Travel in a Box Car of the Fuehrer
Armed with bayonet-fixed rifles
And hurling vulgar insults
Royal Hungarian gendarmes
In cock- feather- plumed hats
Shoved us with vicious force
Onto a shabby cattle car
In the railway station of Szeged.
And then they locked the doors.
With my little sister in her arms
Mother and I found ourselves
Amid eighty men, women and children
Squeezed together like sardines
In a hermetically sealed tin can.
The wagon was ill-ventilated
Its small windows were barred and wired.
The Jewish prisoner train
Departed slowly with the deported
Gathering clattering momentum
On a dreadful journey
Into the gloomy unknown.
The box car came with two buckets
One was filled with water
The other empty for human waste
And soon was filled to the rim
With urine and feces.
The car became a stinking latrine
Rolling on rusty wheels.
We travelled day and night
And sometimes the train
Made a halt on the open track
In the middle of nowhere
Waiting idly for a long time.
We arrived at the concentration camp
After a horrible voyage of three days
But not before the Hungarian gendarmes
Were replaced by SS guards
At the Austrian border.
During the ordeal of this voyage
I sat next to a sick old man
Who was lying on the floor exhausted.
My shoes were touching his face
And I began to play with my shoe lace
Passing it over his mouth and nose.
[...] Read more
poem by Paul Hartal
Added by Poetry Lover
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