elegant German officer, A wise-looking face, almost like an angel. The only thing that betrayed his soul Was the glance from his eyes, of a devil. 44 Our barrack next to the crematoria, Every day we saw the bodies, The flames shooting up. We believed if we kept silent It might make the memories go away, But they constantly come back. They stab me, I don’t understand why, But they obtrude on me. So now I speak. ...