Confession
"I have prepared for use, at this time only in the East, my Totenkopf units, and have ordered them to kill men, women, and children of Polish origins or of the Polish mother tongue without mercy and without pity. Only in this way will we attain the living space that we need."
—Adolf Hitler to Wehrmacht officers before the invasion of Poland; August 22, 1939
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
It has been sixty-seven years since...
Who would suspect a Catholic
girl, twelve, her hair in a bun,
a knotted blood-red babushka,
a stolen Luftwaffe gravity knife
concealed underneath?
But first, I must tell you, Father
my Jewish girlfriend, Gitele,
eleven, her eyes dark as licorice,
her smile like piano ivory,
and a yellow bow always in her hair
bright as the Star of David.
You have to understand
the times, Father. 1940.
No, 1941, the pogrom
in Vilna. On the street,
on the street,
a Nazista,
a soldier,
a boy not much older,
beats her, blacks her eyes
darker than swastikas.
He tears off her clothes,
her girlish naked body
white and bloody,
defiled
between cobblestone
and a field gray uniform.
He decorates his sleeve
with her ribbon.
Forgive me, Father,
for I did nothing
but cry.
That evening, at supper,
as he bites into stale dark bread,
my dziadzi says, The swinia
must die. His son, my Papa,
a leader in the Resistance,
nods and says, Tonight.
By moonlight I follow Papa,
my disobedience, the least of my sins.
As the Gestapo questions,
I meld with alley shadows
and spot the boy,
the soldier,
the Nazista,
the swinia.
Drunk, he staggers
from a beer garden,
like a cow through mud.
In the alley he bends over
to vomit. That's when I run.
My left hand grabs his mouth,
my right clutches the hilt.
I smell fusty fetid beer,
feel the paralyzing terror,
the sharpness of teeth,
the stubbornness of rib bones.
On the lifeless lump at my feet,
I look for Gitele's yellow ribbon
only to find the countenance
of an older man. My father
tells me later, One dead Nazi
is as good as any other.
The knife remains
inside the body we disposed of
in the Zydowski Cmentarz.
No one would seek an Aryan
among buried Jews.
Even after sixty-seven years,
the row of scars where he bit
me as I covered his mouth
still survives despite my habit,
rubbing my thumb across that finger,
when I fold my hands to pray.
