Holocaust poems

Riddle

From Belsen a crate of gold teeth
from Dachau a mountain of shoes,
from Auschwitz a skin lampshade,
Who killed the Jews?

Not I, cries the typist,
Not I, cries the engineer,
Not I, cries Adolf Eichmann
Not I, cries Albert Speer.

My friend Fritz Nova lost his father-
a petty official had to choose.
My friend Lou Abrahms lost his brother.
Who killed the Jews?

David Nova swallowed gas,
Hyman Abrahms was beaten and starved.
Some men signed their papers,
and some stood guard,

and some herded them in,
and some dropped the pellets,
and some spread the ashes,
and some hosed the walls.

and some planted the wheat.
and some poured the steel,
and some cleared the rails,
and some raised the cattle.

Some smelled the smoke,
some just heard the news.
Were they Germans? Were they Nazis?
Were they human? Who killed the Jews?

The stars will remember the gold,
the sun will remember the shoes,
the moon will remember the skin.
But who killed the Jews?

William Heyen



I Keep Forgetting

I keep forgetting
the facts and statistics
and each time
I need to know them

I look up books
these books line
twelve shelves
in my room

I know where to go
to confirm the fact
that in the Warsaw Ghetto
there were 7.2 people per room

and in Lodz
they allocated
5.8 people
to each room

I forget
over and over again
that one third of Warsaw
was Jewish

and in the ghetto
they crammed 500.000 Jews
into 2.4 per cent
of the area of the city

and how many
bodies they were burning
in Auschwitz
at the peak of their production


twelve thousand a day
I have to check
and re-check

and did I dream
that at 4pm on the 19th of January
58,000 emaciated inmates
were marched out of Auschwitz

was I right
to remember that in Bergen Belsen
from the 4th-13th of April 1945
28,000 Jews arrived from other camps

I can remember
hundreds and hundreds
of phone numbers

phone numbers
I haven’t phoned
for twenty years
are readily accessible

and I can remember
people’s conversations
and what someone’s wife
said to someone else’s husband

what a good memory
you have
people tell me




La Pathetique

on La Pathetique
the sound invades my skin
enlarges my heart

the notes drop
into channels
of sadness

piercing
puncturing
pain

Beethoven
must have been
broken hearted
when he wrote this sonata

I hum
I nod my head
I conduct the performance
from my car

this listening
to music
is new to me

for years
I required silence

I was listening
for murderers

I was expecting
menace

I was prepared
for peril

I was waiting
for disaster

and
couldn’t be disturbed.

Lily Brett











Pigtail

When all the women in the transport
had their heads shaved
four workmen with brooms made of birch twigs
swept up
and gathered up the hair

Behind clean glass
the stiff hair lies
of those suffocated in gas chambers
there are pins and side combs
in this hair

The hair is not shot through with light
is not parted by the breeze
is not touched by any hand
or rain or lips

In huge chests
clouds of dry hair
of those suffocated
and a faded plait
a pigtail with a ribbon
pulled at school
by naughty boys.

The Museum, Auschwitz, 1948
Tadeusz Rozewicz
(Translated by Adam Czerniawki)





First They Came for the Jews

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for trade unionist
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

Pastor Niemoller




Auschwitz, August 1988
Linda Ashear

I
My travel agent said,
Why do you want to go there?

II
Silence cracks the world wide open.
A crow shrieks.

III
No one screams in the cement room.
I fix my eye on the door,
remind myself that Zyklon B
is something that happened to somebody else

IV
I follow tracks to the horizon.
Black sandals leave their mark
in fine gray dust.
Gravel crunches, walking sleeping ghosts.
Three white moths circle my head.

V
In the women’s section, Israeli tourists
enter Barracks 26. One old woman
wanders through rows of wooden bunks,
stops, stares, points…
This was my bed.

VI
At the ruined crematorium our guide
bends to pick up something from the earth.
Open you hand, she says.
What is it?
Bone, she says.
A stone grows in my throat.
After Auschwitz, words, like lungs, collapse





Goethe’s Tree
Annie Dawi

Red triangle covers
left breast pocket.
NO for Norwegian,
no tattoo on the wrist
-numbers for Jews only

“German intellectual material”
was Reidar, with his blue eyes
and white-blond hair. Reidar
himself says he looked like
an SS recruitment poster.

Corpse carrier at Buchenwald,
Reidar was, at 19, a veteran
of the underground resistance,
arrested for singing anti-German
songs, and later for sinking
a just-christened German ship.

In the middle of Buchenwald,
Reidar remembers an old oak
around which filed
10,000 Hungarian Jews
who arrived one day in 1945

Rediar says, “smoke poured
forth so voluminously
that daylight didn’t break through.”

In the final months,
Reidar and the others
carried their own skeletons
around this oak,
whose brass plaque reads:

“Under this tree
Goethe sat
and wrote some of his most
beautiful poetry.”