Holy Innocents O The Night of the Weeping Children

Kristallnacht

Holy Innocents | Holocaust | Judaica

Holocaust Poetry | Thorns and Barbed Wire

O the night of the weeping children!

O the night of the children branded for death!

Sleep may not enter here.

Terrible nursemaids

Have usurped the place of mothers,

Have tautened their tendons with the false death,

Sown it on to the walls and into the beams –

Everywhere it is hatched in the nests of horror.

Instead of mother’s milk, panic suckles those little ones.

Yesterday Mother still drew

Sleep toward them like a white moon,

There was the doll with cheeks derouged by kisses

In one arm,

The stuffed pet, already

Brought to life by love,

In the other –

Now blows the wind of dying,

Blows the shifts over the hair

That no one will comb again.

Nelly Sachs

(Translated by Michael Hamburger)

Holocaust Poetry: Compiled and Introduced by Hilda Schiff Page 69