KREMA IV
Content warning: graphic Holocaust imagery
I. Sonderkommando
Prisoners
lead
prisoners
to their
deaths.
Husbands
drag
wives’
bodies
from the
mess
shove dead
children in
the furnace
harvest
and hide
whatever
is left.
II. Weichsel
Paper
is power
powder
hidden
in its folds
bits of black
wrapped
by women
smuggled
against breast
and cigarette.
Pack it in
like they’re
packed in like
sardines into
concrete tins.
Then take the make
-shift weapons
in our hands.
Stand in line.
Wait
for the command.
III. 59-B
We lost
everything
but this day
but this death
by our defiance
of death.
We took
our own charges
to the heart
of this hell
and we pulled
the pins
ourselves.
We incinerated
the walls
of sin
and lost
everything
but
this
inch.
IV. Liberation
The birches
still stand
skin still
peeling
like paper.
Four
women hang
for this.
Three
machines
continue
to spew the
ashes of
our friends.
Two hundred
sonderkommen
meet their end
but how many
were spared
with only
One
month left
‘til liberation.
MOON OVER WARSAW
You find me every night
in this city where I am lost.
You rise like the ghost of blood
& memory looming over this place
like its past, like a promise, like
a mirror exploding into a thousand
thin veins, like craters of light spilling
red across the brick & mortar
of these streets. How
do you bear it? Your sunlit eye
having peered over razor walls;
your own scarred face having seen
this war-torn town in tatters?
Are you not heavy with this―
too heavy like me to rise
like the dead as they watched you
climb ever-upward with ease
nightly over the Vistula longing
as the river longs for the openness
of sea, to scale the walls they built
& be free? But it’s me
watching you climb over this city
of lost souls who finally falls—
not in sorrow but surrender
shedding the heavy armor of
understanding. And it’s you
in your endless cycle of lightness
and night and never ceasing to see,
who teaches me what bearing witness
really means.
Alex C. Eisenberg is a child of the western high desert and the pacific northwest rainforest, with ancestral ties to Eastern Europe. Her soul is rooted in these wonderful landscapes and her writing springs forth from that connection. Alex currently lives by candlelight with her partner, their 5 cats, and an ever-changing number of chickens in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. To read more of her work, follow @alexceisenberg on Twitter or visit alexandriaceisenberg.wordpress.com