Today anything is allowed

Anything is possible

The slaughter houses, the factories

Those children in the flames

Their cries came from beyond the grave

We were all going to die here

I can’t go on, this is the end

Corpses all around

All corpses outside

Leaving behind a few hundred dead

Deprived of burial

The dead were abandoned

I was aware of nothing but the strokes of the whip

Only the first ones really hurt me

Indifference deadened the spirit

We should die soon anyway

Someone had just died

Face the color of dead leaves

Skin and bone with dead eyes

In every corpse I saw myself

There was no reason to live

You died because you had to die

Following a hearse for our own funeral

This was the end of the road

Three gallows rearing up

Three victims in chains

One of them a sad-eyed angel

Their necks were placed within the nooses

Three chairs tipped over

We were weeping

The child’s rope was still moving

The child was still alive

A silent death, suffocation

No way of crying out, calling for help

Death wrapped itself around me

The executioners completed their task

(NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Every line of this poem is a quote from real-life holocaust survivor Ellie Wesiel's book Night)