Initially built in 1780 as a fortress to keep people out, Terezín’s purpose bleakly flipped in 1940 when it was transformed into a Jewish concentration camp. We traveled an hour by bus outside of Prague to see this haunted site. Included below are a few of our writer’s reflections on the experience:
Twins out, yonder: the white angel of death.
Come, little lamb, everyone has a time.
You will learn to love the six little points,
For you must remember what bobe said:
“Under your bed is a little white goat.
Tomorrow it will go to the market,
And this will also be your profession;
Dates and almonds, rozhinkes mit mand’lin,
But until then, sleep, my little child, sleep.”
[Note: Abraham Goldfaden wrote the lullaby in quotations (translation mine).]
– Marc Schorin, New York City, New York
The New Garden
Swallows nest here now
Flit around the rooms where skeletons slept,
cried, ate not enough and said
perhaps a desperate grace
Lucky birds, they do not know
the air that holds them up
once smelled of blood, not flowers
growing on graves. Red flowers,
and little ones, yellow and white
ignorant in the fields that hide the dead
This place is riddled with life like bullet holes
A swallow for every carved name
The stones live on memories
but the flowers thrive on sun
– Mathilde Denegre, New Orleans, Louisiana
She Who Carried the Dead
She walked with timid steps her body shaking, struggling to carry the weight of those who had been lost.
She felt them climbing through her lungs struggling to breath and reaching for her with plaster fingers grabbing on to life.
She saw their faces, whose marble eyes haunted her dreams, as she forced herself to remember the smooth curves of smiles and the outlines of chins. She wondered if after she too was gone there would be anyone left to remember those whose lives played had their final notes where she now stood again.
Time had weathered the once erect walls but the plaster had peeled exposing the scars of old wounds. In one heartbeat it all came flooding back in streams of pain, and tears long since shed but never fully dried.
She felt the weight of the river stone heavy in her pocket. Its’ surface worn from years of enduring the harsh waters, and yet it had risen, resilient and everlasting. The water had left its scars in weathered lines but the stone’s beauty was born from its’ pain.
The camp too had a kind of solemn beauty to it now. Flowers of innocence had sprung from shoots of vibrant grass and singing birds had made their home in what for her had been a cage. Time had washed away the pictures from its past but it was powerless to wipe away the underlying dread which seemed even now all consuming.
The pit of anguish she had learned to live with swelled inside her stomach and dead hands rose to bring her to the ground.
She reached into her pocket, deep like the memories she had tried suppress, and placed the river stone above his name. Time may cover scars but it can’t erase the pain.
-Lexie Boncimino, Charlotte, North Carolina