I have written this poem based off my own interpretation of a journal entry by Charles V. Ferree about his experience liberating concentration camps from Nazi control. We took out some of the nouns, verbs and adjectives from the entry to find it’s tone. I wrote this poem as a spokesperson for what the soldiers liberating the camps would have seen and how it would stay with them forevermore.
What one would call rumors,
I call reality.
The Heinus Holocaust
And it’s horrors, it’s unimaginable horrors
The dead and dying piled in heaps,
Tracks overflowing with skeletal remains
From cold, starvation, or disease,
Their efforts all in vain,
They all died anyway.
In every direction, Chaos ensued
Former tormentors, Crazed inmates
And their bloody fists.
Burning odors from the camp,
The crematorium, permeate my mind to this day.
Millions killed in ways to cruel to imagine,
50 years later, I burned my uniform to rid these memories
They still permeate my mind, encapsulating me inside them,
As if it was still back then.
I can still smell the burnt flesh of every pore.
50. years. later.