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Home > Virtual Museum > CHGS Exhibitions > Bittersweet Legacy : Sosnowice, Poland, September 1939

Sosnowice, Poland, September 1939

Contemporary Ruins VIII
"Contemporary Ruins VIII" by Judy Herzl

Sosnowice, Poland, September 1939

Janet Marks

For Dani and Haya

They were young, perhaps married five years,
parents of a three year old girl
and a newborn son.  It was early evening,
he had closed his haberdashery shop,
joined his wife and children
for dinner in their building
that housed young families and older ones.
Perhaps they heard the marching feet,
from their windows viewed the black uniforms,
swastika armbands, men with hard faces
marching on their street in time
for women, children and old men
to dash down the basement stairs and hide
before the younger men were lined up, searched,
accused of being Jews.

Women, children, and old men
so paralyzed with fear, they could not breathe
nor make a sound, until the shot
which brought my uncle down, rang out.
The infant whimpered, screwed up its face
to cry.  The mother, my aunt,
placed her quivering fingers upon the infant's throat,
squeezed until its breath was gone,
and with a finger to her lips, signaled
the toddler to hush, the baby was asleep.

The shooting ceased, the SS gang
saluted each other, heiled Hitler,
marched off, like comic troops, to do their grizzly work
in town.  My aunt and her two,
the other women with children, and old men
floundered up the stairs to the charnel house
that was their home.

She laid the infant tenderly
beside its father, and
taking the little girl by the hand
threw themselves upon the corpse of the man
adding their cries to the ghastly din .