Sharon Olds

THAT YEAR
by Sharon Olds

The year of the mask of blood, my father
hammering on the glass door to get in

was the year they found her body in the hills,
in a shallow grave, naked, white as
mushroom, partially decomposed,
raped, murdered, the girl from my class.

That was the year my mother took us
when she told him to leave; so there were no more
tyings by the wrist to the chair,
no more denial of food
or the forcing of foods, the head held back,
down the throat at the restaurant,
the shame of vomited buttermilk
down the sweater with its shame of new breasts.

That was the year
I started to bleed,
crossing over that border in the night,

and in Social Studies, we came last night
to Auschwitz. I recognized it
like my father's face, the face of the guard
turning away - or worse yet
turning toward me.

The symmetrical piles of white bodies,
the round white breast-shapes of the heaps,
the smell of the smoke, the dogs the wires the
rope the hunger. It happened to others.
There was a word for us. I was:  a Jew.
It happened to six million.
And there was another word that was not
for the six million, but was a word for me
and for many others. I was:
a survivor

-Sharon Olds, Satan Says