ARCHIVE FILM MATERIAL - by Ruth Fainlight

ARCHIVE FILM MATERIAL

- by Ruth Fainlight

At first it seemed
a swaying field of flowers
wind blown
beside a railway track,
but then I saw
it was the turning heads
of men
unloaded from
the cattle trucks
at Auschwitz.

* * *
Ruth Fainlight was born 1931 in New York City of Jewish parents, and has lived mostly in England since the age of 15. Her father was born in London, and her mother in a small town on the eastern borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Ukraine). She was educated at schools in America and England, and at Birmingham and Brighton colleges of art, and married the writer Alan Sillitoe in 1959. She was Poet in Residence at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, in 1985 and 1990, and received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 1994. Ruth Fainlight lives in London.