Franceska (Women’s Barracks)
A Poem by A.M. Hayden
is her name most think, a Jewish ballerina from Poland, one of millions
of daughters, mothers, sisters, girls, huddled, frightened, one of millions
forced to undress in front of nazi soldiers but museums don’t speak of how
periods perished also, blood everywhere except for monthly cycles, not
only because of dehydration and malnourishment, but the poisons injected
into their women bodies for research, the beatings and rapes by officers, forced
pregnancy terminations following, and the babies that were allowed to be born
had nothing to suckle, no milk in their mother’s breasts, no milk and one experiment
measured how long a newborn could survive without its mother’s milk, several days
it turns out, until a female Czech doctor couldn’t take the mother’s suffering
handed her a syringe full of morphine to end the cries
and the women told stories of dishes they cooked before all of this, blintzes and cakes
so many stories of resistance, of the women who wouldn’t leave their children,
who followed them into the gas chambers so their babies wouldn’t be alone
for their last breaths, resistance in seams ripped out of German coats,
though women workers preferred to slip handwritten notes in the pockets
to German women, with a direct message of the gassings, paper to fingertips
to thread to Zyklon B canisters
and Hungarian Jews revolted, blew up one of the crematoriums, an uprising that killed
several S.S. officers, and it isn’t surprising that women supplied the gunpowder, smuggling in small bits on their bodies and wrapped in cloths, Esther, Ella, Regina, Róza...and Franceska
who some say used her very essence to resist, she danced, danced to distract the officers, when forced to undress, she threw her clothes in an officer’s face, pummeled him with her shoe’s heel, then grabbed his gun, shot him and another, rumors of noses ripped off, hairlines scalped
such was these women’s ferocity, what made her be one who could not wait, defiance uprising within her, did she and the other women hear anything else in that moment before the rage, a sparrow’s sing, wind’s howl, boot heel’s crunch, silence hung in the air after German demands
what moxie to go out fighting, and even today, if you walk near the gas chambers left behind you can hear the birds chirping
