The First Ones
by Yitzhak Katzenelson
The first ones to be destroyed were the
children,
Little orphans, abandoned upon the face of the
earth;
They who were the best in the world,
the acme of grace on the dark earth!
Oh, tender orphans!
From them, the bereaved of the world
in a house of shelter we drew isolation;
from the mournful faces, mute and dark
we said the light of day will yet break upon us!
Thus it was at the end of the winter, forty-two,
in such a poor house of shelter,
I saw children just gathered from the street;
and I hid in a corner of corners,
I saw in the embrace of a nurse
a little girl less than two years old,
emaciated, thin, her face the pallor of death,
and her eyes so grave, so serious.
And I looked at her, I looked at this two year
old crone;
Like a grandma a hundred years was this little
girl in Israel;
the trouble and misery that her grandma had not
seen even in a
nightmare, this little girl had seen fully
awake.
And I wept and said to myself: Away with the
tears!
The sorrow will cease but the graveness will
remain!
The graveness will remain, it will seep into the
well of the world
like a prophecy, like holy scriptures -
Do not cry, do not weep ...
Eighty million murderers will atone for one
worried child in Israel!
At this station another girl I saw, about five
years old;
She fed her younger brother and he cried,
The little one, he was sick;
into a diluted bit of jam she dipped tiny crusts
of bread,
and skilfully she inserted them into his mouth
...
This my eyes were privileged to see!
To see this mother, a mother of five years
feeding her child,
to hear her soothing words -
My own mother, the best in the whole world
had not invented such a ruse.
But this one wiped his tears with a smile,
injected joy into his heart - A little girl in
Israel!
Shalom Aleichem could not have improved upon
her!
They, the children of Israel, were the first in
doom and disaster;
most of them without father and mother
were consumed by frost, starvation and lice;
holy messiahs sanctified in pain ...
Say then, how have these lambs sinned?
Why in days of doom are they the first victims
of wickedness,
the first in the trap of evil are they!
The first were they detained for death,
the first into the wagons of slaughter;
they were thrown into the wagons, the huge
wagons,
like heaps of refuse, like the ashes of the
earth -
and they transported them,
Killed them
exterminated them
without remnant or remembrance ...
The best of my children were all wiped out!
Oh woe unto me -
Doom and desolation!
