“I went… there was an office in Prague where you had lists and lists of people who came back; I don’t know if it was in alphabetical order maybe, or dates when they came back, but you could check if you knew anybody who came back. And I went to see these lists every day,
“The people put the slice of bread, like myself, underneath the pillow until the morning. You could hear during the night shouting. ‘You stole my bread. You stole my quota.’ Somebody stole each other’s slice of bread. So the law, unofficial law was, he had to be killed, by strangling. Who done it, either the
“When we got to Auschwitz, which I didn’t know it was Auschwitz, I didn’t know nothing about it; I did not know about concentration camps, I did not know what was going on at all. When we got there they told us, ‘Raus, raus, raus!’ They didn’t let us take the clothes at all, they
Perhaps we can say that every poem is marked by its own ’20th of January’? Perhaps the newness of poems written today is that they try most plainly to be mindful of this kind of date? But do we not all write from and toward some such date? What else could we claim as our
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night we drink and we drink we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when
