History of Sorts

This is not a poem written by a Holocaust victim or survivor. These are my personal reflections—what I imagine I might have written if I had lived through that experience,

Along the iron serpent’s spine,
Through soot-choked skies and frozen time,
A whistle screams — a hollow sound —
The wheels begin to kiss the ground.
From village, city, ghetto’s seam,
They gather us from fractured dream,
And herd us in with nameless dread —
The living numbered with the dead.

No luggage now but breath and bone,
Our voices hushed to undertone.
The cattle car, a wooden tomb,
Its air a sour and stifled gloom.
We press like books on broken shelves,
Reduced to ghosts before ourselves.
Mothers hold tight their silent young,
Their lullabies are left unsung.

Through frost and fog, the engine moans,
Across a Europe built on bones.
The stars above — indifferent, still —
Cannot defy the human will
That charts this path to ash and shade,
Where mercy’s light is long decayed.
No stops. No names. No turning back.
Just numbers bound on railroad track.

A journey with no map, no end,
No letter sent, no message penned.
Each town we pass — a fleeting breath —
A window blink from life to death.
Yet none who wave will ever know
Where vanished souls are made to go.
No cries escape the walls of wood —
No answer comes, though long we stood.

What god would sleep while children cry?
What man remains when men must die?
What justice in the silence grows
When only hate the gavel knows?
We were the doctors, teachers, kin,
Our only crime: the blood within.
Now crammed like freight with whispered prayers,
Our future stolen unawares.

At last, the train begins to slow,
But not to free the ones below.
Barbed wire fences bite the sky,
The chimneys speak — though none know why.
The air is thick with something strange,
A quiet sense of awful change.
We do not know the names they call —
We only feel the shadows fall.

A soldier shouts, a dog’s sharp bark,
The air splits open, raw and stark.
Some sent to labor, most to flame,
Each step erases face and name.
The line divides, the fates are cast,
The present buried in the past.
And those who vanished in the smoke
Are legends none should dare revoke.

This was no voyage meant for choice,
No ticket home, no second voice.
This was the path by hate designed —
To erase the soul, the spark, the mind.
Yet even here, within despair,
Some kindness clung like whispered prayer:
A crust of bread, a hand to hold,
A tale of love in moments bold.

The journey ends, the tracks run cold,
But not the story left untold.
For every soul the rails betrayed,
A vow by time must now be made:
To speak their names, to light a flame,
To guard the truth against the shame.
Though none returned to where they’d been,
We carry them through word and pen.

So listen, world, to every turn —
This was the journey of no return.
But let no silence dare erase
The echo of each sacred face.
The train has stopped, but still we hear
Its rattle ringing in the ear.
Not to forget, not to forgive —
But so the dead through us may live.