My tryst with death
Of late, I have been reading and watching a lot on the Holocaust during WWII, and the images of the young children being paraded off to the detention/ extermination camps somehow have left a deep impact on me. The fear ,the paranoia they went through must have been unimaginable, of young dreams being shattered forever for no fault of theirs, of knowing that they might be killed, and still daring to breathe. I decided once to think how they must have felt, and penned down some lines as a 15 year old child during the brutal genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, pulled apart from family and friends.
Do you remember when you were fifteen?
What did your eyes hold?
Maybe dreams of love, romance and prosperity -
Of aspirations and hopes writ large.
But do you know, what I see,
I see an impending doom.
My eyes, if you look into them are filled with grim.
For I see death, ghastly and brutal.
I count my days , striking them off one by one,
For I do not know what my future holds.
The days of happiness have become days of yore,
Like a mirage -an illusion that was never true.
Confined within the darkness, even the sky seems unreal,
For even the brightness of the sun can’t light up my days.
The relations we form here are fragile, for the faces disappear,
Today they are here and tomorrow not.
Some were my brothers or sisters or friends,
But it has been long they parted and never came.
What happened of them are stories we hear,
Maybe that will be my fate tomorrow I fear.
But is it worth to stay alive and die every day,
Or should I struggle
To survive for the light at the end of the tunnel?
Of late, I have been reading and watching a lot on the Holocaust during WWII, and the images of the young children being paraded off to the detention/ extermination camps somehow have left a deep impact on me. The fear ,the paranoia they went through must have been unimaginable, of young dreams being shattered forever for no fault of theirs, of knowing that they might be killed, and still daring to breathe. I decided once to think how they must have felt, and penned down some lines as a 15 year old child during the brutal genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, pulled apart from family and friends.
Do you remember when you were fifteen?
What did your eyes hold?
Maybe dreams of love, romance and prosperity -
Of aspirations and hopes writ large.
But do you know, what I see,
I see an impending doom.
My eyes, if you look into them are filled with grim.
For I see death, ghastly and brutal.
I count my days , striking them off one by one,
For I do not know what my future holds.
The days of happiness have become days of yore,
Like a mirage -an illusion that was never true.
Confined within the darkness, even the sky seems unreal,
For even the brightness of the sun can’t light up my days.
The relations we form here are fragile, for the faces disappear,
Today they are here and tomorrow not.
Some were my brothers or sisters or friends,
But it has been long they parted and never came.
What happened of them are stories we hear,
Maybe that will be my fate tomorrow I fear.
But is it worth to stay alive and die every day,
Or should I struggle
To survive for the light at the end of the tunnel?
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