Sophia+A.

Theme: Children in Concentration Camps in WW2
 * Collection of poems

What All the Poems Have in Common

TEREZIN** That bit of filth in dirty walls, And all around barbed wire, And thirty-thousand souls who sleep Who once will wake And once will see Their own blood spilled.

I was once a little child, Three years ago. That child who longed for other worlds. But now I am no more a child For I have learned to hate. I am a grown-up person now, I have known fear.

Bloody words and a dead day then, That's something different than boogie men!

But anyway, I still believe I only sleep today, That I'll wake up, a child again, and start to laugh and play. I'll go back to childhood sweet like a briar rose, Like a bell which wakes us from a dream, Like a mother with an ailing child Loves him with aching woman's love. How tragic then, is youth which lives With enemies, with gallows ropes, How tragic, then, for children on your lap To say: this for the good, that for the bad.

Somewhere, far away out there, childhood sweetly sleeps, Along that path among the trees, There o'er that house Which was once my pride and joy. There my mother gave me birth into this world So I could weep...

In the flame of candles by my bed, I sleep And once perhaps I'll understand That I was such a little thing, As little as this song.

These thirty-thousand souls who sleep Among the trees will wake, Open an eye And because they see A lot They'll fall asleep again... --Michael Flack, 1944

**The Butterfly** The last, the very last, So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow. Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing against a white stone… Such, such a yellow Is carried lightly ‘way up high. It went away I'm sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye. For seven weeks I've lived in here, Penned up inside this ghetto But I have found my people here. The dandelions call to me And the white chestnut candles in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don't live in here, In the ghetto. Pavel Friedmann

AT TEREZIN
When a new child comes Everything seems strange to him. What, on the ground I have to lie? Eat black potatoes? No! Not I! I've got to stay? It's dirty here! The floor- why, look, it's dirt, I fear! And I'm supposed to sleep on it? I'll get all dirty!

Here the sound of shouting, cries, And oh, so many flies. Everyone knows flies carry disease. Oooh, something bit me! Wasn't that a bedbug? Here in Terezin, life is hell and when I'll go home again, I can't yet tell.

--"Teddy" 1943