Archive
02/18/10 - (2)
Statistics
On September 3, 1944, Just another regular-Tuesday-departure day, 8 passengers aboard transport #83 Headed east, from the Dutch transit camp Westerbork (Who, 1 month earlier, had been arrested, By at least 3 members of the German Security Police, In their secret-hiding-place annex — Achterhuis — At 263 Prinsengracht, in the nether lands of Amsterdam, Where, for 2 years and 1 month, They "lived" in 500 fetid square feet of squalid space), And arrived, 3 cattle-car days later, At the Polish valley of the dead known as Oswiecim.
Out of the 1019 pulled-up-by-the-roots Jews aboard #83 (498 men, 442 women, 79 children), Those misfortunate 8 (4 Franks, 3 van Pels, and 1 Pfeffer) Were among the exceedingly lucky ones, Who, at that malodorous abattoir, that flesh-and-bones cesspool, Were selected to step nach rechts (to the right), Stay however many nights might constitute the "night" at Auschwitz, Instead of nach links (to the catastrophic left), Over that too-well-worn path to the gas, at Birkenau... Among those 258 men, 212 women, 0 children To survive their first death,
Though not among those 44 men, 82 women of the original 1019, Who'd been rounded up and stuffed into the devil's express rail cars Leaving Westerbork, on September 6, 1944, And outlived the war without knowing how or why. (Indeed, of the 140,000 Jewish residents of WWII Netherlands, 110,000 were deported to the "east," violent silence.) Actually, miraculously, of the Achterhuis 8, There was 1 among the unspeakably, despicably paltry 5000 Who did survive the Nazi exterminations of Dutch Jewry: Otto Frank, who was chosen to live so that, In our hearing his youngest daughter's tiny voice of 1, We might begin to comprehend the statistic "6,000,000."
02/18/10 - (2)
|
|||
|
|||
