Yom HaShoah begins tonight at sundown, and runs through
sundown tomorrow. It’s the day set aside to remember
the millions of victims of the Holocaust, when the Nazis and their
accomplices murdered around six million European Jews through a variety of
methods. (Their industrialized death capabilities also exterminated another
five million non-combatants, in addition to the millions of civilians killed in
various acts of actual war. And the other millions of military deaths.)
So today I’ve got a couple of poems from the Holocaust.
In the past I’ve given you some that take up
the horror of the scope of this policy of genocide. Today I’m taking it
down to the individual level, with two poems about the power of love in even
the worst that human hell can create.
Jerzy Ficowski is a Polish poet, translator and literary
critic. He fought in the Polish home army during WWII, was imprisoned for a
while and took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
Following the war, Polish army veterans and ghetto
combatants were suspect to the Soviet-backed Communist regime. While such
efforts served the purpose of Stalin in the war against Hitler, clearly anyone
who’d had the cojones to fight for Polish freedom from one totalitarian regime
was capable of doing the same against another. Ficowski spent a few years
traveling with Polish gypsies, and much of his work focuses on the sufferings
of the Roma and Holocaust victims in Poland. Throughout his life he spoke up
against censorship and for freedom of expression, which was not an easy or a
simple thing during the Communist rule.
I’ve read a few of Ficowski’s poems. They all strike me
with their spare, sparse power. Not one extra word. Here I give you “Both your
Mothers”, which is so moving. Bieta is his wife, who was smuggled out of the
Warsaw Ghetto at birth and brought up by a foster mother. Her birth mother died
in the war.
“Both Your Mothers”
for
Bieta
Under a futile Torah
under an imprisoned star
your mother gave birth to you
you have proof of her
beyond doubt and death
the scar of the navel
the sign of parting for ever
which had no time to hurt you
this you know
Later you slept in a bundle
carried out of the ghetto
someone said in a chest
knocked together somewhere in Nowolipie street
with a hole to let in air
but not fear
hidden in a cartload of bricks
You slipped out in this little coffin
redeemed by stealth
from that world to this world
all the way to the aryan side
and fire took over
the corner you left vacant
So you did not cry
Crying could have meant death
luminal hummed you
its lullaby
And you nearly were not
so that you could be
But the mother
who was saved in you
could now step into crowded death
happily incomplete
could instead of memory give you for a parting gift
her own likeness
and a data and a name
So much
And at once a chance
someone hastily
bustled about your sleep
and then stayed for a long always
and washed you of orphanhood
and swaddled you in love
and became the answer
to your first word
That was how
both your mothers taught you
not to be surprised at all
when you say
I am
And here’s a different turn of the kaleidoscope of love
and survival, from Lily Brett. Brett, a poet and novelist, was born in a
displaced-persons camp in Germany after the war and emigrated to Australia with
her parents when she was two. This poem’s tale reminds me of so many survivors’
stories, the embodiment of the dictum that the evil that men do lives long
after them.
“My Mother’s Friend”
My mother
had a schoolfriend
she shared the war with
my mother
looked after her friend
in the ghetto
she laid her out
as though she was dead
and the Gestapo overlooked her
in Auschwitz
she fed her friend snow
when she was burning with typhoid
and when
the Nazis
emptied Stuthof
they threw
the inmates
onto boats in the Baltic
and tried
to drown
as many as they could
my mother
and her friend
survived
in
Bayreuth
after the war
my mother’s friend
patted my cheeks
and curled my curls
and hurled herself
from the top
of a bank
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