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.