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For even in that sleepless dread, there was a price to be paid. I found that wakefulness was no remedy, no ward against their touch. They are something from a time-a world-long lost and utterly beyond our mortal ken. They are something ancient and terrible, something spun from the sticky webs of fever dreams. The other prisoners, the ones from the old world, referred to them as the alukah - which roughly translates to “the horse leeches.” 1> Though they feed like leeches, they are not. They take and they take and they take, giving you back nothing! They leave you weak. They drew out my vitality with their gaze, leaving me bereft of warmth or any strength to resist them. Their eyes-oh, their horrible, horrible eyes-gave no light, they seemed only to absorb it.

How they whispered and chittered among themselves-gasping, slavering at the bounty before them! Their disembodied heads held aloft by ethereal currents their pendulous viscera drooping from their ragged necks as they darted among the rafters, oozing a foul and odorous bile in their wake. Even in the stillness of the night, their inky hair churned in a frenzy around their faces, wild and tangled with the darkness. They metastasized out of the shadows scuttling over the walls, arising from between the rough boards, the emaciated limbs, the black bars stealing from the in-between places that no one ever sees. I have seen them on those nights when the snow sifted past the gaps in the walls and frost rimed the crude berth on which I lay.

I have seen them in those bitter hours before dawn when cold numbed my limbs and the night spilled from the windows, filling my eyes with darkness. I, too, have felt their raw caresses, their terrible kisses deep in the dark on those nights when the wind howls and the thunder of the artillery booms off in the distance. I would have called those who have seen them delusional, mad even! But I, too, have seen them. I wouldn’t have believed it-at least not before I arrived here. They came with us as we huddled and cried and grieved, crawling over our bodies like so much vermin as the death trains plodded toward our extinction. They came with us, moving from body to body in the fetid twilight of the cattle cars-shifting, changing, feeding, masquerading first as children, as misshapen dwarves, as shrunken old women. The alukah have two maws-one that bites, and another that suckles at the wound.Īlways they cry out: “More! Give us more! They devour the poor from the earth and the needy from among humanity. They have teeth like swords and fangs like knives. The Horse Leech Has Two Maws written by Michael PiccoĮxcerpted from the journal of Micha Slauss, Theresienstadt Holocaust Memorial Museum The only Biblical reference I have found to this creature is paraphrased at the start of this journal.” Others describe the alukah as simply demons appearing mainly in rabbinic literature. Some describe them as a “Hebrew succubus,” some horrific variety of vampire. According to the Biblical scholars I have spoken to, alukah can also mean “blood-lusting monster.” Historically, the alukah have been closely associated with Lilith or are thought to be her direct descendants. The first footnote is “In Hebrew, alukah means “horseleech”-a type of leech with many teeth that feeds on the throats of cattle. This story has an academic frame and that the text on the website has a number of scholarly footnotes that provide additional context.