Holocaust Poem of the Day: Rachmones III

“It took some time before I began to realize that there were people lying there at my feet who had been killed only a short while before.” – Filip Müller

Their pressed uniforms

stood out like blood on

a veined marble head stone.

The ash and snow mixed

under their feet. Each soldier

weighed more than two

or three prisoners combined.

Tissue stretched taut between

bones – he no longer knew

how people could still be alive.

The line between life

and death began to fray.

Singed with the scent of silence.

Pink skin now gray ash.

The smell of blackened flesh

turned his barren stomach.

After months of touching

the hands of the dead

he began to envy those

he saw gasping for air.

He wished it would be over.

He could no longer remember

what fresh air tasted like.

The air would forever remain

dry and thick in his lungs –

this is what it is like to taste sorrow.

Haunted by the whispers only

G-d was meant to hear.

When he was younger,

he used to be afraid

to go to sleep; now

he was afraid to wake up.

About Filip Müller

Deported from Sered, Czechoslovakia, Filip Muller (#29236) worked for three years as a prisoner in the “Sonderkommando” in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz. Every day he saw the flames extinguished of many, now forgotten, candles. Frequently writing notes about his experiences, Müller spent years after his liberation trying to educate all those who would listen to his account but he did not compile and publish his testimony until 1970 under the title Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (Ivan R. Dee, Publishers: Chicago (IL), 1979). Müller has lived in Western Europe since 1969.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: Sabbath Gassing

“I went to the pillar near which the girls had talked to me. There I found the girl Yana who had asked me to take off her necklace and give it to her lover as a last keepsake. She lay where she had said she would. I took off the necklace, pocketed it and left the room.” – Filip Müller

They walked through the doors

with their right hands raised

looking to brush their kissed fingers

against the mezuzah that was not there.

The showers were used in solitude.

No guards in the room.

This was their time to destroy silence.

The sun set with the

latching of the double doors.

The Sabbath greetings began.

“Shabbat Shalom!”

Voices repeated,

muting the constant echoes.

The dialogue ceased as

the air became thick and

their bodies remained dry.

The pipes did not

flush with water –

they hissed with gas

as the screaming began.

About Filip Müller

Deported from Sered, Czechoslovakia, Filip Muller (#29236) worked for three years as a prisoner in the “Sonderkommando” in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz. Every day he saw the flames extinguished of many, now forgotten, candles. Frequently writing notes about his experiences, Müller spent years after his liberation trying to educate all those who would listen to his account but he did not compile and publish his testimony until 1970 under the title Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (Ivan R. Dee, Publishers: Chicago (IL), 1979). Müller has lived in Western Europe since 1969.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: Rachmones II

“Behind it a round red-brick chimney rose up into the sky.” – Filip Müller

The handle sizzled in

his snow chapped palm.

As he pulled the furnace door

he could hear the air caress

the ashen body within.

He paused. The bitter taste

of parched flesh

seized his muscles.

The guard turned and began

a slow walk in Filip’s direction.

In his eyes, sinister delight

glowed brighter as he inched

toward ‘his’ inmate.

His neck bulged as his arm

rose and his fist clenched.

Filip pulled the iron door open

but he could not avoid the assault.

About Filip Müller

Deported from Sered, Czechoslovakia, Filip Muller (#29236) worked for three years as a prisoner in the “Sonderkommando” in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz. Every day he saw the flames extinguished of many, now forgotten, candles. Frequently writing notes about his experiences, Müller spent years after his liberation trying to educate all those who would listen to his account but he did not compile and publish his testimony until 1970 under the title Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (Ivan R. Dee, Publishers: Chicago (IL), 1979). Müller has lived in Western Europe since 1969.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: Job

“I was like one hypnotized and obeyed each order implicitly. Fear of more blows, the ghastly sight of piled-up corpses, the biting smoke, the humming of fans and the flickering of flames, the whole infernal chaos had paralysed my sense of orientation as well as my ability to think.” – Filip Müller

The wooden doors slid to the right

and unnumbered inmates were

forced in to the mass of humanity.

The fire hose hissed as droplets

fell and froze to their lips.

They patiently shuffled their feet

across sheets of crystallized tears.

Their clothes stiff with icy sweat.

The able bodied were embroidered

with needled ink. Their numbers

stripped them of nearly everything,

leaving only that which damned them:

their blood and their faith.

Filip was chosen to live;

chosen to watch others die;

chosen to stay warm on

the coldest days as families,

towns, and villages were

reduced to smoke and ash.

His breath choked thick

with the tribes and lineage

of every Jew. This was a test

Job was never forced to endure.

About Filip Müller

Deported from Sered, Czechoslovakia, Filip Muller (#29236) worked for three years as a prisoner in the “Sonderkommando” in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz. Every day he saw the flames extinguished of many, now forgotten, candles. Frequently writing notes about his experiences, Müller spent years after his liberation trying to educate all those who would listen to his account but he did not compile and publish his testimony until 1970 under the title Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (Ivan R. Dee, Publishers: Chicago (IL), 1979). Müller has lived in Western Europe since 1969.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: Rachmones I

“We had been running for about 100 metres, when a strange flat-roofed building loomed up before us.” – Filip Müller

In the distance, with the air

above the stacks still,

ovens stood in industrial

innocence within their brick

and mortar womb.

The furnace lay cold and gray

with its cast iron door swung open,

and waited to receive the next Jew –

to embrace them in its crucible heart.

In silent slavery and in slumber

the bodies kept flowing past

Filip like a swollen stream.

Ice and snow singed his feet.

The inhumanity of the inanimate.

About Filip Müller

Deported from Sered, Czechoslovakia, Filip Muller (#29236) worked for three years as a prisoner in the “Sonderkommando” in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz. Every day he saw the flames extinguished of many, now forgotten, candles. Frequently writing notes about his experiences, Müller spent years after his liberation trying to educate all those who would listen to his account but he did not compile and publish his testimony until 1970 under the title Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (Ivan R. Dee, Publishers: Chicago (IL), 1979). Müller has lived in Western Europe since 1969.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: A Pure Breath

“What matters is that all this did happen.” – Janusz Korczak

The boy pushed away sleep and,

blinking his silent eyes in the candlelight,

he listened to Korczak’s voice.

Echoing above the soldier’s

ash-muffled steps, the only

sound in the camp was

the doctor’s paper cracking

like a stiff flag in a sharp

breeze as he chiseled lead

onto what once was white.

Despite his arthritic fingers,

he had written hundreds of

pages in the ghetto;

but these were the first

curled letters of his Kaddish.

This was his last leaf of script;

the last journal entry which

would never leave his hand.

This was his voice that would rain

down with his body and

rest in the lungs of Treblinka.

About Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak was an elderly doctor who cared for countless children at an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Born Henryk Goldzmit in 1878, Korczak first made a name for himself in Poland as a pediatrician, writer, and children’s rights advocate. Korczak would later change his name to shield himself from the growing anti-Semitism of the time. He wrote autobiographical novels at the turn of the century as well as founding the first children’s newspaper, The Little Review, and he had a radio program as “the Old Doctor.” Later, he gave up his medical practice to establish the first progressive orphanages in Warsaw. From that point until the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Korczak wrote about children and for children. Korczak was 64 when he began writing Ghetto Diary (Yale University Press: New Haven (CT), 2003). Refusing numerous attempts at freedom, Korczak died with his children at Treblinka.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: The Last Sign of God in the World

“Now that every day brings so many strange and sinister experiences and sensations I have completely ceased to dream.” – Janusz Korczak

Below the smokestack sky

the rose pressed up from under

the concrete Treblinka wall.

It was the only color seen

from the crowded cattle car.

Korczak followed his pupils’

dry eyes as they passed

the flower and entered the camp.

The petals haunted the doctor.

They were the same red

he had seen dripping from

the children’s chapped hands.

Janusz knew the rose was

the same red as the fire that

caused hundreds of mothers

to fall on the heads of sons

and daughters they never knew.

The train stopped, the doors

opened, and the doctor led

his students into the cold

smoldering courtyard. As

his young Jews huddled and

clamped around his waist,

the crimson rose

continued to haunt his eyes.

About Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak was an elderly doctor who cared for countless children at an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Born Henryk Goldzmit in 1878, Korczak first made a name for himself in Poland as a pediatrician, writer, and children’s rights advocate. Korczak would later change his name to shield himself from the growing anti-Semitism of the time. He wrote autobiographical novels at the turn of the century as well as founding the first children’s newspaper, The Little Review, and he had a radio program as “the Old Doctor.” Later, he gave up his medical practice to establish the first progressive orphanages in Warsaw. From that point until the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Korczak wrote about children and for children. Korczak was 64 when he began writing Ghetto Diary (Yale University Press: New Haven (CT), 2003). Refusing numerous attempts at freedom, Korczak died with his children at Treblinka.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: With His Children

“The world knows nothing of many great Poles.”- Janusz Korczak

Some children high stepped, others

had to be dragged by their armbands,

but most of them, free

from the crucible orphanage walls,

blindly obeyed the doctor.

“They don’t want you, just the children!”

He never replied to the pleading few.

He only broke step twice with his troop--

the first was to make sure the children followed;

the second was to hand a stack of papers

to a coughing soot-haired youth-- the

one child in the crowd that day not being

forced to march. Then, the doctor

resumed his pace as caboose of the line.

The ghetto sea thinned as the

hazy box car opened its doors--

for every child that entered the train,

ten people lost their voices.

When the doctor was the only one left

to walk through the sliding doors,

the solitary thing that could be heard

was the ticking of a pocket watch

lying in the corner of the cattle car.

Tick! Tick! Tick!

About Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak was an elderly doctor who cared for countless children at an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Born Henryk Goldzmit in 1878, Korczak first made a name for himself in Poland as a pediatrician, writer, and children’s rights advocate. Korczak would later change his name to shield himself from the growing anti-Semitism of the time. He wrote autobiographical novels at the turn of the century as well as founding the first children’s newspaper, The Little Review, and he had a radio program as “the Old Doctor.” Later, he gave up his medical practice to establish the first progressive orphanages in Warsaw. From that point until the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Korczak wrote about children and for children. Korczak was 64 when he began writing Ghetto Diary (Yale University Press: New Haven (CT), 2003). Refusing numerous attempts at freedom, Korczak died with his children at Treblinka.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: The Assistant’s Diary: August 4th, 1942

“For in the hour of reckoning I am not inside a solitary cell of the saddest hospital in the world but surrounded by butterflies and grasshoppers, and I can hear a concert of crickets and a soloist high up in the sky- the skylark.” – Janusz Korczak

The doctor has been writing fewer pages

as the calendar has pared its months.

What was once an opus of aspirations

has become a ghetto diary--

recording occurrences of the day.

His thoughts are becoming weak.

The eloquent script used to pen

A Child’s Right to Respect

is now a collection of

abandoned words-- he knows

his energy can no longer

be wasted on literary devices.

I see the doctor has finished for tonight.

I hope to get them done quickly

so I may also sleep.

Amidst the children’s

cacophony of coughs,

the typewriter keys popped

with every staggered finger stroke

like moist maple wood in a flame.

These are the last words

the ink embossed on the page:

“I am watering the flowers. My bald head in the window. What a splendid target.

“He has a rifle. Why is he standing and looking on calmly?

“He has no orders to shoot.

“And perhaps he was a village teacher in civilian life, or a notary, a street sweeper in Leipzig, a waiter in Cologne?

“What would he do if I nodded to him? Waved my hand in a friendly gesture?

“Perhaps he doesn’t even know that things are- as they are?

“He may have arrived only yesterday, from far away…”

About Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak was an elderly doctor who cared for countless children at an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Born Henryk Goldzmit in 1878, Korczak first made a name for himself in Poland as a pediatrician, writer, and children’s rights advocate. Korczak would later change his name to shield himself from the growing anti-Semitism of the time. He wrote autobiographical novels at the turn of the century as well as founding the first children’s newspaper, The Little Review, and he had a radio program as “the Old Doctor.” Later, he gave up his medical practice to establish the first progressive orphanages in Warsaw. From that point until the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Korczak wrote about children and for children. Korczak was 64 when he began writing Ghetto Diary (Yale University Press: New Haven (CT), 2003). Refusing numerous attempts at freedom, Korczak died with his children at Treblinka.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: A Hundred Stars

“People are naïve and good-hearted. And probably unhappy.”- Janusz Korczak

He strolled through

sidewalk slush to

collect donations used

to support his children;

they were contributions

needed to prevent his Jews

from being forgotten.

With his daily persistence, he

eagerly received tattered marks

from ghetto inmates without

concern for his reputation; 

this is what King Matthew

would have done.

At night, by the light

of a hundred blue stars glowing

from frayed threads wrapped

around the sleeping children,

he would write in his journal

with a pencil sharpened at both ends.

This was his lull of huddled peace

when he could record,

not yet a Kaddish for his children,

rather a prayer: to be able

to live through another day.

By morning, his smudged plea

had faded from the page.

Ink was precious--

its permanence was reserved

for lists marked by the SS.

Beyond the orphanage,

the only people who knew

the names of his flock

wore swastikas

stamped on their sleeves.

So long as his children

were carried on a clipboard

titled “Treblinka” he would

never let the executioner’s pen

forget the name Korczak.

About Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak was an elderly doctor who cared for countless children at an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Born Henryk Goldzmit in 1878, Korczak first made a name for himself in Poland as a pediatrician, writer, and children’s rights advocate. Korczak would later change his name to shield himself from the growing anti-Semitism of the time. He wrote autobiographical novels at the turn of the century as well as founding the first children’s newspaper, The Little Review, and he had a radio program as “the Old Doctor.” Later, he gave up his medical practice to establish the first progressive orphanages in Warsaw. From that point until the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Korczak wrote about children and for children. Korczak was 64 when he began writing Ghetto Diary (Yale University Press: New Haven (CT), 2003). Refusing numerous attempts at freedom, Korczak died with his children at Treblinka.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: Children’s Games

“Everything else has its limits, only brazen shamelessness is limitless… I wish I had nothing, so that they might see it for themselves, and that would be that.” – Janusz Korczak

Playing jacks was all she would do.

Every day.

Occasionally the doctor

would step on a jack. He

always picked them up

and returned them to

the little girl. Every time,

he noticed her hands seemed

colder than the pointed metal.

She gradually lost them all

despite his efforts to find them.

Small rocks from gutters

proved to be adequate substitutes--

they were easier on feet as well.

When she lost the pink rubber ball,

the only thing for her to do was sleep.

The guard knew what he was doing.

About Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak was an elderly doctor who cared for countless children at an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Born Henryk Goldzmit in 1878, Korczak first made a name for himself in Poland as a pediatrician, writer, and children’s rights advocate. Korczak would later change his name to shield himself from the growing anti-Semitism of the time. He wrote autobiographical novels at the turn of the century as well as founding the first children’s newspaper, The Little Review, and he had a radio program as “the Old Doctor.” Later, he gave up his medical practice to establish the first progressive orphanages in Warsaw. From that point until the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Korczak wrote about children and for children. Korczak was 64 when he began writing Ghetto Diary (Yale University Press: New Haven (CT), 2003). Refusing numerous attempts at freedom, Korczak died with his children at Treblinka.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: Without His Mother to Light the Candles

“Two o’clock in the morning. Silence.” – Janusz Korczak

The violin slid through his fingers,

singing through every shaking note.

The bow frayed under his bony hand

while the strings pitched and swayed

across the paper’s faded bars.

He played every night

through the span of a candle.

Melting light rolled down the stem and

swept across the table; he began to weep.

Once the wax dripped off the edge and

onto his bare knee, the tears ceased,

the music stopped; his voice whispered,

“Shalom.”

About Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak was an elderly doctor who cared for countless children at an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Born Henryk Goldzmit in 1878, Korczak first made a name for himself in Poland as a pediatrician, writer, and children’s rights advocate. Korczak would later change his name to shield himself from the growing anti-Semitism of the time. He wrote autobiographical novels at the turn of the century as well as founding the first children’s newspaper, The Little Review, and he had a radio program as “the Old Doctor.” Later, he gave up his medical practice to establish the first progressive orphanages in Warsaw. From that point until the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Korczak wrote about children and for children. Korczak was 64 when he began writing Ghetto Diary (Yale University Press: New Haven (CT), 2003). Refusing numerous attempts at freedom, Korczak died with his children at Treblinka.

Holocaust Poem of the Day: Door to Door and Back

“The children are living in constant uncertainty, in fear.” – Janusz Korczak

He slid through the hallway

on the soles of his blistered feet,

ignoring the usual volunteers.

It was the cracks, like veins in

forest green and gray marble,

that reminded the doctor of why

he left every day to collect donations--

like the children the cracks

grew both higher and deeper.

Korczak eased down the stairs.

The reality of the railing was that

each time he leaned on it

for support it became looser--

without reinforcements it would break.

Slightly winded from his descent,

the doctor approached the fragile

Krochmalna Street door and listened.

Once the muffled clicking

of an officer’s shoes passed,

he grasped his thinning coat,

braced himself for the

hypothermic Warsaw winter,

and walked into stinging snow.

Drifts muted his footsteps,

silence enveloped the ghetto--

as soundless as a still clapper.

Not a single ringing coin

echoed in the hush--

each mother had her

own children to sustain.

Cracks in the wall had grown

by the time the doctor returned.

He had nothing to fill them.

About Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak was an elderly doctor who cared for countless children at an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Born Henryk Goldzmit in 1878, Korczak first made a name for himself in Poland as a pediatrician, writer, and children’s rights advocate. Korczak would later change his name to shield himself from the growing anti-Semitism of the time. He wrote autobiographical novels at the turn of the century as well as founding the first children’s newspaper, The Little Review, and he had a radio program as “the Old Doctor.” Later, he gave up his medical practice to establish the first progressive orphanages in Warsaw. From that point until the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Korczak wrote about children and for children. Korczak was 64 when he began writing Ghetto Diary (Yale University Press: New Haven (CT), 2003). Refusing numerous attempts at freedom, Korczak died with his children at Treblinka.