May 1945, by Marian Woyciehowicz Gonsior

From the heavens fell
Men with devilish grins.
White patches of silk
Popped open against the red German sky.
 
The Devils in Baggy Pants had come
But there was a devil lurking far below.
The neighbors said, “We knew nothing”
And the devilish met the devil.

Just a neighbor’s walk from their homes in Ludwigslust

Past manicured avenues, cascades, and canals

Reflecting pools that could only see the brilliant blue of the sky

And not the devil next door that no one, of course, no one knew.

Boots marched, the shattered apple blossoms drifted down

Carpeting the shattered devil’s camp

Carpeting a thousand men, if not more, dead, dying, starving and starved

Deprived of even the food one would give to a dog.
 

Bodies tortured, stacked five rows high in the barrack

Strewn with soiled rags and fragrant white petals

The flowers of Maiwein sprung from hollows of shallow graves.

But what did the neighbors in Ludwigslust know of Wöbbelin?

The villagers claimed no knowledge of its existence.
They claimed no knowledge of May’s flowers, of apple blossoms or even the dead.

But, that day the Devils in Baggy Pants had come And the neighbors would be forced to see their neighbors
To see the gaping mouths of the unburied dead between the flowers of May
To see the trail the devil left when he fled.

The friends, families and neighbors of Ludwigslust would know

What they claimed they could not ever know

That the devil’s work had been done

That their land howled with the voices of the dead

 

 

 

Note: After the Battle of Anzio the 504^th Regiment of the 82^nd Airborne Division acquired the nickname "The Devils in Baggy Pants," taken from an entry found in the diary of a German officer killed there: "American parachutists...devils in baggy pants...are less than 100 meters from my outpost line. I can't sleep at night; they pop up from nowhere and we never know when or how they will strike next. Seems like the black-hearted devils are everywhere..." In 1991, the 82^nd Airborne Division was recognized as a liberating unit by the US Army’s Center of Military History and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1991. May 1945 refers to the month the Wöbbelin concentration camp was liberated.