Men came out
Women emerged
No children
The children were gone
What happened the first month?
Outside bars and cement
Away from gas chamber
When legs and arms, mere bone
Unshackled could move once more
How
Did you pick up your lives then?
Learn the grace of living 
No one has ever said
Something so horrific cannot be vented
It can only transform into fire
from survival we are born, once more
A second life
Not a child, not young
Nor unscathed, but covered in scars
They are our metal, winking silver and rose 
We do not stand in new bones
But those that know the feeling of kneeling
Begging for the end to come
And when it did not
When we survived
Despite their best attempt to smother
It is a land of ash and terror 
To navigate and put back together
Those shattered pieces of self 
Willing meaning from devestation
How? 
With the blood of ancestors, fresh
Seeing them led to their deaths
Courage in silence, in suffering
How?
When nothing is left but the last straw 
And it erupts into flame, burning everything you were
How?
Do you design again a day, a week, a year?
With a face enured by fear
Used to screaming in the dark
How?
To go past the horror and walk into a new life?
We do it by taking the broken pieces of us
Head in the oven, wrists slashed in bathroom
Pill bottles strewn about like flotsum
All our aborted attempts to shut the terror out
We take the gore and the furnace
The golem and the hangman
In our minds eye we stand among graves
Tasting human ash whilst behind us chambers cough out families
And if that doesn’t kill us 
Nothing ever will
Because when you stand on the far side of fear
Your heart extinguished and cold, a lifeless thing
There is only survival
We are the feral leftovers
We rebuilt ourselves from nothing 
Like from clay we came, so again, a second coming
To defy the proximity of evil
We are the ones who refused to cease
Standing when nothing held us up
But the necessity of being
(For all who perished in the death camps and all who survived.)