Ten years, twenty one days, and three hours. A moment had passed. The lives of those who had been taken inside the horrific wooden framed camps, poured in to them like fish at sea, so many people, so little space, poured in seperate, poured in together.
The number of those less alive tomorrow, was replaced by how many could be packed in today. Their shoes were stacked tighter than cord wood, the families were loosed from them, and set them alone.
Fathers, maybe their sons, off to one side, across the rows and rows of house like holes that they were kept in. Mothers, maybe with daughters, maybe not, were stripped of clothes and their loss of dignity and of being one, now among the masses, to see their people there, were lost.
Watching all of them in striped clothes, some working, others, many others, to lay in bed, to not be seen, to not see. Each having a tattoo of numbers, not even done in pattern and right line, that meant only that they were numbered. They were not people, they were not animals, they were merely statistics of those mean who had imprisoned them, and who paraded them daily, to be swept like dirt from the garden path, into standing, and out lying down, their faces pulled, their body’s aching, their throats stretched and mouths open in agony.
Each one, an individual, to God, each one, in a pile, stacked and carried and burned and buried to the man and men who had herded them there.
Ten years. Not enough time, those around still know, feel and can sense the ones who gave their lives to God.
Sixty years past that date. Sixty years and seven months and thirteen days. They are still alive in my mind. Still the prey that traded for heavens walk.
Ralph Peck
Photo by Ralph Peck
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