The Child Who Wrote This Did So on the Day That She Was Sent to the Gas Chamber in 1944

A child wrote this while in the Terezin Concentration Camp on the outskirts of Prague the day that he/she was sent to the gas chamber. I cried for that child that no one had been able to save. I wondered for the hundredth time how we could save our David …  and if a child in a concentration camp had been able to remain optimistic until the end, how dare I give up?

 On a purple sun-shot evening

under the wide-flowering chestnut trees

upon the threshold of

yesterday, today, the days are all like these.

Trees flower forth in beauty

Lovely too their very wood all gnarled and old

That I am half-afraid to peer

into their crowns of green and gold.

The sun has made a veil of gold

so lovely that my body aches.

Above, the heavens shriek of blue

convinced I’ve smiled by mistake.

The world’s abloom and seems to smile

I want to fly, but where, how high?

If in barbed wire things can bloom

Why can’t I? I will not die!