Voices from Auschwitz
I
Suitcases “Brown leather, nothing but the best,” he said,
his family lived well. This sturdy case
had been to Biarritz and back again.
Its partner travelled with his son and wife,
to Switzerland, stuffed full of jewels and clothes.
They made it, just. My master stayed too long.
That extra day of business was his last.
Leather is heavy. Porters carried me
on holidays, but on this final trip
my master staggered to his journey’s end.
His soft hands blistered with the weight of me.
You get no service on the road to Hell.
Another case, a dark grey cardboard one,
with worn old shirts and yellowing underwear.
His overcoat was pawned. I held the rest.
The men who carried us, Heinrich and Ernst,
who never would have mixed in outside life,
struck up a friendship in their final days,
picked lice together by the barbed wire fence.
Death’s a great leveller that knows no class.
A few weeks “Arbeit” frees a man from wealth.
The millionaire and tramp both look alike
when spat upon and herded to their graves.
II
Song of the Shoes
My shoes were kid, the finest from the shop.
My father made them for me with his love.
“Liebchen!” he called me as he put them on.
I was too young to button them myself.
I ran to him in them. My staggering steps
left little wear upon the leather soles.
I felt the world beneath my feet at last.
I ran a little, then he picked me up.
I never really learnt to walk alone,
my mother’s, father’s, then, the soldiers’ arms
carried me onward, bore me to my end.
They took my shoes. I dreamt of other ones.
My father had been saving coloured scraps,
bright, sizzling red to case my tiny feet
and match the roses on my mother’s dress.
The ones I left were white, my first and last,
made from the kid he used for wedding shoes.
They lie promiscuously in the heap
with tough brown boots once worn by laughing boys.
A million visitors walk by them now.
III
Two Tons of Hair
Yes, every age is represented here:
soft silky children’s hair, like thistledown,
a matron’s plait as heavy as her hips,
grey locks, at least old Eva had some time
to live, to love, to make her own mistakes.
She even had begun to look ahead,
enjoyed the thought of finding peace in death,
but not this sort, one that was dignified,
a gentle sleep, reposing in her bed,
from which she’d wake no more, she’d dreamed of that.
Her children round to say their last goodbyes.
Her daughter to inherit her fox fur,
her rings, the locket and the photographs.
Her son, just married, would need furniture.
the bed and sideboard, dining table, chairs…
The choice was taken from her with her clothes.
Nothing to hold and nothing to bequeath.
What dignity was left? In her last weeks
she faded to a dried-out Dürer witch,
with flapping dugs, where once she’d suckled babes.
I grew on Anna’s head. Dark shiny coils,
rolled tightly back and pinned beneath her hat.
I was her pride and joy. She ceased to hope
the day they hacked me off. “It will grow back!”
poor dying Eva said. But she was wrong
Time had run out as well for her and me.
The hair that lies here never had a chance
to grow and flourish on a dead girl’s skull.
Anna is ash, her friends, buried or burned.
Next to me lies another woman’s hair,
A horsetail hank. Her coarse peroxide blonde
did not deceive the officers who searched.
A hasty dyeing led to hasty death.
IV
I Can See Clearly Now
(Or Through a Glass Darkly)
Hopelessly tangled in the heap of frames
these cheap wire spectacles belonged to Hans.
There’ll be no four-eyes jokes where he’s gone now.
No cruel boys to break the glass in them.
His shop is closed, the window panes were smashed.
The stock was looted by the self-same boys,
the clever automata that he made,
a trapeze artist turning on a swing,
a bear with cymbals and a skating girl.
Yes, all his “children” in the cold outside.
The wooden drummer still performs a roll
as he is carried out. A dancing mouse
dies in the gutter with a clockwork whirr.
Yes, much of it is crushed in the boys’ haste.
Some toys are kept and later they are sold.
They pass through several hands. The price goes up.
The stamped initial H becomes a mark
That dealers treat with something like respect,
although the real provenance is lost.
Collectors snap them up. They’re far too good
to find their way, these days, into kids’ hands.
Several Museums of Childhood bid for them.
Their wood and tin outlive the human span.
Poor Hans, sometimes it pays not to see much.
The fields of mud, the fences of barbed wire,
the crematorium was just a blur.
Par-blindness spared him much that sighted men
would pay a little fortune not to see.
Myopic Hans goes stumbling to the light.
Anna who turned him down is with him now.
Beauty and ugliness met the same end.
V
Last rites
Survival is the only game at last.
While still alive, these living skeletons
must struggle to keep down their scraps of food,
retain the spark of life. Hold their last warmth
embracing strangers is their only hope
as icy winds track through the long hut walls.
Survive to tell the world. Hold on somehow.
Plan for some future life and not give up,
Hold to the shreds of what had meant so much.
“Curse God and die!” Job’s wife once said to him.
Curse God and live! Some of them took that path,
Defiant atheism worked for some.
“A kindly God would never let us die…”
While others clung to rituals they’d known,
circumcised babies with a shard of glass
or sang the Shabat songs in the latrines.
No wrongs, no rights, only survival counts.
The world must find these witnesses alive.
True history is made of memories.
Voices from Auschwitz is © Fiona Pitt-Kethley
|
Fiona Pitt-Kethley has been living in Spain since 2002 with her husband, chess grandmaster and former British Champion, James Plaskett and their son, Alexander. She is the author of more than 20 books of prose or poetry published by Chatto and WIndus, Abacus, Peter Owen, Sinclair-Stevenson, Arcadia Books, Salt and smaller presses. She has published many articles in the Independent, the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, London Review of Books and other magazines and newspapers.
|
Eimear Bourke is a 27-year-old Irish lawyer who has always been interested in poetry and writing. Born in Dublin and raised in Navan, Co. Meath, she graduated from Maynooth University in 2013 with a degree in Law and English. Her writing focuses on interpersonal relationships and Irish seascapes. She is inspired by Yrsa Daley-Ward and Rita Ann Higgins.
ackie Gorman has been published in a number of journals including Poetry Ireland Review, The Lonely Crowd and The Honest Ulsterman. She was part of the 2017 Poetry Ireland Introductions Series and won the 2017 Listowel Writers’ Week Single Poem Award and was commended in the Irish Poem of the Year Award at the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards in the same year. She recently completed a Masters in Poetry Studies at Dublin City University. Her first collection was published by the UK poetry publisher The Onslaught Press in May 2019.
JLM Morton lives in Gloucestershire, England, snatching as much time as she can to write between caring for a young family, renovating a house and staring up the barrel of a demanding day job. Her first set of poems was recently published by Yew Tree Press for the Stroud Poets Series and she is currently working on a collection.
Aishling Alana likes to think of herself as the embodiment of organised chaos. In her short(ish) life, she has overcome progressive pain diseases, has met ex-prisoners of death row, interviewed Ted X speakers and gained a Masters in Philosophy of the Arts. She loves bouldering and the sea, and can often be found in the thinking ‘woman’ pose while learning how to code. Having been born in Ireland at the brink of an intense culture shift, her writing takes in fantastical elements of sexuality, religion and identity.
Farideh Hassanzadeh is an Iranian poet, translator and freelance journalist. Her first book of poetry was published when she was twenty-two. Her poems appear in the anthologies Letters to the World, Contemporary Women Poets of Iran by Faramarz Soleimani, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, edited by Tom Lombardo, The Poetry Of Iranian Women by Sheema Kalbasi, Tonight, An Anthology of World Love Poetry by Amitabh Mitra.
Afric McGlinchey is a multi-award winning West Cork poet, freelance book editor, reviewer and workshop facilitator. She has published two collections, The lucky star of hidden things (Salmon, 2012) and Ghost of the Fisher Cat (Salmon, 2016), the former of which was also translated into Italian by Lorenzo Mari and published by L’Arcolaio. McGlinchey’s work has been widely anthologized and translated, and recent poems have been published in The Stinging Fly, Otra Iglesia Es Imposible, The Same, New Contrast, Numéro Cinq, Poetry Ireland Review, Incroci, The Rochford Street Journal and Prelude. In 2016 McGlinchey was commissioned to write a poem for the Breast Check Clinic in Cork and also for the Irish Composers Collective, whose interpretations were performed at the Architectural Archive in Dublin. Her work has been broadcast on RTE’s Poetry Programme, Arena, Live FM and on The Poetry Jukebox in Belfast. McGlinchey has been awarded an Arts Council bursary to research her next project, a prose-poetry auto-fictional account of a peripatetic upbringing.
Linda Ibbotson was born in Sheffield, England, lived in Switzerland and Germany and travelled extensively before finally settling in County Cork, S. Ireland in 1995. A poet, artist and photographer her work has been published in various international journals including Levure Litteraire, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, Iodine, Irish Examiner, Asian Signature, Live Encounters, Fekt and California Quarterly. Linda was also invited to read at the Abroad Writers Conference, Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford, Butlers Townhouse, Dublin, and Kinsale, Ireland. One of her poems ‘A Celtic Legacy’ was performed in France at Theatre des Marronniers, Lyon, the village of Saint Pierre de Chartreuse and 59 Rivoli, Paris by Irish actor and musician Davog Rynne. Her painting Cascade has been featured as a CD cover.
Audrey Molloy was born in Dublin and grew up in rural Wexford. She now lives in Sydney, where she works as an optometrist and medical writer. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Moth, Crannog, The Irish Times, Orbis, Meanjin and Cordite. Audrey’s work has been nominated for the Forward Prize and she is one of Eyewear Publishing’s Best New British and Irish Poets 2018. She was runner up for the 2017 Moth Poetry Prize and has been shortlisted for several other poetry awards.
Kimberly Campanello was born in Elkhart, Indiana. She now lives in Dublin and London. She was the featured poet in the Summer 2010 issue of The Stinging Fly, and her pamphlet Spinning Cities was published by Wurm Press in 2011. Her poems have appeared in magazines in the US, UK, and Ireland, including nthposition , Burning Bush II, Abridged, and The Irish Left Review. Her books are Consent published by Doire Press, and Strange Country Published by Penny Dreadful (2015) ZimZalla published MOTHERBABYHOME, a book of conceptual poetry in 2018.
Karen O’Connor is a winner of Listowel Writers’ Week Single Poem Prize, The Allingham Poetry Award, The Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Award for Poetry and the Nora Fahy Literary Awards for Short Story. She is a poet and short story writer and her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Karen’s first poetry collection, FINGERPRINTS (On Canvas) was published by Doghouse Books in 2005. Her second collection, Between The Lines, also from Doghouse Books (2011), was featured on RTE Radio 1 Arts Programme, Arena.
Sarah Chen is an emerging poet and 19-year old college student. Raised by Chinese-immigrant parents in Texas, she moved to Dublin in August 2018 to study English. Her writing experience was previously limited to songs performed with her rock band, but now is expanding into the territory of written poetry. Her collection of poems, Poems Written in Dublin was written in the span of a morning upon completion of her first year of college.
Deirdre Gallagher has works published in A New Ulster, Crossways Literary Magazine, Poethead, Comhar, Feasta and upcoming in The Stinging Fly. Literature is passionate, powerful, restorative, and transformative. It makes an immense contribution to our evolving world. A language enthusiast, she believes that we can dispel the shadows cast by checkered history and disconnection to see the emergence of a bright, compassionate, and equitable future that celebrates the advantages of multilingualism within national and global contexts 
Chris Murray 