Yom HaShoah, the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust, begins the evening of Sunday, May 5. It has always been a difficult time for me. For many years, I joined my parents at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. I remember Elie Wiesel’s haunting voice: “Let us tell tales…” A memorial candle-lighting ceremony followed. I remember my mother walking down the aisle, carrying a white candle for the dead of her city, Lodz. I wonder what my father, a survivor of Auschwitz, would say about these terrible times we live in now.
Survivors
We were severed limbs of a tree
Pick-up sticks to pyromaniacs
Roasting our skin like marshmallows.
We were phantom arms and legs
Of an amputee creeping
Out of the smoking heap.
We were fevered by visions
Of roots like fingers
Planted in the earth’s belly.
Two by two, we boarded the boat
Noah’s grateful beasts
To salvage what was left.
America! America! America!
We chanted the magic word of passage.
Our daughter sat quiet as baggage.
