Recipe for Plum Strudel (On reading In Memory’s Kitchen, A Legacy From the Women of Terezin)

Listen for a mother’s kind kitchen-aproned voice.

She recites her strudel dessert recipe of choice.

With one egg, fat and flour make ‘a dough’;

Under a heated pot to rest then it must go;

Use some milk to soak three rolls;

When very soft put them in a bowl;

Stiffly beat four egg whites into snow.

And have these ingredients ready in a row:

15 decagrams butter, one spoon of cinnamon;

30 decagrams sugar and the rind of lemon.

Add to the bowl and batter together well.

(Batter the mixture till you hear it yell!)

Stretch the dough but keep it thick;

Then spread it on your nut mix;

Sprinkle prune plums – noodle shape is nice

- about one-and-a-half kilos will suffice.

Roll the strudel and bake in a hot oven.

It comes out high, beautiful, neatly woven.

In Terezin, the starving women are ‘food obsessed’.

They savour the recipes their families possessed.

Mina Pachter says the love of cooking they share

Is purely platonic - their camp cupboard is bare.

‘Sie kochen zusammen oft nur platonisch

Zusamen geschmolzen die Vorrathe sind.’

For Cold Stuffed Eggs Pachter, her mind surges;

‘lasse der Fantasie freien Lauf’, she urges.

There are no words

to bring the women’s hunger

to our realisation;

It would take a descent

to a new harsh language
of lapsed civilisation.

European commodities (On reading Jan T Gross’s Golden Harvest)

Merchandising

Business was brisk in the market

At the edge of the Ponary Forest:

Shoes, trousers, coats, dresses, galoshes for sale;

Two navy coats cost one-twenty rubles;

A man asked for something for his wife;

The Shaulist found a Jew in the fourth line

Her clothes were near enough the wife’s size;

Marked for murder she did not need them;

Drinking vodka in the October cold,

The death merchants waited for the next truck.

Appropriating

Morning saw the peasants’ wagons arrive;

In Radzilow the throng filled the streets;

A bird’s eye view framed a town carnival:

A carnival of looting empty homes.

They had locked the Jews in a huge barn;

Jozef Ekstowicz and a pal doused

The barn with petrol and set it on fire;

His gran wanted one of the empty homes;

Godlewski summarily refused her;

She said her grandson’s deed gave her a right.

Benefiting

In Vitlich faces watched from windows

Even before the sound of breaking glass;

This happened on the morning after:

SA thugs beat the butcher Herr Marx

And threw him into the rear of the truck

Where five other battered Jews were bleeding;

They looted the place leaving little;

Frau Marx stood outside the shop her hands raised;

‘Why are you people doing this to us?’

‘What have we ever done to you?’ Silence.

Renting

Yes: Leaving the ghetto was verboten;

Shelter cost an arm-and-a-leg per head;

Food could be got at black-market prices;

The dark-blue police were ever hunting;

If the Jews were trouble you could ‘waste’ them;

Petelka burned a whole family;

Schmaltzowniks extorted for keeping stum;

They rented the victims their lives as long

As it was profitable to do so.

Hunting

In Siedliska the farmers bought scythes

At the local cooperative store;

‘You’ll need them for today’s roundup’;

The prize for catching Jews was vodka or sugar;

They took the clothes from still warm bodies;

They went to mass on Sunday where the priest,

The voice of authority in the village

Saw them in the murdered victims’ clothes;

He said nothing; though ‘the time will come when

These souls will have to be paid for’.

Arriving

A sixty-car train arrived from Warsaw;

The Jews had to wait their turn to die;

The locals sold them food and water;

Vodka and kisses got around the guards;

Cups of water cost one hundred zlotys;

Drunken guards had their games to play;

They would take money to let Jews escape,

And shoot them as they tried to run away;

The living dead filed up the himmelweg;

The bishops everywhere who knew were silent.

Dispatching from Treblinka

The train dispatcher checked the bundles;

The bundles were loaded into freight-cars,

The separate categories labelled;

Men’s suits, jackets, trousers;

Men’s tall boots, and shoes;

Women’s dresses, blouses, sweaters, hats;

Bundles of underwear, children’s clothes;

Swaddle clothes, pillows, cushions;

Suitcases: pencils, fountain pens, and glasses;

Separate bundles of canes and umbrellas;

Spools of thread of every colour;

Leather for shoes, bags and clothes;

In cardboard boxes: razors, clippers;

Mirrors, pots, pans, washbasins;

Carpentry tools: saws, planes, hammers;

Also shipped was shaved women’s hair;

The form recorded ‘military cargo’;

Most transports snaked back to Germany.

To ease life for the ordinary Germans;

It was patriotic to keep what was useful.

Digging: Post-war Kopacze

Diggers pose for a formal photograph;

Seven relaxed policemen stand with them;

They have been digging in the hilly soil;

Rowed in front are the fruits they have reaped:

Over twenty human skulls and some bones.

You cannot see the flesh or braids of hair

Of murdered Jews buried in the ash pits,

Or the teeth ripped from the jaws of the skulls

By locals gold-digging in Treblinka;

The harvested teeth will bleed forever.

Disposing

The Nazis sold the looted possessions

As bargains to the Marxs’ own neighbours;

One woman bought Frau Marx’s own pillow;

She knew for what she paid it was a steal;

But she buried the thing deep in a closet;

She could never bring herself to use it;

Years after the murdered millions she asked

What should she do with Frau Marx’s pillow;

But there was no redemption in disposal;

The Marxs had suffered a garbage death.

Otorge

The sun tattooed the chimney breast with dazzling light.

The clock ticked time as if there was no tomorrow.

She heard the cows bellowing and I had to check.

The morning choir was bird-light song singing sunrise;

The sun spread its skirting rays round the damp pastures.

Dew-wet cobwebs matted the stiff twinkling stubble.

The cart-way ruts ran with last night's rain down the slope

Into the bottom where worms drowned and ducks waddled.

How sure I walked the path and lane to the hill fields.

A fox floated on the banks of the Blackwater.

A kestrel hanging in the air let itself down

Level by level till it seized a green lizard.

Once in a lamplight sweep I saw a long-eared owl

Returning to the castle where young voices creaked.  

It flew legs behind when the mice began to run.

The castle wall returned my hoot in loud echo.

A willow copse sloped up the hill from the river

How sure I walked the banks to the busted castle.

Birds roused from their roost trees cut the air with long words.

A squirrel applied his fore-teeth to hazel nuts.

The cow-pond swelled from the full purling stream.

The solaced cows stood sipping, in the hotter hours.

And bats on the wing sipped surface insects at night.

Once flaxhole water seeped - left the fish belly up.

The old folk lit the dried-out rindless rushes dipped

in bacon-scum that burned brighter than wicked tallow.

How sure the stood boy who stole honey from the hives.

Season followed season, seeding to harvesting.

The pensile boughs of birch bared in an autumn drowse.

Beside the orchard where long codling apples grew

A busted cottage held bales of hay in its mouth.

Here, a keen north wind tumbled the treetops with snow.

Here, flowers-of-May blossoms kissed my face

Here, chill fog floated rime-frost spikes into my face.

Here, a clucky, feathers on end, flew in my face.

How sure I was the cycle would come round again.

Pigs waited lying relaxed on their straw-floored pen,

Taking turns in the wallow, waiting for slaughter.

On the dunghill beside the pigpen a trapped hind

Sprung her back legs and broke the neck of a beagle.

I walked the grassy path the old ones had bruised down.

Time has extinguished the path, for ghosts don’t tramp grass.

As if they’re not hers, the earth is hard on her brood. 

Lacking the heart of a hen, she devours her own.

Sunflower

I cannot explain this poem;

It means only what it says.

There’s landscape and atmosphere.

A sunflower under sunlight,

Spreads now its wings of green leaves,

Magnetising the hot sun.

Its petals roll down the hill

Like a fire-wheel disc of sun.

A verse flies off in the wind.