All that strays and wanders

Sundown tonight marks the start of Yom HaShoah, Israel’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust. Amongst other ceremonies throughout the 24-hour period, tomorrow at 1000 local time, air raid sirens will sound and everyone in Israel will come to a halt for two minutes to reflect on the systematic attempt by Nazi Germany to eradicate the Jewish people on an industrial scale.

It seems to me that the entire world ought to be reflecting on this, given the rise of right-wing extremism who are becoming louder and more confident in their championing of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, christofacism, anti-Semitism, wealth inequity, homophobia and authoritarianism, not only in the US, but also in Europe.

Well, today’s entry for National Poetry Month is ancillary to Yom HaShoah. Johan Wolfgang von Goethe’s “On the Divine” enjoins us to follow the better angels of our nature, which we all too frequently do not. But the poem was an initial thread between two people from different worlds, and the tapestry it wove became a love that bridged those worlds and endured for decades.

Gerda Weissman, a Polish Jew, was not quite 21 in May 1945 when she and 150 other young women—last survivors of a death march that initially included 2000 concentration camp inmates—were discovered in Czechoslovakia by American soldiers. She could barely stand up, but that put her in better condition than her companions, so she greeted the Americans. As she gestured to the interior of an abandoned factory where they lay, she said, “Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut!”

Kurt Klein, the soldier to whom she spoke was struck by the emaciated, barely-alive girl quoting Goethe, “Noble be man, merciful and good!” As she was treated in a field hospital (where 30 of her companions died), Klein visited her and a friendship grew, which blossomed into romance. Klein and Weissman married the following year, and built a life for decades in Buffalo before retirement took them to Arizona. They had three children, eight grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren. Klein (a Jewish immigrant whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz) died in 2002; Weissman 22 years later.

They are an example of Goethe’s noble humanity, and I hold on to them as I look around me at the work of those who would destroy them.

“On the Divine”

Let man be noble,
Generous and good;
For that alone
Distinguishes him
From all the living
Beings we know.

Hail to the unknown
Higher beings
Of our intuition!
Let man resemble them;
Let his example
Teach us to believe in them.

For the realm of nature
Is unfeeling;
The sun sheds its light
Over evil and good
And the moon and the stars
Shine on the criminal
As on the best of us.

The wind and the rivers
The hail and the thunder
Storm on their way
And snatch one victim
After another
As they rush past.

So too does blind fortune
Grope through the crowd, now
Seizing a young boy’s
Curly-haired innocence
And now the bald pate
Of the old and guilty.

As great, everlasting,
Adamantine laws
Dictate, we must all
Complete the cycles
Of our existence.

Only mankind
Can do the impossible:
He can distinguish,
He chooses and judges,
He can give permanence
To the moment.

He alone may
Reward the good
And punish the wicked;
He may heal and save
And usefully bind
All that strays and wanders.

And we revere
The immortals, as if
They were human beings
Who do on a great scale
What little the best of us
Does or endeavors.

Let the noble man
Be generous and good,
Tirelessly achieving
What is just and useful:
Let him be a model
For those beings whom he surmises.

                        Translated by David Luke

  

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Unknown higher beings

Sundown tonight marks the start of Yom HaShoah, Israel’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust. Amongst other ceremonies throughout the 24-hour period, tomorrow at 1000 local time, air raid sirens will sound and everyone in Israel will come to a halt for two minutes to reflect on the systematic attempt by Nazi Germany to eradicate the Jewish people on an industrial scale.

It seems to me that the entire world ought to be reflecting on this, given the rise of right-wing extremism who are becoming louder and more confident in their championing of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, christofacism, anti-Semitism, wealth inequity, homophobia and authoritarianism.

Well, today’s entry for National Poetry Month is ancillary to Yom HaShoah. Johan Wolfgang von Goethe’s “On the Divine” enjoins us to follow the better angels of our nature, which we all too frequently do not. But the poem was an initial thread between two people from different worlds, and the tapestry it wove became a love that bridged those worlds and endured for decades.

Gerda Weissman, a Polish Jew, was not quite 21 in May 1945 when she and 150 other young women—last survivors of a death march that initially included 2000 concentration camp inmates—were discovered in Czechoslovakia by American soldiers. She could barely stand up, but that put her in better condition than her companions, so she greeted the Americans. As she gestured to the interior of an abandoned factory where they lay, she said, “Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut!”

Kurt Klein, the soldier to whom she spoke was struck by the emaciated, barely-alive girl quoting Goethe, “Noble be man, merciful and good!” As she was treated in a field hospital (where 30 of her companions died), Klein visited her and a friendship grew, which blossomed into romance. Klein and Weissman married the following year, and built a life for decades in Buffalo before retirement took them to Arizona. They had three children, eight grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren. Klein (a Jewish immigrant whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz) died in 2002; Weissman on 3 April of this year.

They are an example of Goethe’s noble humanity, and I hold on to them as I look around me at the work of those who would destroy them.

“On the Divine”

Let man be noble,
Generous and good;
For that alone
Distinguishes him
From all the living
Beings we know.

Hail to the unknown
Higher beings
Of our intuition!
Let man resemble them;
Let his example
Teach us to believe in them.

For the realm of nature
Is unfeeling;
The sun sheds its light
Over evil and good
And the moon and the stars
Shine on the criminal
As on the best of us.

The wind and the rivers
The hail and the thunder
Storm on their way
And snatch one victim
After another
As they rush past.

So too does blind fortune
Grope through the crowd, now
Seizing a young boy’s
Curly-haired innocence
And now the bald pate
Of the old and guilty.

As great, everlasting,
Adamantine laws
Dictate, we must all
Complete the cycles
Of our existence.

Only mankind
Can do the impossible:
He can distinguish,
He chooses and judges,
He can give permanence
To the moment.

He alone may
Reward the good
And punish the wicked;
He may heal and save
And usefully bind
All that strays and wanders.

And we revere
The immortals, as if
They were human beings
Who do on a great scale
What little the best of us
Does or endeavors.

Let the noble man
Be generous and good,
Tirelessly achieving
What is just and useful:
Let him be a model
For those beings whom he surmises.

                        Translated by David Luke

Voices from the fringes: The telephone numbers of God

If you wanted to pick a demographic that has historically held the persona of “other”, you’d be hard-pressed to make the argument that anyone but Jews fit the bill. Anti-Semitism has to be the second oldest profession, and it’s still going strong. You want to deflect from [whatever’s going wrong] in your [village, city, country, world], point at the Jews. Anywhere, everywhere; any time, every time.

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, began at sundown yesterday and runs to sundown today. It marks the national program of genocide committed by the Nazis and their allies against European Jews, which resulted in six million dead.

Today’s poem is “After Auschwitz”, by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Amichai was born in Germany; he emigrated to Israel with his family in 1936, when he was 12. I’ve always found his focus on the details of life gripping; he tackles the big things with the same power.

“After Auschwitz”

After Auschwitz, no theology:
From the chimneys of the Vatican, white smoke rises—
a sign the cardinals have chosen themselves a pope.
From the crematoria of Auschwitz, black smoke rises—
a sign the conclave of Gods has not yet chosen the chosen people.
After Auschwitz, no theology:
the numbers on the forearms
of the inmates of extermination are the telephone numbers of God,
numbers that do not answer
and now are disconnected, one by one. After Auschwitz, a new theology:
the Jews who died in the Shoah
have now come to be like their God,
who has no likeness of a body and has no body.
They have no likeness of a body and they have no body.

The ghost of life/Gratitude Monday: A pilgrim in winter

It’s Gratitude Monday. But, also, Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, begins today at sundown. Today’s National Poetry Month entry combines both.

Born in Vilna (then part of the Russian empire, now Belarus) in 1913, Avrom Sutzkever wrote his poetry in Yiddish, whether he was in Vilna, Moscow or Tel Aviv. Active in Vilna’s arts and cultural scene, Sutzkever added anti-Nazi resistance work to his repertoire when the Germans occupied the country.

During an Aktion in 1941, Sutzkever escaped to the countryside and was hidden by a barefoot peasant woman named Yanova Bertushevitz; she and her husband kept the poet in their cellar and managed to smuggle food into the ghetto to his family. Eventually his worry about the danger to his protectors and his family led him to return to Vilna, but he did not forget her gift to him.

  

“1980”

And when I go up as a pilgrim in winter, to recover

the place I was born, and the twin to self I am in my mind,

then I'll go in black snow as a pilgrim to find

the grave of my savior, Yanova.

She'll hear what I whisper, under my breath:

Thank you. You saved my tears from the flame.

Thank you. Children and grandchildren you rescued from death.

I planted a sapling (it doesn't suffice) in your name.

Time in its gyre spins back down the flue

faster than nightmares of nooses can ride,

quicker than nails. And you, my savior, in your cellar you'll hide

me, ascending in dreams as a pilgrim to you.

You'll come from the yard in your slippers, crunching the snow

so I'll know. Again I'm there in the cellar, degraded and low,

you're bringing me milk and bread sliced thick at the edge.

You're making the sign of the cross, I'm making my pencil its pledge.

I think today of the people who protect their loved ones and their communities by staying home—in much better circumstances than Yanova and Sutzkever—and I’m grateful. In the face of fear and death, they are choosing compassion and life.

Telling tales

Yom HaShoah starts at sundown today and runs to sundown tomorrow. It’s the day set aside by the state of Israel to commemorate the nearly six million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s. At 1000 local time, everything will come to a halt across Israel, and people will stand silent and still, remembering those deaths. It’s an astonishing thing to watch on my computer screen; I cannot imagine it in real life.

Rather than say anything myself, I’m sharing part of the opening lecture Elie Wiesel gave at an international symposium in 1974 at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. It’s included in his article, “Art and Culture after the Holocaust”, published in CrossCurrents.

“Let us tell tales. Let us tell tales—all the rest can wait; all the rest must wait.

“Let us tell tales—that is our primary obligation. Commentaries will have to come later, lest they replace or becloud what they mean to reveal.

Tales of children so wise and so old. Tales of old men mute with fear. Tales of victims welcoming death as an old acquaintance. Tales that bring man close to the abyss and beyond—and others that lift him up to heaven and beyond. Tales of despair, tales of longing. Tales of immense flames reaching out to the sky, tales of night consuming life and hope and eternity.

“Let us tell tales so as to remember how vulnerable man is when faced with overwhelming evil. Let us tell tales so as not to allow the executioner to have the last word. The last word belongs to the victim. It is up to the witness to capture it, shape it, transmit it and keep it as a secret, and then communicate that secret to others.”

  

The thing is, when we stop telling those tales, the Nazis win—generation after generation.

Paschal moon: the thunder from Sinai

Yom HaShoah, the annual commemoration of the millions of lives lost in the Holocaust, began at sundown yesterday. At 1000 local time, everything will come to a halt across Israel, and people will stand silent and still, remembering those deaths. It’s an astonishing thing to watch on my computer screen; I cannot imagine it in real life.

(Possibly the two minutes of silence at 1100 on 11 November every year in the UK is the closest approximation. But in the years I lived there, I never saw the kind of universal participation—traffic kept moving, people chattered—so, no.)

Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is by Maria Skobtsova, née Elizaveta Yurievna Pilenko in 1891 in Riga, then part of Russia. She embraced atheism in her youth, married for the first time at age 20 (to a Bolshevik), and got involved with pre-war literary circles. For a while—during and after the Russian Revolution, Skobtsova had quite the adventurous life, including a planned assassination of Leon Trotsky, from which she was dissuaded by friends. Following her divorce, she was drawn to the (Orthodox) Church; she married a second time (to a man named Skobtsov), divorced this husband and moved to Paris with her children. The short version of this journey is that she took religious vows (assuming the name Maria) and found her calling in social work and theological studies. Her home became a center for refugees, geographic, economic and spiritual; her doors were open to anyone in need of help.

I don’t know whether it was a residue of her early years as an atheist, but somewhat unusually for a follower of Eastern Orthodoxy (the term “pogrom” and its practice originated in tsarist Russia), Skobtsova welcomed Jews to her refuge (without expectation of needing conversion), including during the time following the German invasion and occupation of France. Her spiritual advisor, Father Dmitri Klepenin, issued baptismal certificates to Jews, and she both sheltered those who came to her and helped many escape the country.

Eventually the Nazis came for her. In 1943 she was sent to Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women, where she was gassed on 31 March 1945, five weeks before the end of the war. In 2004, the Eastern Church declared Skobtsova a saint; in 1985, she was recognized as Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

Skobtsova’s poetry covered a lot of ground, but for today I’ll give you this one.

“Israel”

Two triangles, a star,

The shield of King David, our forefather.

This is election, not offense.

The great path and not an evil.

Once more in a term fulfilled,

Once more roars the trumpet of the end;

And the fate of a great people

Once more is by the prophet proclaimed.

Thou art persecuted again, O Israel,

But what can human malice mean to thee,

who have heard the thunder from Sinai?

Resistance moon: The strange command

Since it is Pesach in this Month of Resistance, even though I gave you some Jewish poetry just a few days ago, let’s have a couple from one of my favorite writers, Primo Levi.

Levi did not start out to be a writer—he studied chemistry. And in fact, following a little re-accommodation by the Germans during World War II, he worked as a chemist in a paint factory for 30 years. But that involuntary hiatus shaped him indelibly, and his is one of the most powerful voices for both resistance and resilience to come out of the Holocaust. Viz.:

“Reveille”

In the brutal nights we used to dream

Dense violent dreams,

Dreamed with soul and body:

To return; to eat; to tell the story.

Until the dawn command

Sounded brief, low

'Wstawać '

And the heart cracked in the breast.

Now we have found our homes again,

Our bellies are full,

We're through telling the story.

It's time. Soon we'll hear again

The strange command:

'Wstawać

“Wstawać” is Polish for “get up”—either to rise from a bed or stand up from a seated position.

In all the works I’ve read by Levi that deal with his relationship with the Nazis, he breaks from Italian and refers to the camps only by their German term: “lager”. It’s as though the very concept of Bergen-Belsen, Maidanek, Mauthausen and Auschwitz is so repulsive that he refuses to use an Italian word for these places. (Note to future press secretaries of this or any other administration: they were extermination camps, not “Holocaust centers”. You’re welcome.) I’m guessing that the order to get out of bed or stand to attention at Auschwitz, where Levi was a prisoner for eleven months, would have been given in Polish, so that’s the word he chose, and his translators retained it.

I wonder if Levi imagines that Death will also speak in Polish, when the summons comes? 

The second poem today is not strictly to do with resistance, but rather with solidarity, with comradeship, with the kind of connections that shape and strengthen us for the better as human beings. That encourage our decency and give us reasons to resist. As Levi well knew—we survive and build not just for ourselves, but for those who follow behind us.

“To My Friends”

Dear friends, and here I say friends

the broad sense of the word:

Wife, sister, associates, relatives,

Schoolmates of both sexes,

People seen only once

Or frequented all my life;

Provided that between us, for at least a moment,

A line has been stretched,

A well-defined bond.

I speak for you, companions of a crowded

Road, not without its difficulties,

And for you too, who have lost

Soul, courage, the desire to live;

Or no one, or someone, or perhaps only one person, or you

Who are reading me: remember the time

Before the wax hardened,

When everyone was like a seal.

Each of us bears the imprint

Of a friend met along the way;

In each the trace of each.

For good or evil

In wisdom or in folly

Everyone stamped by everyone.

Now that the time crowds in

And the undertakings are finished,

To all of you the humble wish

That autumn will be long and mild.

Gratitude Monday: Base and precious metals

Last week NPR reported a story that really reached out to me. You may recall an earlier story of how staff at the Auschwitz museum discovered two pieces of jewelry hidden in the false bottom of an enamel mug. The original owner—one of hundreds of thousands to pass through the work-and-death camp—is unknown, so the narrative surrounding the mug, the ring and the necklace remains ephemeral and very sad.

But that report sparked a listener to contact NPR with a similar story from her own family history. You can read it here, but the condensed version is that when the German army began the invasion of Poland in 1939, a Jewish couple in Warsaw, Guta and Meyer Rak, took precautions against the presumed chaotic future. They took their gold jewelry to a goldsmith and asked him to melt it down and hide it in the lip of an ordinary tin tea canister.

When they picked it up some time later, of course there was no way of knowing whether the goldsmith had done what he’d been paid for, because the whole point was that the precious metal be completely hidden. He could well just have kept the gold as well as their payment, lined the tin with more base metal and handed that over; after all—even if they did discover deceit, what could they do about it? The Raks took the canister with them as they fled to the East, and it stayed with them through years in Soviet labor camps, and more years of travel until they settled in the Bronx.

They never attempted to retrieve the gold—they always managed with what was visible, without having to dip into their secret reserve—so they lived their long lives without knowing whether their reserve still existed. It took them decades before they even told their daughter what the rusty old tea canister represented.

But when their granddaughter was planning her wedding, she decided to use whatever metal the tin contained for her wedding rings. She found a jeweler who likes a challenge, and he made a special tool to pull out the lining around the lip that would cause minimal damage to the canister.

And he found gold.

The Warsaw goldsmith had not taken advantage of the dark times to cheat customers he would never see again. And he’d done a masterful job using lead to solder the gold securely to tin—apparently a tricky balance.

The Raks kept their battered old canister with them for 70 years, trusting that, whatever came along, they could always pull out something extra from the can if it was needed to get them to better times. But they managed without ever needing it.

And their granddaughter and her husband wear daily reminders of that story of honor, trust, hope and resilience.

I am grateful that this story has come to light to remind us that such precious metals are possible, even in the basest of times.

Proud-pied April: Nothing matters in hiding

This year marks the 60^th anniversary of the Hungarian revolt against its Communist government (and Soviet overlords). What started as a student march on the Parliament building in Budapest on 23 October looked for a few days as though it would crack open the Warsaw Pact. But within a couple of weeks the Red Army invaded and even more repressive measures were imposed on the country, symbolized in such photos as this one:

Hungary’s in one of those dicey geopolitical situations, standing in the path between Russian and German interests. During the Second World War the country was an Axis ally, and engaged in some unsuccessful secret attempts to negotiate an armistice with the Western Allies while fighting off the Soviets, which resulted in a German invasion in March, 1944. Between then and Germany’s surrender in April, 1945, 450,000 Jews and 28,000 Roma were murdered; there was almost no Hungarian resistance to this policy of deportation and murder.

One of the victims was the poet Miklós Radnóti. During the war Radnóti was conscripted into the Hungarian army; being a Jew, he was assigned to an unarmed labor battalion on the eastern front. He continued to write poetry, which we know about because, as the end approached, he bribed one of his Hungarian guards to smuggle his notebook of poems out. In November 1944, on a forced march, Radnóti was killed, with about 3200 comrades.

Like poets everywhere, Radnóti wrote about the human experience. In his case, of course, that experience included imprisonment and the expectation of being murdered. For example:

“The Hunted”

From my window I see a hillside,

  it cannot see me at all;

I’m still, verse trickles from my pen

  but nothing matters in hiding;

I see, though cannot grasp this solemn,

  old-fashioned grace: as ever,

the moon emerges onto the sky and

  the cherry tree bursts into blossom.

Since the end of the war, Radnóti has been recognized as a national treasure in Hungary. Funny how that works out.

Courtroom drama

Seventy years ago today the major powers who defeated the Axis on the battlefield embarked on a novel enterprise: they put the leaders of Nazi Germany on trial for what we’ve come to know as war crimes. The International Military Tribunal, comprising jurists from France, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union, opened proceedings against 24 civilian and military figures (one, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, was tried in absentia), the ones who had neither committed suicide nor managed to escape into anonymity.

The trial was held in Nuremberg, for both practical and symbolic reasons. Although the Allies had bombed the hell out of the city, the Palace of Justice was basically intact and had enough room for such a massive undertaking. And Nuremberg had been the spiritual heart of Nazism, being the home of the Party’s annual gatherings. Where better to drive a stake into the heart of National Socialism?

There were four charges—unprecedented in the history of warfare and international law:

Conspiring to commit crimes against peace

Planning and waging wars of aggression

War crimes

Crimes against humanity

Ahead lay nearly eleven exhausting months of contentious testimony, unspeakably ghastly evidence, equivocation, defiance, arrogance and behind-the-scenes manipulation. The Soviets had never wanted to conduct a trial—their preference was summary execution upon discovery. Even Winston Churchill had toyed with the notion of rooting out the evil without bothering with legal niceties. But in the end, the Allies pulled together and gave humanity a permanent record of what happens when the rule of law surrenders to ideological insanity.

Yes, the irony of Stalin’s minions sitting on the bench that exposed ideological crimes does not escape me. It was a delicate dance the Western Powers performed, condemning Nazis while turning a blind eye to Soviet atrocities against humanity.

It was also a chancy business—not only charging elected (in some cases) leaders and military commanders with crimes that had not been defined as such at the time of commission, but also naming them as criminal actions. Because if they are crimes when committed by Nazis, they are also crimes when committed by Russians, Japanese, Syrians and Americans.

It’s a slippery slope, no doubt about it. And Lord knows we’ve gone ass over teakettle a few times over many of the principles argued at Nuremberg.

But what a remarkable undertaking, to draw that line in the sand, to say out loud, “This is wrong and it does not go unnoticed.” Even if it does very often go unpunished.

In my opinion, almost more than the actual victory itself, the Nuremberg Trials marked the triumph of good over evil. Pretty much anyone with manufacturing capability, masses of conscripts, good commanders and the will to persevere can win a war. It takes something more than that to turn from places like Babi Yar and Belsen to the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg.

Collateral damage

Seventy years ago today, the 11^th Armoured Division of the British army was pushing through northern Germany (in the general vicinity of Hanover) when they came across something they must have thought was unimaginable. Even given what they’d already seen in nearly six years of total war.

They entered the cluster of prison camps known as Bergen-Belsen, which over the years had housed Jews, POWs, political prisoners, Roma, “asocials” (which covered a wide range of behaviors the Nazis didn’t like), criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals. Starting in the last months of 1944, it became a collection camp for thousands of Jewish prisoners evacuated from camps ahead of the advancing Red Army in the East. (And by “evacuated” I mean “forced marches in winter without food or shelter or adequate clothing.")

So what the soldiers of the 11^th found on 15 April 1945 was 60,000 gaunt, sick humans (men, women, children) in ragged, filthy tatters of clothing. There was a typhus outbreak, and the prisoners were dying at a rate of 500 per day. And more than 13,000 corpses in various stages of decomposition, were scattered around the grounds.

Imagine, if you can, what it would be like—even being a soldier—to come across this kind of horror; cruelty and killing on an industrial scale. You’ve never seen anything like this, never heard of it. Nothing in text books, no tales on the radio or in the newsreels. You’re just marching through the fields of Germany, and you start to smell something really, really bad. And then you walk into a compound that is so nightmarish that you have no vocabulary to describe it, even to yourself. You have no point of reference, so it’s as though you just walked into a nightmare world where nothing connects properly.

And yet, there it is, all around you. The sights, the stench, the sounds; tens of thousands of human shells, who also find the sight of you unbelievable.

Sadly—these days, were we to stumble upon, for example, mass graves in Bosnia, we would be able to say, “Oh, yes. Genocide. Mass rape and torture. I know what this is. It’s revolting, but I know what this is.” In 1945—not so much.

One member of an official film unit described the jumbles of corpses:

“The bodies were a ghastly sight. Some were green. They looked like skeletons covered with skin—the flesh had all gone. There were bodies of small children among the grown ups. In other parts of the camp there were hundreds of bodies lying around, in many cases piled five or six high.”

Perhaps the most famous description of what these soldiers encountered was by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, which I share with you here.

However, the voice I recall is of a British medical officer in a permanent exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, which recorded his account of working with the prisoners. He spoke of being completely overwhelmed by the numbers of patients—not one of the 60,000 was healthy. They had typhus, they had dysentery, they had all manner of diseases and injuries, all compounded by malnutrition, exhaustion, exposure and beatings.

This MO spoke of having to make choices of whom to treat and whom to let die, on the basis of who was most likely to benefit from treatment and survive. He couldn’t treat everyone; not everyone would recover. The one that I recall (and I heard this in 1996) was choosing between two sisters, both of whom were very sick, but one more so than the other. He had to treat the slightly healthier one and let the weaker one die. The anguish in this man’s voice was palpable, all those decades later.

It tore my heart into pieces to think of a physician having to make those kinds of choices. I wondered if, in the remaining years of his life, he was able to take solace in the lives he’d saved, or whether the only faces he saw were the ones he’d turned away from.

To me, this is part of the cost of letting evil like Nazism take hold, of giving it space, of providing it weapons and not standing up to it until it’s barging through your door. Collateral damage, I suppose you’d call it—the nightmares carried by the soldiers of the 11^th Armoured, and other units that discovered other camps—for the rest of their lives.

April soft and cold: A long always

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

Gratitude Monday: Yom HaShoah

As I mentioned yesterday, today marks Yom HaShoah, the commemoration of those lives lost in their millions during the Holocaust. At 1000 today, sirens throughout Israel wail, and the entire country comes to a halt for two minutes of silence. People stop driving, shopping, lecturing, giving closing arguments, preparing lunch, playing soccer. Indoors or out, they stop in their tracks (if they’re in cars, they get out and stand beside them) and spend two minutes thinking about a time when the unthinkable became not only thinkable but executable.

Two minutes, six million dead; that’s about 50,000 lives per second.

And I’m guessing that the primary purpose of those sirens is not Yom HaShoah; it’s to warn of present-day dangers to the survival of both Israel and the Jews. Which lends another layer of meaning to the custom.

So, today also being Gratitude Monday, what’s there to be grateful about in all this?

Well, I’m grateful that—with all the will in the world, and a good deal of the technologies at their disposal—the Nazis did not succeed in eradicating European Jewry. I’m really not very good with large numbers; I think in terms of each life—who that man was; what that child might have become; how that woman was going to work in a factory, be a research chemist, plant a garden. Each of those possibilities gone.

But not all of the potential was lost—for example, David Keller, who survived Nazi slave labor camps to come to the United States, raise a family, volunteer in the community and die a couple of years ago in Palo Alto, aged 89.

I’m grateful for the life of David Keller, and for the millions of men and women of the Allied armies, navies and air forces who beat the Germans back yard by yard to enable Keller and thousands of others to live out their lives.

I’m grateful for one of the most unlikely of Presidents, that failed haberdasher and product of machine politics from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, who (unlike FDR) felt that creating a homeland in the Middle East for the surviving Jews was both a morally and geopolitically correct stance. His recognition of the State of Israel in 1948—in the face of objections from his military and diplomatic advisors, not to mention the international opposition, starting with Britain—was probably the tipping point for getting that fledgling nation any kind of start at all.

I’m grateful that people like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi did not flinch in recounting their experiences with the Final Solution. And that Victor Frankl used his experience to help us understand that the strength of our mental lives gives strength to our physical ones.

Remembrance of this past is crucial to our future, if we are not to replicate it. Because, as Anatoly Kuznetsov said, "Let me emphasize again that I have not told about anything exceptional, but only about ordinary things that were part of a system; things that happened just yesterday, historically speaking, when people were exactly as they are today."