110,000 Pairs of Shoes
written by: Aurora Kastanias
Remember when we used to play
Amidst brick and wooden barracks,
Twenty-eight blocks surrounded by barbed wire,
Six towers, drawing images on silver sands
Made of ashes raining over us
Erecting later nightmares, grey
As the sky-obfuscating fumes, sun-stealers
Bore by humming chimneys.
Freezing cold on early mornings
We used to align in rows of ten,
The roll call was painful and endless
Yet each day shorter than the previous,
Friends disappeared
Into scents of crackling skins,
We counted our bones, and the missing ones,
Eleven hours of labour dreaming a great feast,
Dreading lunch, the obnoxious taste of rutabaga soup.
A piece of black bread for dinner
We returned to our room, undressed
Naked shivered queuing to the bathhouse, washed,
Rejoined the rats and lice sleeping in our beds.
Remember when the Nazi fled,
Took many of us on a death march to the West,
Great tanks liberated the camp,
The Russians told us we were free.
We were 232,000 when the game began,
We were 700 when the Red Army ended it.
While studying for my BA in Business Administration, at an American University in Rome, I further got enchanted by 19th century existential authors as well as European ‘absurdism’ and the Theatre of the Absurd.
It was only after my MBA that I started writing more seriously, giving space to my true passions. In recent years I have written two existential novels in Italian. In recent months I have started studing astrophysics and writing poems in english, which finally brings me here.
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