Poems

Irma Sperling In The Brain Chamber

[Antje Sperling, a German Jew, watched a television documentary in 1995 about a psychiatric hospital in Vienna: she knew that her ‘sister’ was there.]

Only her brain remained,
locked for 50 years
in a Viennese vault;
a Gestapo hideaway
for mental defectives.

her crime was autism:
taken at three-
interned in Hamburg-
killed in Vienna;

part of a ten year
Nazi experiment
which failed to see
her locked liveliness:

a 13 year old bottle
stacked on a shelf,

only brought into light
by a sister who unweaved
the warp of Nazi lies.

© 1996 Published in Wiener Zeitung. [Written as Linda Collins]