Mormor’s Interview, 1998
by Miriam Akervall
Translated transcripts from my grandmother’s video testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation
We slept in a theater one night. They kept us on the stage
so everyone could see the condemned.
They kept us separate. They pointed at the cage.
They punished us in the ways they could. Enraged
eleven girls would dare to run and spend
their goodwill. Play the body like a role, onstage.
Condemned, they called us. So we were made to wage
our freedom for hunger. They cut our rations.
We were kept separate. They pointed to my rib cage
as proof of our betrayal. The condemned. It was strange –
they asked us why we ran away. We learned we could offend
them with our daring. Stage a theater of escape.
It was a little boy that found us. No more than eight.
We were in a coal bed. Shorn bulbs blooming in the din.
His face so small and separate. His cage the same cage.
Afterward, I arrived in the north a castaway.
Taught myself to read cartoons while working as a maid. Again,
I thought, begin again, as if I could arrange
myself unwatching, unkept, blunted of my rage.