by Reinhard F. Hahn
(translated from Low
Saxon by Reinhard F. Hahn)
to the memory of Agathe Lasch*
now
and then
in the still
it touches me
the icy-cold claw
of your last seconds
when the unimaginable
suddenly was certainty
when your future stared at you
out of terrified eye sockets
in pallid, poison-sucking grimaces
when everything was clearly written there
in the scribbly-scrawl of contorted limbs
amid the jumble on the bottoms of the pits
the moment between realization and nothingness
when the hum of electric fences turned into a lament
into a tearless wail
over the destruction
of your human dignity
your human beliefs
and your human dreams
and over all the empty words
in your memory
*
Agathe Lasch was one of the most famous and most prolific scholars of Low Saxon (Low German). In 1942, during a transport from Berlin to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, she perished in a carriage that had been converted to a gas chamber.
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