even for you the past has not passed my love where are you? sterilized and without our children you died of a broken heart after your return you looked back as much as you could to the road we walked together, in five you no longer had eyes to look forwards you had no more days, there weren’t any days and you didn’t know that much had not changed you didn’t know about the hunt in Kosovo of the many expulsion orders everywhere of the pogroms exactly like those of centuries past and you don’t know of gynaecological visits forced, of the sterilizations fifty years later, this, thank god, you never know, and neither of Lyon, and the attacks at Oberwart in that same year my love, I saw it for you and I see you in the blocks of granite, rough in the quarry smooth in the shops and broken along the streets not only in those 2of Buchenwald you cannot remember, my love you are dead, but can you tell me how is the paradise of that god that you believed in? are there even camps up there, those camps that permit the good Christians and even those more good, to live amongst you? and finally tell me, do they do without it or do they keep, for the standard question of security, in a hidden warehouse the standard and always relevant skein of barbed wire?
1In memory of Z. L. di Wieselburg (Lower Austria, who survived Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen e Bergen-Belsen, where the last of his three children died; deported on 4/04/43, he was liberated on the 26/05/45 by the English.. She was only able to marry the father of her dead children in August 1945, as it was a “mixed marriage”.
2On the grounds of the Buchenweld concentration camp, Block 14 stood, a mass of granite blocks remember the Roma and Sinti and each one bears the name of a camp where they were interned.
Translation by Katie Hepworth