Growing up in Bergen-Belsen: The Chrysalis

Growing up in Bergen-Belsen:

The Chrysalis

[Meet the Author]

This is not war… this is timeless and the whole world and all mankind are involved in it. This touches me and I am responsible.

— Alan Moorhead, journalist, Bergen-Belsen, 24 April, 1945

We all grow up among the dead.
But for a child, I had so many.
In fifteen minutes—less time than it took
to kill hundreds—I could ride
my white, three-speed bicycle,
out through the front gate,
over the cricket pitch,
down past the pig farm
and into Bergen-Belsen. The house

I grew up in appears on a postcard
mailed by soldiers of the Wehrmacht
to their families sometime
during their training in nineteen
thirty-nine; contained, toward
the end of the war, eight hundred
sixty-nine Gypsies, Jews and others—
overflow from the camp next door

as Stalin advanced and Hitler
panicked and prisoners
were shuffled west. And this past
chose me, and I acquired my destiny
and the shadow of that destiny
followed me everywhere, and this
is how I became possessed
by the memory of some task
I had yet to do. The butterfly,

remember, must haunt the body
of its first self, hidden deeply there,
and in a different form. And this
is what it means to be burdened
by the future and it must
mean everything to dream yourself wings, wake,
and pour into your life.

I don't remember how or when
I saw my first photographs
of Bergen-Belsen; of bodies
being pushed and rooted forward
and piling up against the broad-
bladed grin of an army 'dozer;
of prisoners on their knees among stacks
of bodies, on their knees and preparing
a meal of turnips. Bodies

like netted leaves on the wire
and so much light as if the sky
had simply lowered
its forehead to hold them
there. To speak of the world
in terms of something else
is a habit of survival. Say it:

those were human beings
caught up on the wire.
And left hanging on the wire.
And so much sky. Say it:
this touched me

and I am responsible.
This was the year of my greatest
discovery: the barbed
and buffed lime-green locket
of a peacock butterfly tethered,
still, to its stem and lifted,
carefully, out of the nettles.
It was the only evidence I had
of a magic so real it felt like a dream.
Imagine being able to break
down the body you have
and rebuild it, then, into something better.

And if I could vanish into myself
and come back into this world,
I would want some evidence of welcome,
I would want to rupture back
toward a light that's familiar,
and this is why I packed that jar
with twigs, and bruised leaves,
and grasses. And this
was my undoing. Overnight

that butterfly emerged and became
caught up in such a world and when
I woke it was a slender failure

between the collapsed tents of its wings.
How is it we can rupture so hard
toward a future while the world

for which we burn has other plans.
After this, my jars stood empty

because I could not undo
that wound, and I could not undo history,
the house into which I was born,
or the fact that I had stood, quiet
and still, on the very ground
across which human beings
had been bulldozed into pits. I

cannot change the fact that a poem
is a gesture of welcome, and why
would I want to, because for those
of you who have vanished
into yourselves, this is how
you come back, now, into the world:
here it is.