Souls are flying, floating to Berlin,
showing the way to the troops.
Naked bodies of women and boys
ignited in flames of petrol,
left in the snowy fields of the Ukraine,
in the bone freezing winter,
are screaming mutely onto the redden skies.
Passengers of trains and cars
fueled by cyanide and chlorine,
are crying in the wind:
“Our only right was to an anguished death,
for our dishonored murdered virgins,
we're coming, butchers, to settle the debts!”

Souls are flying, floating to Berlin,
a faster rhythm driving the motors;
galloping horses pulling train carts
they fly, powered by invisible wings.
Forests are trailing behind,
and on the trees of Vitebsk and Mostovo,
boys and girls are hanging in clusters,
their maimed, contorted bodies staring,
unrecognizable even to their mothers:
“Our only right was to an anguished death,
for our crushed beautiful young lives,
we're coming, butchers, to settle the debts!”

Souls are flying, floating to Berlin,
Their countless sighs tornados stirring;
revolutionaries, prisoners, scientists,
all lie in the furnaces of Lublin, Dachau,
Majdanek, Auschwitz, Birkenau,
in a ghostly world of rabid frantics;
but those tired furnaces burning with
four years of pyre, now start to march:
“Our only right was to an anguished death,
for the shaved off hair of murdered women,
we're coming, butchers, to settle the debts!”

Souls are flying, floating to Berlin,
looking down at the ravaged, extinct homes;
and upon the guilty city, curses rain
like windblown sand in a wasteland.
Among the droplets are my mother and sister,
friends, who have no resting place
between the sky and ground;
like sacrificial lambs they fell upon this land
and watered it with their blood.
“Our only right was to an anguished death,
but we're coming for
our grey-haired mothers' broken hearts,
we're coming, butchers, to settle the debts!”

Souls are flying, floating to Berlin,
future generations mortifying.
Those buried alive start marching:
the lime-pits, trenches, work battalions,
two thousand youths from Dombos,
with the warm smile of hope
on their handsome faces, arise.
Heroic rioters of the Warsaw Ghetto
are resounding trumpets of the judgment day:
“Our only right was to an anguished death,
in the name of justice and freedom,
we're coming, butchers, to settle the debts!”

Souls are flying, floating to Berlin,
where a big wheel overruns everything,
and nobody can stop anymore
history's fast flying train.
It is time to identify Cain,
and from every weapon, bone hands are aiming.
Wolves are lurking and howling,
but the dead know not forgiveness:
“Our only right was to an anguished death,
and now, butchers, we came to settle the debts
for a world you slaughtered and set afire!

Arad, 1945