Question

I need help with answering a question and then getting my answers checked :) Thank you!

Answer 1

TEREZIN

That bit of filth in dirty walls,
And all around barbed wire,
And thirty-thousand souls who sleep
Who once will wake
And once will see
Their own blood spilled.

I was once a little child,
Three years ago.
That child who longed for other worlds.
But now I am no more a child
For I have learned to hate.
I am a grown-up person now,
I have known fear.

Bloody words and a dead day then,
That's something different than boogie men!

But anyway, I still believe I only sleep today,
That I'll wake up, a child again,
and start to laugh and play.
I'll go back to childhood sweet like a briar rose,
Like a bell which wakes us from a dream,
Like a mother with an ailing child
Loves him with aching woman's love.
How tragic then, is youth which lives
With enemies, with gallows ropes,
How tragic, then, for children on your lap
To say: this for the good, that for the bad.

Somewhere, far away out there, childhood sweetly sleeps,
Along that path among the trees,
There o'er that house
Which was once my pride and joy.
There my mother gave me birth into this world
So I could weep...

In the flame of candles by my bed, I sleep
And once perhaps I'll understand
That I was such a little thing,
As little as this song.

These thirty-thousand souls who sleep
Among the trees will wake,
Open an eye
And because they see
A lot

They'll fall asleep again...

--Michael Flack, 1944


That's the poem.

Here are the questions (the one blank I need help on)

1. Who is speaking in the poem?
The person speaking in the poem is an adult thinking about his lost childhood.

2. To whom is that speaker speaking?



3. What is the poem talking about?
The poem is talking about how the speaker lost his childhood because of the Holocaust.


4. Do you think the author of this poem is a survivor of the Holocaust? If so, what makes you think that?