The Stalag Doll

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Spanish

Translated by Wendy Cross

I am a doll. I was born sixty years ago at Görlitz in Germany, in a hut in Stalag VIII-A. I am the one for whom a Belgian prisoner of war, number 15825, opened his clenched fists and to whom he shouted out his pain. The pain of hunger, of cold, of illness, of imprisonment, of the dark, of separation, of the fear of whether he would still be alive the next day, of the horror of war. A pain sharpened by the barbed wire and the watchtowers. I am the work of his trembling hands that could no longer caress. To make my body, he took a piece of his old shirt and rolled it around a little wooden stick

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