Tag: Holocaust

Spare the Details by Nathaniel Gutman

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Spare the Details

Their faces.
Twelve blank faces caught in the flashbulb.

I ask you:
Did they feel the walls closing in,
hear the drums beating?
The last one, number thirteen,
left Berlin three weeks before.
Her face,
locked inside a photo-within-a-photo,
placed on the lavish dinner table, the lace cloth,
her radiant shine.

She had the power—the power to shine.

Happy birthday,
champagne glasses raised.
I recognize some faces–
my own family.

Around the corner,
at Humboldt University,
students rejoice in Book Burning Day,
Einstein, Freud, Brecht, Helen Keller,
“cleansed” by massive fires.
Did they see the flames,
on their way to the elegant party,
did they smell the smoke?

There she is—my mother.
Her face,
the thirteenth,
against twelve grim faces.
Her radiant shine.

She knew.
Forced them to flee too,
her parents, my grandparents.
Here they are:
Your father is looking at you, Mother.
Your mother, at him.

Behind your parents, in the back,
is a man—uncle Ivan.
It is his house.
Didn’t much like him, Mother says,
don’t care, who the woman hugging him was,
who some of the other guests were.
Uncle Ivan.
What happened to him? I ask.
We know enough, she says.
We can spare the details.

My letter to Berlin
receives an immediate reply,
formal, polite—
attached, his Third Reich ID card:

Born: October 22, 1878
Berlin, Charlottenburg
Profession: Attorney
Religion: Moses
Address: Budapester Strasse 17
Deported: January 20, 1944, Auschwitz.
We know enough, she says.
We can spare the details.

*

Nathaniel Gutman, a filmmaker, produced, directed and/or written over 30 theatrical/TV movies and documentaries internationally, including award-winning Children’s Island (BBC, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), Deadline (with Christopher Walken), Linda (from the novella by John D. MacDonald; with Virginia Madsen).

Born in Israel, Nathaniel’s creative work often tries to come to grips with his bitter-sweet, overly sheltered German-speaking early childhood, of books, art and good (too good) manners, before being thrown, first in school, then, in the army, into the explosive reality outside.

The Immigrant by Julie Standig

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The Immigrant

My aunt’s apartment on Surf Avenue
was immaculate. I thought.
Until I had to clean it out. Shopping bags
overfilled, one on top of another—
in every closet, pantry, and storage bin.

I discovered old bank statements,
official letters from Germany—in German.
Letters from unknown-to-us people,
written in Polish.
Letters from Israel,
written in Hebrew.
Letters from lawyers that testified
what was taken, when, how much.
Her ketubah from Bergen Belson.

The linen closet was stuffed with towels,
and between those towels, more letters.
One took our breath away
           They took the kinder, put them on a train.
           We knew we would not see them again.
They took her father’s shoe factory.
They took the silver. The china.
Her hair. They sterilized her at Block 10.
They took her baby boy.

The bedroom closet was packed with racks
of shoes. Row after row after row.
A pair of slippers trimmed in fur. Size 5.
My aunt had small feet.

I clutched her nut-brown sweater to my heart.
It was the same one she wore
for her immigration photo.
She kept everything. And I unearthed it.

Stashed in a night-table drawer—
an evergreen marbled notebook
on dictation and grammar,
two accordion-folded rain bonnets,
in plastic sleeves with the ILGWU* stamp.

Small paperbacks:
Geography (for 7th and 8th grade)
Spelling
Mathematics
The D.A.R. Manual for Citizenship

And her porcelain plate with FDR
and Churchill’s side-by-side faces.
Written on the bottom—For Democracy.

*International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).

*

Julie Standig’s poetry has appeared in Schuylkill Journal Review, Sadie Girl Press, Gyroscope Review and online journals. She has a full collection of poems, The Forsaken Little Black Book and her chapbook, Memsahib Memoir. Lifetime New Yorker, she now resides in Bucks County with her husband and their springer spaniel.

Three Poems by Emily Kedar

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At the Holocaust Memorial in Prague

After Jan Zwicky

Fourteen lines of names are mine—
I fold my body low next to the lettered wall.
Tourists press play on their audio guides
and a voice in every language says
I should be dead. I do not move. Years pass

backwards and suddenly I’m six. My mother wails,
I hold the doubled echoes of her weeping. She’s caught
by that same patch of white brick wall
tattooed with thin red lines. She cannot move,
the only time she let me see her cry.

Our bodies stunned in one place
at different times. If only I could touch her now…
breath again reaches me and I rise
to go out of there, squinting into bone grey light.

* 

Last Date

When you tell me you’re German I hold back,
wait until our second date to ask
what your Grandfather did during the war.
You wince and hold your breath— you knew
this was coming; you tell me about the bone handle
knife you eyed as a child, how he gave
it to you before he died.

On our third date, you invite me over to make soup.
I watch your long fingers slice carrots, the well-worn
bone hilt resting easy against your palm, the knife’s edge
bobs up and down, thuds orange circles that roll
easily away. I watch you carve the chicken open,
and wonder if this blade cut through the skin
of any one of my ancestors.

* 

Doykait

My bubbie survived that great war,
to fry latkes for me in fragrant oil
in a quiet house by a ravine,
the air yellow with sweet onion.
As I grow, I find her grief
inside my pelvis, teach myself alchemy
from scratch, locate her pain,
turn it into another kind of gold.
I do not labour at liberating ghosts
only to watch as it happens

all over again:
a young woman’s brown cheek
trembles under her keffiyeh
as she kneels over her mother’s
dead body. This moment will lodge
inside her ovaries, play out
in her daughter’s heart.
Generations later, a girl will leave
someone she loves, as I have— cry out
why does it never feel safe to stay?

*

Emily Kedar is a poet and writer from Toronto, Canada. Her work has most recently appeared in The Malahat Review, The Maynard and The Bellevue Literary Review. She is currently pursuing an MFA from Pacific University.

GEMÜTLICHKEIT by Michael Salcman

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GEMÜTLICHKEIT

Despite a vow taken after the war
the occasional German word
escaped my father’s mouth
in a hail of Yiddish spit.

Gemütlichkeit was one such word,
by actual vote their favorite
in Berlin and the German side
of Prague—where it held
the warmth of a house alive
with comfort,
and so many other meanings
you could hear it breathing
with books and a cat, friends
and wife, enough warm food
and drinks like a fiery slivovitz.

He knew
the wet sound of this word
how it unwound slowly on his tongue
syllable by syllable,
and how it took some time to forget
where and when it was spoken

Last.

*

Michael Salcman: poet, physician and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland. Poems appear in Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on medical subjects, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces: New Poems, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Book Prize (2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022) and the forthcoming Crossing the Tape (2024) are published by Spuyten Duyvil.

Two Poems by Margaret Dornaus

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The Heart is Not a Stone

             after Danusha Laméris

You cannot hold it in your hands,
or kick it to one side to clear your path.
Or toss it in the air to see how far
it travels . . . skipping as it does
across still water. It is neither this
nor that, but by its nature soft
though not without sharp
edges. It is a dozen songbirds
singing as the light returns, a child
at play, a lover calling out
your name: a reminder there is
no love without the loss. No poetry.
Perhaps then it’s enough to speak
of smaller things—a pocket,
say, a stone—until you also find
your heart. Holding on. Letting
go. Speaking before daring
to be spoken for.

*

But You Don’t Die from It

             “The yellow star? Oh, what of it? You don’t die from it.”
                         —from Night, Chapter One, by Elie Wiesel

At Buchenwald, Liliane takes two stones from her pocket.
Small specimens collected from a desecrated cemetery in Potsdam.

She places one stone on a cairn overlooking Buchenwald’s
courtyard, where tourists are snapping pictures off

their bucket list: the frozen watchtower clock displaying
the time of liberation; the arched entryway gates

proclaiming Arbeit Macht Frei without a shred
of irony; the lightning-struck oak where Goethe sat

on this hillside above Weimar’s cobblestoned ode
to life and literature and music. A month ago

when Liliane and I met in a New York restaurant
that served schnitzel, she asked if I was Jewish.

It’s your name, she said, explaining she’d studied
surnames given Jews by their oppressors.

I told her that my name had haunted me since
childhood. How my classmates taunted

me with nicknames: dormouse; doormat; doornail,
as in dead as . . . How at night I’d wished

for a name that sounded more American, less
German. It’s just a name, I said that day

Liliane and I became friends. Long before
she placed her second stone in my left hand.

*

Margaret Dornaus holds an MFA in the translation of poetry from the University of Arkansas. A semifinalist in Naugatuck River Review’s 13th annual Narrative Poetry Contest, she had the privilege of editing and publishing a pandemic-themed anthology—behind the mask: haiku in the time of Covid-19—through her small literary press Singing Moon in 2020. Her first book of poetry, Prayer for the Dead: Collected Haibun & Tanka Prose, won a 2017 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in I-70 Review, MacQueen’s, Minyan Magazine, MockingHeart Review, Red Earth Review, Silver Birch Press, and The Ekphrastic Review.