Remembrance
Before we left Oswiecim, went to work elsewhere for the devil, and left you to play your sweet clarinet for those officers' socials and decampment marches. Six of us said a Novena and made a promise in the bunker you built. Remember that sweet German marmalade, Albert? And those cups of tepid soup we brought to you those August nights? I remember your ready smile and broad hands. How capable you were with a carpenter's tools. We were, each of us, around 19 years old in September of 1944. Karol said you reminded him of his kid brother, the stubborn mass of your young muscles despite the starvation and hard labor you endured. You heartened us. And we loved you as we did another Jew, a Nazarene who was also a carpenter.
In that place, where you worked alone those hot afternoons, in that bunker, we built together; the one made to protect the SS from an air-raid. The rest of us gathered there. And Bronislaw wrote our names and prisoner numbers on a scrap of paper that Karol ripped from an empty cement bag. We used the pencil left by a visiting inspector and right where you hid the evidence of the food we would stash for you, jelly jars and soup tins. Then, just there in the cement wall, inside an old vinegar bottle, after we said a prayer for survival, and if nothing else remembrance of our young lives, we secreted that scrolled paper after adding your name, Albert Veissid, and A12063, your prisoner number.
