Tiny Fingers

She used to be a lovely doll,

A fine doll indeed.

In tiny fingers she would stroll,

And play, and laugh, and feed.

What happened next she didn't know,

But fingers clutched her hard:

In stifling heat, in dreary cold,

They pressed her to the heart.

One day she felt a foreign hand --

It grabbed her and it hurt.

And tiny fingers, they unbent.

She flew into the dirt.

She worried for her dainty suit,

Her curly hair, so neat,

When, trampled by a heavy boot,

Her lovely head had split.

And there she lay, in trash and gore,

Amidst this earthly hell,

And what she heard and what she saw

It's better not to tell.

She hoped the tiny fingers would come

And maybe pick her up,

But broken glasses called her dumb

And told her to grow up.

They were wrong. She was picked up,

Though by another hand.

Her blouse and skirt were tidied up,

But head they didn't mend.

She found herself behind a glass,

With crowds shuffling past.

She didn't like this quiet fuss

And hoped it wouldn't last.

But when she asked a baby boot,

"What is this strange place?"

"Museum. Auschwitz," it boomed

And curled its rotten lace.

Picture credit: Paweł Sawicki, Auschwitz museum exhibit : A broken doll and children' clothes that belonged to people deported to Auschwitz for extermination.

Tiny Fingers has been published in The Linnet's Wings in 2016.