The poem

I volunteer as a reader for Learning Ally, an organization I highly commend to you for its work to provide recorded materials for visually impaired and dyslexic students.

Usually, I read books about historical events and figures, such as John Quincy Adams, or Robert E Lee, or Sociology textbooks, or the like, but my current recording project is a book called “Beyond Courage,” a collection of stories of Jewish resistance during World War II.

It is a deeply disturbing book and not far into it I came across this story and this poem that has haunted me since. I think you will find it disturbing as well, but it reminds us that there are some things that we must not let happen again.

 Marianne Cohn 1922-1944

 During the methodical and relentless campaign by the Nazis to eliminate all of the Jews in the countries that the Germans occupied or controlled, members of various organizations smuggled as many Jewish children as possible over the border into Switzerland.

German-born Marianne Cohn, living in exile in the so-called “free” or unoccupied France during the war, had spirited hundreds of children to safety, but on May 31,1944, the Nazis caught Marianne and twenty-eight children on their way to the Swiss border.

They were imprisoned in Annemasse, Occupied France. Interrogated and beaten mercilessly, 21-year old Marianne refused to implicate her fellow conspirators. Though she had a chance to save herself, she refused, for fear of what the Nazis would do to the children they also held captive. Only three weeks before the liberation of Annamasse, on the night of July 8, Marianne was dragged from her cell and murdered. The children were unharmed.

Marianne left behind a poem:

I will betray tomorrow, not today.
Today, tear off my fingernails.
I will not betray!
You do not know the extent of my courage.
I know.
You are five hands, harsh and full of rings.
You are wearing hob-nailed boots.
I will betray tomorrow. Not today.
Tomorrow.
I need the night to make up my mind.
I need at least one night
to disown, to abjure, to betray.
To disown my friends,
To abjure bread and wine,
To betray life,
to die.
I will betray tomorrow, not today.
The file is under the windowpane.
The file is not meant for the torturer.
The file is not meant for the executioner.
The file is for my wrists.
Today, I do not have anything to say.
I will betray tomorrow.