Saturday, April 12, 2014

YOM HASHOAH

Painting by Marc Chagall - "Fiddler on the Roof"

in memory of the six million Holocaust victims...

MARCH 11, 1942

Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, asocials, criminals 
and prisoners of war were gathered, stuffed into
 cattle cars on trains and sent to Auschwitz.
                                              ~  Google
Paris--first deportation
of those to be murdered
are herded into train cars
this day,  bound for Auschwitz--
the first of over one million to die there
and across the ocean in America
I am born the day before.

            Here stops my poem…

Will it change anything
for me to remember
a Jewish child born in Paris,
City of Love, the same day as me
or the small Gypsy girl,
the father who stole bread to feed her?
And should I say I'm sorry
and by the grace of some god
might they, somewhere, hear? 
Will those two words change anything    
in this world of instant everything?
           
            Maybe the one word left to say
            is the one word never to forget--
            remember…

Seventy years later I want to say something
that hasn't already been said,  
but it is as though I am newly born again--
possessing  the same number of words today
as I had that first hour, lying there safe--
by the luck of some heavenly lottery
a long straw waving in my tiny fist.

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