Heinz Czechowski
The Bitterness on my Tongue
The bitterness on my tongue
Doesn’t come from the orange I’ve just eaten.
It is a bitterness that won’t go away. I can’t
explain. I believe I acquired it
as a child in the war with a handful of snow
to quench my thirst. There were no
fairy tales, but at that time there was always
a lot of whispering around me: the grown-ups
spoke from behind their hands
of the war that was then being waged,
of the Black Marias and the soldiers
returning from Stalingrad minus a leg.
I saw too the block warden’s
Nazi salute and heard,
whilst having my hair cut,
of the blood of Galician Jews
splattered on the wall. The almost endless stream
of Russian women in the evening making
their way up Wild-Man Hill,
as they dragged themselves from
the Göhle factory back to their camp,
and finally the wooden carts
laden with the dead from the bombing raid
– all this must have been in this handful
of snow, which I stuffed
in my mouth to quench my thirst,
this thirst as a child,
which never deserted me, but left
this bitterness on my tongue.
[Wüste Mark Kolmen, 1997]
Translated by Ian Hilton
Page(s) 60-61
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