Archive
06/11/12
Numbered Days
He was transported in the warm serenity of his mother's womb, Before being born into the choking-cold, death-rattling stifle of a cattle car And carried the remainder of the way there, To that place he learned, only many nightmares later, to name Auschwitz, Where he was parted from his mother, she relegated to her own fate, Leaving him the entirety of her/his birthright's paltry legacy: Six blue numerals tattooed on his stubby, chubby left forearm.
How he survived those few days before the Red Army liberated the camp, While he was being hidden in the lice-infested recesses of the Lager bunks, Breast-fed by childless mothers awaiting their turn in the crematories, He could only attribute to blind, dumb luck, precarious serendipity. All he knew, as he grew too-slowly older, lonelier, by the pound, the inch, Was that those half a dozen ciphers grew, also — Homunculuses, sinister, surrealistic, unbidden twins of him.
But that was sixty-seven years back, in memory's refusing-to-fade past, Just a vague approximation of how he came to be. Indeed, it would all be specious conjecture, Were it not that, recently, he was able to access his identity, By searching the German state archives Web site, And learn that his numbers were issued at Auschwitz, toward war's end, A mere digit separating those issued his Polish mother, Sonya, from his.
To this day, only his birth is a blur; The rest of his existence suffers from the clarity of utter disillusionment, The ubiquitous reminder those six digits above his left wrist elicit Whenever he lifts his arm, involuntarily, in a Sieg heil salute Similar to that which his scared parents, worshiping the Führer, would give, As if their doing so might exempt them from the Holocaust's roll call, Allow their only child to breathe the glorious freedom of being a non-Jew.
06/11/12
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