Itzhak Katzenelson
The Song on the Murdered Jewish People
(Selected parts for the Requiem)
Translated by Noah H. Rosenbloom
1. I PLAY
I play. I sat down low on the ground,
I played and sang sadly: O my people!
Millions of Jews stood around me and heard,
Millions of murdered - a great throng - stood listening.
Millions of heads and hands turn to us - try to count them!
See their faces and lips - is that a prayer or a frozen cry?
Go, touch them... There's nothing left to touch - hollow.
I invented a Jewish people. I made believe in my heart.
2. O MY AGONIES
O agonies! O my agonies... Rejoice O Jews, rejoice!
Rejoice you forlorn remnants across the sea,
In your ignorance. O if my agonies could speak.
They would poison your life, they would darken your world.
Look into the street and you'll go mad!
The street is dead, yet full of shrieks and screams -
The street is empty, yet the street is full.
Wagons laden with Jews, with mourning and grief!
do not know. They go on. They turn from Nowolipki.
On Zamenhof, the road to the Umschlag is fenced off. There waits
An empty train to carry us far, far away -
And return tomorrow empty again... O my blood runs cold!
3. THE TRAIN-WAGONS ARE HERE AGAIN
Horror and fear grip me, hold me tight -
The wagons have returned! Only yesterday at dusk they left -
And today they are here again, standing at the Umschlag.
Do you see their gaping mouths? Their wide and terrible mouths? O dread!
Only a while ago they were crammed, stuffed to suffocation with Jews.
Dead Jews stood among dazed living ones -
Pressed together, the dead stood erect, unable to fall,
No one could tell the living from the dead.
And now? Now you are freight cars watching in silence,
Silent witnesses to such human cargo, such pain and misery.
You watched, closely, silently. O tell me, wagons, where
did you carry them? Where did you carry the Jewish people to death?
TO THE HEAVENS
O heavens, I praised you, exalted you, in all my songs,
I loved you like a beloved who vanished, melted away like foam.
In my early youth I compared my hope
To your fiery sunsets: "Thus vanished my hope, thus fades my dream."
4. WARSAW (THE FIRST ONES)
And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day.
Tat did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand.
Warsaw! The city of Jews - the fenced-in, walled-in city,
Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes.
Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy market place -
Jews trading and worshipping, both happy and sad -
Seeking their bread, praying to their God.
They crowded the walled-in, locked-in city.
You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland.
You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard.
Your streets are empty - not even a corpse can be found there.
Your houses are open, yet no one enters, no one leaves.
5. TOO LATE
Too late! Too late! A day before yesterday, yesterday, even this morning, You could still reach a frontier by bus, train, freight. Now it's too late... What now? The feet buckle, the hands drop. Too late! Now all exits are shut, all doors barred...
We all knew it, the fish in the water, the birds on the roof, The gentiles around us: We are being killed, all of us killed! For no reason! Nothing can be done! The die is cast: To destroy the Jewish people, cut it down root and branch.
6. THE SYNAGOGES ARE ON FIRE (ONE RUINED DESOLATE HOME)
The synagogues and Torahs have been burned, the rabbis tortured...
Were you at the synagogue? The ark is at the eastern wall, you know,
The Bimah in the middle. And Rabbi Yossele... Where is he? Where?
He is whipped and chased by a German around the Bimah.
The rabbi is old, short, hump-backed, crippled,
Ruptured - unpleasant? - He bends, twisted, runs... And falls,
O, rabbi, lift your bright face and put them to shame... No! conceal, hide
Your holy face, rabbi! Your face gives off a great light -
Don't let it shine on them. Let the sun defile its light,
Let the sky desecrate its blue on their vile faces.
You, rabbi, are brighter than the sun, purer than the sky!
Smoke billowed skyward, flames burst from the smoke. Where is the fire?
The synagogue, the ark, the scrolls, the seats - all ablaze.
The rabbi, held by the sexton, turned around... The measure is full...
7. IN THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Hannahle, you're strong, Hannah, I didn't know how strong.
Do you want to stay here alone? Here, with the children? You tell me:
"Go! Hurry! Go to Warsaw." I didn't want to, yet I left for Warsaw, I had to.
My eyes were dry... my throat was choked by tears at the leaving.
In less than two months you and the children were driven from home.
You found refuge with me in Warsaw. Together we saw
The beginning of the end... At the very end you, Benzikl and Yomek were gone...
I remained alone with my oldest, watching the end of us are in fire and flames...
8. THE UPRISING (THE END)
I want to shout, to run through the streets wringing my hands and screaming aloud...
There is also joy: Arms! We bought arms! Some escape to the woods, Zvi wants
to go to there, too.
They neither knew nor expected it. I heard the villain's loathsome voice:
"The Jews are shooting!"
Before he gave up his filthy ghost. It wasn't an outcry but a shock:
"Unbelievable!" It was not only his cry of surprise and amazement:
"The Jews are shooting."
All the eighty million murderers echoed it: "The Jews, too, act like us,
like every German."
Woe unto us! We are able. We can resist and even kill you. We, too! We, too!
But we can do what you never could and never will - not kill!
Not exterminate a helpless people who raise their eyes in vain on high.
You cannot keep from killing. You're born criminals. You must wave the sword
forever.
This was two days before Passover. And on the eve of Passover Lesz was
liquidated.
In my hiding place I heard cannons day and night. At night I saw fire.
The ghetto burned with its walls and its last Jews. The fire crackled.
The sky glowed. Had anyone watched he would have seen the end.
9. Prayer (IT'S ALL OVER)
The end. At night, the sky is aflame. By day the smoke coils and at night it
blazes out again. Awe!
Like our beginning in the desert: A pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night.
Then my people marched with joy and faith to new life, and now - the end,
all finished...
All of us on earth have been killed, young and old. We have all been exterminated
Rising over Lithuanian or Polish towns, the sun will never find
A radiant old Jew at the window reciting Psalms, or going to the synagogue.
On every road peasants will welcome the sun in wagons, going to market.
So many gentiles - more than ever, yet the market is dead. It is crowded,
yet seems empty.
And Jewish children will never wake in the morning from bright dreams,
Never go to heder, never watch birds, never tease, never play in the sand.
O little Jewish boys! O bright Jewish eyes! Little angels! From where? From here,
yet not from here.
O beautiful little girls. O you bright pure faces, smudged and
disheveled.
They are no more! Don't ask overseas about Kasrilevke, Yehupetz.
Don't. Don't look for Menachem Mendels, Tevye the dairyman, Nogids,
Motke thieves. Don't look.
They will, like the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea and
Amos from the Bible,
Cry to you from Bialik, speak to you from Shalom Aleichem and
Shalom Asch's books.
Never will the voice of Torah be heard from yeshivoth, synagogues,
and pale students,
Purified by study and engrossed in the Talmud... No, no, it was not
pallor but a glow,
Already extinguished... Rabbis, heads of yeshivoth, scholars, thin,
weak prodigies, Masters of Talmud and Codes, small Jews with great
heads, high foreheads, bright eyes - all gone.
10. RISE UP, MY PEOPLE! ( SING!)
Show yourself, my people. Emerge, reach out
From the miles-long, dense, deep ditches,
Covered with lime and burned, layer upon layer,
Rise up! Up! from the deepest, bottom most layer!
Come from Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz,
Come from Belzec, Ponari, from all the other camps,
With wide open eyes, frozen cries and soundless screams.
Come from marshes, deep sunken swamps, foul moss -
Come, you dried, ground, crushed Jewish bones.
Come, form a big circle around me, one great ring -
Grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers, mothers carrying babies.
Come, Jewish bones, out of powder and soap.
Emerge, reveal yourselves to me. Come, all of you, come.
I want to see you. I want to look at you. I want
Silently and mutely to behold my murdered people -
And I will sing... Yes... Hand me the harp... I will play!
I play. I sat down low on the ground,
I played and sang sadly: O my people!
Millions of Jews stood around me and heard,
Millions of murdered - a great throng - stood listening.
Due to funding shortage, the issued CD is only the orchestral version. Click here to find out how you can contribute to recording a full production of Ms. Razdolina's requiem.
Please feel free to send comments to: ucsj@ucsj.com
To contact Ms. Razdolina regarding this CD, please write to her directly at razdolin@netvision.net.il
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