Auschwitz.
We're gathered like corpses,
The dead from a war,
Hurled in the back of a truck,
Or train,
Seen no more by those with such uncaring an eye.
We are the unwanted,
The Jews, the believers, the fighters,
The children.
We love and are loved,
But they don't care,
And now our home is Auschwitz.
The old and sickly soon die,
Their flesh rotting and shrivelling,
In the cattle carriage with no escape,
It doesn't stop.
On and on and on.
The clacking becomes the sound
Of nightmares filled by cats and pigs.
Then suddenly it stops.
"Raus! Raus!"
Go!
Faster. We must be faster.
For now, we belong to Auschwitz.
Three long lines.
Three short categories.
The men,
The women,
The children, the old, sick and pregnant.
Separated.
The healthy women, of a 'perfect age',
Walk in,
Single file of course.
Then the men, talking and smiling,
The better place they'd been promised in view.
They were the workers of Auschwitz.
Then there was the third.
The sick coughed and heaved, the old stayed quiet,
The young played and laughed as norm.
Led to a room, they took off their clothes.
"Shower. You must shower."
They walked in.
Some say it was naïveté,
But happened before, it had not.
They waited,
"Water? Where's the water?"
The cry came unanswered.
They are the dead of Auschwitz.
They gathered us, corpses,
From a war,
That's what we are.
We aren't a statistic,
A number that you read, written on paper that soon decays.
We were the Jews, the believers, the fighters,
The children,
But now we just were.
We were the people of Auschwitz.
