Budapest Winter, 1944
My mother speaks in gravel
accents, witnesses.
Seventy‑five now, her small
back dowager‑humped
tough, arthritic fingers
circling the air
"In Budapest your great
uncle Max, my
father's brother who very
successfully built
a business selling printing
machines, an amateur
opera singer
with a lovely tenor voice
arrested in his business place,
and with hundreds
of others lined up at the banks
of the Danube. Groups
were driven toward trains waiting
to deport them East,
Treblinka some, but mainly
Auschwitz
and the death center
at Birkenau,
others gunned down where
they stood.
Max, then in his sixties
or early seventies
hurled himself down rocky banks
through roots
and brush, a thin, old Jew
bleeding in torn
overcoat, rolled into the icy
river rather
than embrace bullets and bodies,
hid under an ice
float, given up as dead"
mother witnessing old
thick‑veined
hands flutter, circle
and punctuate
how her uncle floated
frostbite waters,
swam dragging soggy clothing,
climbed out
frozen, unforgotten
and alive.
The Cat-Woman of Oederan
She was beautiful, my mother says
sexual and cruel in a cat-like way.
I think she had yellow eyes, this guard
at the labor camp at Oederan, near Dresden
where prisoners like my mother worked
making munitions for the German war machine.
She could fly into an athletic rage.
She was lithe and strong, a fit Aryan.
She probably did what my mother calls "gymnastics,"
daily calisthenics in a black leotard, like Eva Brown.
She could terrify and wound, humiliate
and beguile.
She selected prisoners for transport east, to death.
She had probably killed prisoners herself.
She ruled the barracks, commanded silence with a look.
I think she had a cat's soul.
There was a young girl in the barracks, ten or twelve.
No one knew how she got there.
Her parents were dead.
There were no other children there.
Her survival depended on drawing no attention to herself.
One night she started screaming for her mother
shrieking in the dark, an uncontrolled, primal, suicidal scream.
No one could stop her.
She would take no comfort, feared no threat
she listened to no reasonable plea.
"Be quiet, be quiet for God's sake..."
Suddenly the cat-woman
Standing at the barracks door, standing for Death.
The knot of women parted, helpless, ready to witness again.
The child screamed and screamed.
She became nothing but that horrible noise.
Cat-woman sprang to her side, cradled her
rocked her like a mother, soothing, purring, comforting.
Sometime later she brought the child a doll.
As long as my mother remembers, the child
followed the cat-woman like a pet.
She never learned what happened to the child, if she survived.
The cat-woman I see in the officer's bar, laughing
with her colleagues, talking about her girls, her Jews.
She has yellow eyes and ears pointed at the tips.
I think when all slept, she became a cat
stalking mice in corners of the camp.
When I see a cat lapping at a saucer of milk
when I hear those profoundly erotic, self-satisfied sounds
gurgling from the heaving belly of a cat
or see a cat play with a hamstrung mouse
I see her, cat-beautiful and cruel at Oederan.