they say "there can be no poetry after auschwitz," and i know that feeling.

i know being torn, person from home, soul from body.

you've felt it coming, maybe, or heard it happening to others. or, like me, you're the first, you're the youngest, and they surprise you. in the night they come--those angry men--and force you from your home. it is a forcing. the only choice you have is leave or die. incompliance means death. they can kill you slowly, or shoot you down, or make your sister suffer. your mother? do you want her to die? then leave. no. don't pick anything of yours up on the way out, no time for that. no time to grab at hope, to stuff shreds of respect into your pockets or hang some freedom around your neck. no room for cheap trinkets like those on the train you'll be taking.

look at me, writing it all about you. "you" would normally mean anyone except me, but it's really all about me. i left my body sometime between when that gestapo broke down my door and when he shoved that gun into my back, hard, and hurt, and hurt. i skip around the words. sometime between when he picked me up the first time, out by the swing set, and... and...

you can't finish the sentence, because you've walked out the door, away from the uninvited man in your living room. you don't know what he's doing there, how he tears your pictures, the photographs of you and family you left scattered on the desk in the bedroom. or how he cracks the mirrors in the bathrooms and eats all your food. hurried, like an animal, he eats. all that nutrition, meant for your small body, wasted. and when he's done, he gathers all the books from the study and lights them on fire and the whole place burns. and later you'll beat yourself up, you'll think you should have immediately put up a stronger door after the first one shattered, that it should have been bigger and inpenetrable, and you were wrong for not putting up steel inside your house when you first moved in.

there i go again, writing you into my story. this is my story. in my story i sat on the top rung of the monkey bars, and he picked me up and took me inside. inside his house where i didn't belong. inside his room where i wasn't allowed. when he did that he broke down my door, forced part of himself on me that i didn't want. when he touched me i heard the gestapo's sly voice, not angry yet, testing, tempting. telling. quiet but forceful. "touch this. show me your bedroom. unlock this door so i can see what's behind." this is the part where i really hurt, because i didn't like the feeling of invasion. such discomfort. such bad feelings.

you don't really hurt once you've left your home. when you're out, you're out. the gestapo that drive you down the street, the gestapo that force you on the train and don't feed you, that shoot your neighbor and hang your friend, they don't feel so invasive out here. they seem perfectly in place in that death machine, auschwitz. black creeps in on every side, and you can smell the rot, and the burning, but it's not like having that man standing in his awful boots on your clean floor. you're only in auschwitz a year, anyways. that's all. maybe just nine months. fall, winter, spring. in summer, you leave. but you can't go home.

but this is my story. and i've found my hips again, they just don't seem right, they're not the same size as those hips i had before he made me leave. i'm disappointed by the size of my thighs and my stomach and my arms. even though i've found my house, the sight of it displeases me, all skinny rotten boards and hunched over frame. and the inside--the inside is charred. blackened. my mother tells me to redecorate, but i need reconstruction. they tell me that more of us kill ourselves after gaining freedom than while kept in concentration camps. this i believe. there is no thought of trying to sleep, to dream, when there is a monster in your room as a child. the only thought is of not being eaten, not being beaten, not feeling or crying. but the morning light makes things different. you can rest without worrying about what the monster will do to your body. resting during the day--when you should be awake--starts to sound blissful. i understand.

me and you. we're all tied up. i can't separate the two. but i can't reconcile us, either. i wish this were easier for both of us. and i wish i could write poetry like i did in auschwitz. there it would just surprise me, just roll out, bundles of words that were formulated just enough to work as poetry. they'd spring up in the most unexpected places, from cold floors and smelly beds and the darkest places within me. they were child's ramblings, but they were poetry. and now my words when mixed make chunky essays about the lines i heard in my "literature of the holocaust" class today.

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~beth