Holy Innocents Massacre of the Boys

Kristallnacht

Holy Innocents | Holocaust | Judaica

Holocaust Poetry | Thorns and Barbed Wire

The children cried ‘Mummy!

But I have been good!

It’s dark in here! Dark!’

See them They are going to the bottom

See the small feet

they went to the bottom Do you see

that print

of a small foot here and there

pockets bulging

with string and stones

and little horses made of wire

A great closed plain

like a figure of geometry

and a tree of black smoke

a vertical

dead tree

with no star in its crown.

The Museum, Auschwitz, 1948

Tadeusz Rozewicz

(Translated by Adam Czerniawski)

Holocaust Poetry: Compiled and Introduced by Hilda Schiff Page 70