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from Part I - Camp Life: The Reality 1933–1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2018
France Černe was born in 1923 in Zgornji Kašelj, Slovenia. The young Slovenian teacher was transferred to Dachau concentration camp on October 16, 1944 and was present there when the camp was liberated in April 1945. His prisoner number was 116,839.
The following poem was written after the death of a fellow prisoner in 1944 and was first published on May 6, 1945, shortly after liberation, in Razsvit, the organ of the Yugoslavian antifascist youth in the camp, volume 4.
Smrt v Dachau
Tiho droben dež rosi
po golih topolih.
Težak je sen
v četrti baraki.
Nekdo še ne spi,
vročično se premetava,
bole ga roke, noge, prsi, glava.
Nekdo ne spi,
še ko luna po dežju priplava.
Spominja na dom se,
na domovino preljubo,
na mater, ki je v izgnanstvu umrla,
na sestro, ki se je tujcu uprla,
očeta, ki je padel nedavno.
To v njem vpije.
Tako blizu, tako blizu je vse:
segel bi z roko—
domek bi beli dosegel,
na domača polja bi legel
in tam bi zaspal.
“Domov, domov, hočem domov,
nočem spati tu sredi grobov,
mati moja, ne v krematorij,
še je živo moje srce,
da bi se splazil,
da v svoji krvi bi gazil
sto in sto kilometrov do doma.
Mati!”—
Krik.
Vročični bolnik
se vzpne na razbolena
kolena.
“Mati!”
In šibko telo
pade kot snop
na pograd mrtvo.
Death at Dachau
Silently, light rain drizzles
upon naked poplars.
Heavy are the dreams
in the fourth barrack.
Someone still does not sleep,
tossing feverishly,
his arms, legs, chest, head aching.
Someone does not sleep,
even when the moon floats after the rain.
He remembers home,
his beloved homeland,
his mother, who died in exile,
his sister, who resisted the foreigner,
his father, who has recently fallen.
All this, it screams through him.
So close, so close is everything:
holding out his hand
he could reach his white home,
he could lay down in his fields
and there, fall asleep.
“Home, home, I want to go home,
I don't want to sleep here amidst the graves,
Oh, Mother, not to the crematorium,
still alive is my heart,
I would crawl,
wade through my own blood
hundreds and hundreds of kilometers to get home.
Mother!”—
A shriek.
The feverish patient
rises to his aching
knees.
“Mother!”
And the weak body
falls as a sheaf
on the bunk, dead.
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