'You do not know where my courage ends. I do.' Photo: Lynette Giesbrecht on Unsplash
I shall betray tomorrow
Marianne Cohn, 1921-1944
I shall betray tomorrow, not today.
Tear out my nails today,
I shall not betray.
You do not know where my courage ends.
I do.
Five of you, hard hands with rings.
And on your feet you’ve boots
With nails.
I shall betray tomorrow, not today,
Tomorrow.
I need the night to decide.
No less than a night to decide.
To deny, forswear, betray,
To deny my friends,
Forswear the bread and the wine,
Betray my life,
To die.
I shall betray tomorrow, not today.
The file is under the tile.
The file is not for the grille.
The file is not for the noose.
The file is for my pulse.
Today I have nothing to say.
I shall betray tomorrow.
Marianne Cohn was born in Mannheim, Germany, but in 1935, together with her Jewish parents, she was forced to flee the Nazi regime. After sheltering for a while in Spain they were able to settle in France, where Marianne joined the resistance movement, operating under the false name of Marie Colin and helping Jewish children escape into Switzerland. On 31 May 1944 she was caught by a German patrol while travelling in a truck with a large group of children. She and the children were taken to the Gestapo prison in Annemasse. Despite the possibility of escape, she insisted on remaining with the children in order to care for them. Almost every day Marianne was taken for questioning, and often brutally beaten, but she refused to reveal the identity of her companions and friends. On 8 July 1944 she was taken from the prison by French militiamen, tortured and murdered. She was twenty-three years old. All the children who were caught together with Marianne were saved, as were her parents and her sister. Letters, including this poem and photographs of her, survived, and after the war were donated to Holocaust Museum in Israel as part of ‘Gathering the Fragments’ project. In 1954 Helmut Gollwitzer, Käthe Kuhn and Reinhold Schneider published a collection of letters from Germans in prison, condemned to death for opposing the National Socialist regime. Entitled ‘Du hast mich heimgesucht bei Nacht’, it includes a brief account of Marianne’s life, together with the above poem (‘Ich verrate morgen’).
