Sunrise On Day Two

Another day invades the small room where we sleep.
Our muscles ache in protest as we rise for another day's labor.
We rise simply because it's all our bodies can understand now,
It's what we have been born for and all we've to look forward to.

I watch the tear-stained faces of the mothers who arrived yesterday
And discovered that they'd just given their children their last hug.
The life in each one of their eyes is gone, like they've been hollowed out
As the screams rang out like sirens from the gas chamber and echoed off stone walls.

After the first day, people always seem to think themselves inpenetrable.
They assume that because they lost everything that nothing will matter.
But day two is always hardest. When the women have to sort through the clothes,
Clothes that were worth more to the Germans than their precious babies.

Day two is the hardest because the men are sent to dig the grave. Only one grave.
The men labor all day to produce a hole big enough to satisfy the officers.
And just when the pain seems to be purely physical, like it won't get much worse,
The broken bodies of the children arrive to be tossed carelessly in the shallow grave.

Day two is where they take your name, you're no longer a person to them.
You become a number tattooed on your own forearm, and that's all.
Even if you should die in camp, no grave reads your name and familial sentiments.
Your grave is instead shared by twenty other prisoners in an unmarked ditch.

Day two is usually when you figure out who was truly religous or not.
Some throw their bodies to the earth to cry out for God in their injustice.
Others watch in earnest as words from the holy books are read aloud,
Looking as though each word on the page might give them peace from Hell on Earth.

So as the sun streams in the window letting us know that another day begins,
I see these nameless, broken faces of each of my fellow prisoners and sigh.
Today, is the hundreth time I've had to watch the destruction of Jewish lives,
And the hundreth time I've had to witness day two for my comrades.

And I know that today, trucks will arrive with new prisoners.
Prisoners that will be stripped, shaved, and taken from their children.
Prisoners that will work until the point of exhaustion and then some.
And as long as these prisoners arrive, I can promise myself an eternity of day two.