"Theresienstadt Poem."
Theresienstadt was concentration camp
in Czechoslovakia near Terezin, to which
for some reason or other, the Germans sent children, mostly
young children.
And it was a stopover.
The children went on their way to Auschwitz
and other extermination camps in Poland.
And there's a book that has been published called I Never
Saw Another Butterfly.
It was a tragic book, a terrible book.
It's full of poems and drawings by these children.
A few grownups in the camp to keep up morale
held classes secretly--
classes in poetry and drawing, painting.
And in 1944 at the approach of the Western armies,
the Germans slaughtered many thousands
of children, 15,000 children.
Among them was a girl named Nely Sílvinová who has a watercolor
in this book.
In your watercolor, Nely Sílvinová your heart on fire
on the gray cover of a sketchbook is a dying sun
or a flower the youngest of the summer.
The sun itself the grizzled head of a flower throbbing
in the cold dusk of your last day on Earth.
There are no thorns to be seen.
But the color says thorns.
And much else that is not visible it says also,
a livid wound at the horizon it says Poland and winter.
It says painful Terezin.
It says SILVIN VI 25 VI 1944.
And somehow above the light body on its bed of coals
it says spring.
From the crest of the street it says
you can see the fields brown and green.
And beyond them the dark blue line of woods
and beyond that smoke.
Is that the smoke of Prague?
And it says blood.
Every kind of blood.
Blood of Jews.
German blood.
Blood of Bohemia and Moravia running in the gutters.
Blood of children.
It says free at last SILVIN VI 1944.
The mouth of the womb it says.
The penis of the commandant.
The enraged color.
The whip stock.
The gun butt.
It says.
Petrified god.
God that gave up the ghost at Terezin.
What does it say but itself?
13 years of life and your heart on fire, Nely Sílvinová.