THE CHILDREN by Charles Reznikoff

THE CHILDREN:

- (from HOLOCAUST part 8.)

- Charles Reznikoff

Once, among the transports, was one with children
- two freight cars full.
The young men sorting out the belongings of those
taken to the gas chambers
had to undress the children - they were orphans -
and then take them to the 'lazarette.'
There the SS men shot them.

A large eight-wheeled car arrived at the hospital
where there were children;
in the two trailers - open trucks- were sick woman and men
lying on the floor.

The Germans threw the children into the trucks
from the second-floor and the balconies -
children from one year old to ten;
threw then upon the sick in the trucks.

Some of the children tried to hold on to the walls,
scratched at the walls with their nails;
but the shouting Germans
beat and pushed the children towards the windows.

* * *

The children arrived at the camp in buses,
guarded by gendarmes of the French Vichy government.
The buses stopped in the middle of the courtyard
and the children were quickly taken off
to make room for the buses following.

Frightened but quiet,
the children came down in groups of fifty or sixty to eighty;
the younger children holding on to older ones.

They were taken upstairs to empty halls -
without any furniture
and only dirty straw bags on the floor, full of bugs:
children as young as two, three, or four years of age,
all in torn clothes and dirty
for they had already spent two or three weeks in
other camps, uncared for
and were now on their way to a death camp in Poland.

Some had only one shoe.
Many had diarrhoea
but they were not allowed in the courtyard
where the water-closets were;
and, although there were chamber pots in the corridor
of each storey, these
were two large for the small children.

The women in the camp who
were also deportees and about to be taken
to other camps were in tears;
they would get up before sunrise
and go to the halls where the children were -
to mend the children's clothing;

but the women had no soap to clean the children,
no clean underwear to give them,
and only cold water with which to wash them.
When soup came for the children,

there were no spoons;
and it would be served in tins
but the tins were sometimes
too hot for the children to hold.

* * *

A visitor once stopped one of the children :
a boy of seven or eight, handsome, alert and happy.
He had only one shoe and the other foot was bare,
and his coat of good quality had no buttons.

The visitor asked him for his name
and then what his parents were doing;
and he said, 'Father is working in the office
and Mother is playing the piano.
Then he asked the visitor if he

would be joining his parents soon -
they always told the children they would be
leaving soon to rejoin their parents -
and the visitor answered, 'Certainly.
In a day or two.'

At that the child took out of his pocket
half an army biscuit he had been given in camp
and said, 'I am keeping this half for Mother' -
and then the child who had been
so gay burst into tears.

- Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) - from 'Holocaust'