How did I know about the Holocaust
amidst the silence.
Or was the knowing encrypted on my soul,
trickling, in time, to my consciousness.
An knowing that is never taught,
Can never be unlearned,
Can never be forgotten.
Note: Our most indelible lessons are the ones we somehow hadn’t to learn…
At redemption there were four sons,
so too in destruction.
The wise son pores over tractates of names,
and lists of towns, too small, it would seem,
to bear the burden of its dead.
The simple son stares at photographs on museum walls,
and is visited at night by the visages of the dead,
who awaken him with tears.
The son who knows not to ask,
awaits the day the silence will end,
so his question may be asked.
The evil son…
In Haggada of the destruction there is no evil son,
just a son who longs to be normal,
and believes that by forgetting the past,
he might be like others.
Redemptions: Based on the Four Sons in the Passover Haggadah,
The typlifications there are just as applicable now except the evil son,
you can’t blame someone for running away from the Holocaust.
In the face of the ineffable
there can be no words, they say,
only silence.
But my life has been measured by decades of silence,
not mere kilometers.
So the crunch of flagstones,
the swirl of winds,
even the tears
are no stead.
In Auschwitz silence will not suffice.
for when words do return,
they return as they were,
like seeds scattered on the frozen ground.
But if words can rise from the destruction,
To parse therewith a syntax of the pain.
Then speech entombed shall resurgent flow,
words whose tears may heal the soul again
Note: At the planning for trip I made to Auschwitz, the group was to walk in
silence along the train platform. My life was filled with silence and
I was in the middle of my search for words, so I wrote a poem.
The acid that was my parents has left me
with the memory of the pain,
angry at the hurt,
and lifetired
But it has etched upon my soul,
beneath the sadness and the pain,
vistas of sensitivity
that I was borne to reveal
yet fear.
Note: My first 2g poem. I stuck my toe in the water and sent to the 2g mailgroup I was part of.
When I asked about her grandfather,
my mother said he gave his grandchildren mints,
then silence.
Not if the mints were azure blue or white,
not the peppery scent of their breaths,
not of the toddler's cries because he would not get,
just mints.
It is left for me to imagine my uncles crunching impatiently
the hard candy when they tired of letting it dissolve
as I would, a generation on.
For children do not hoard memories.
By the time my mother had realized that what she had
would be what would stay,
reality had turned opaque,
and the shards of memory effaced.
So from the rubble of oblivion,
I conjure alone the image
of my uncles racing home
along cobbled streets,
candies clutched tightly in their fists.
Note: Sometimes the words that were said highlighted how great the silence.
Some of us have only their names.
Names are good for reading at memorial services
and putting on bronze plaques in the synagogue
next to a flickering bulb,
which is almost as good as mourning.
Some of us have stories without names.
Names have been removed from the story like fangs
so it can no longer hurt the storyteller.
So I am destined to tell the story over and over again,
unsatisfied.
Sometimes I feel like putting the names in column A
and the stories in column B,
like the test we took in grade school
1. George Washington and
c. first President of the United States,
drawing a line between the story and the name
So every story has a name and each name a story.
Then on Remembrance Day I can feel I am mourning a real person
not just a name without a past
or a story with no identity.
And I can hope that the tears fall more freely.
But if I match imperfectly,
I will have mourned a fiction
a phantom who existed only in my manipulations
thus wasting the day.
Or do the dead know how to lift the tears
from the page on which they have fallen
and carry them in cupped palms
to their proper page.
Note: I had no photographs. Someone I knew had photographs but didn’t know who the people were. Sometime telling a story of not having a narrative is also a narrative.
My mother’s father was named Mordechai Kleinbart
but maybe, because he was the eldest son,
his mother called him Tateleh.
And his father, I am convinced, called him Mordkhe,
like my father calls me.
His sister and brothers called him, perhaps, Moti
except for the baby sister who called him Momo
even after she grew up.
His wife’s cousins at the winery may have called him Kleiny
and his children surely called him Tati
as did his wife,
except late at night, alone in the bedroom
she would maybe call to him with Yiddish familiars
in a soft erotic lilt.
Or maybe not,
because Mordechai Kleinbart is the single name I have.
It alone is molded on memorial plaques
and carved in stone.
All the other names are exist only in memories long interred
or on pages yet unwritten.
Note: I have had so many different nicknames and monikers in my life so
to have only one name means that we know so little about them and
we have to give then names in order to create a narrative.
The image of my grandmother calling to my grandfather with Yiddish endearments
is an image that brings tears to my eyes with longing never to have met them.
1.
My cousin Haim Stern returned to Serednye after the war
took the key from the neighbor
to return shortly, a shoebox under his arm.
He strode toward the tree grove.
The bonfire in the grove burnt the photographs well.
As he stood over the curling pictures, prodding them deeper into the flames
the nitrate smoke burnt his eyes.
He sat in the clearing till the embers died down, then freed, left for America
his spare set of shoes now in the shoebox.
2.
My father has put away the pictures from before the war and he can't find them.
But I think that he put away the pictures so he won't find them.
What good are those pictures, he says, they were all blurry
and in the posed pictures they all look like statues.
Better we should take pictures of our wonderful grandchildren, not blurry and in color.
Let's finish the roll and in an hour we'll have new pictures. Much better
3.
I don't have any pictures of my uncles who died in Auschwitz
not that it would help much.
My Uncle Meshulam died when he was 4 years old.
I would feel pretty silly holding a picture of a four year old
and saying this is my uncle.
It is hard for me to imagine that I had a family at all.
I'm not a god who creates a family from motes of dust.
4.
Whenever I would ask about the Holocaust my parents changed the subject saying
"You have to put the past behind if you want to go forward"
After 45 years of all sorts of directions, I am beginning to doubt their words.
Note: One of my first poem and the first time I grapple with the enormity of trying
to create a narrative from the silence. Creating family from motes of dust.
My mother has never spoke of what happened during the War,
and never will.
Her aunt made a video
and she spoke about the camps.
So the story has been told, she thinks
her pain untold.
She says her words have been spoken by others
only the spelling of the names differ,
such that only her silence is truly hers.
Note: There is no lack of Survivor memoirs and in the end
it may seem like the same story all over again. I understand the need to
tell but I understand the fear that your story be dismissed “been there, heard that”.
An apologetic for silence