My mom spent eleven months in Auschwitz. She watched her parents get machine-gunned before her. Has bullet scars on both sides of her breasts. She survived the ghetto, and was one of the young people chosen to work in a suitcase factory until the ghetto was liquidated on September 18, 1943.
After the liquidation was completed (and I don’t know where she was during that time), she was forced to drag out all the bodies from the apartments in the town in which she was born and grew up. After all the bodies were removed, she, along with the other young people left, were made to take all the furnishings and belonging to the ghetto residents outside, to be loaded onto Nazi trucks and taken to Germany.
Before she lost the ability to be nasty and hurtful she talked about some of what she went through. Art Spiegelman used her for notes for Maus and Maus II.
She was angry and afraid and emotions I’ve never understood since the day I was born. She was easy in telling tales, tales I couldn’t stop asking about — and couldn’t block out of my mind.
I’ve thought about her scar, and the blurred blue ink underneath, since I was old enough to touch her arm.
72197
I want your number, mom —
the number
first tattooed on your virgin flesh
then burned away
in a pique of freedom
I need the number
for a new covenant
to wear your shame as
my badge of memory
one star
one number
for each family lost
by each family serving
as a Ner Tamid[1].
This is no covenant
of secret mutilation
passing a livestock brand
from a time beyond memory
this –
this is our new brand
of bondage, body and
soul
to the strength and power we lacked
in ages past and present.
I claim this covenant everlasting
between me and my uncles and aunts
my grandparents and cousins
my parents and sister and children
This is a covenant between
we new priests of memory
and our havurot[2]
and temples
and synagogues
and shtibles[3]
and homes
and hearts
This covenant is to teach and remind
remember and relate
how god did not Pass us Over
and heard not the helpless cries from ghettos
truck exhausts rifle stocks bullets
boxcars camps
dry showers
This covenant is to preach
that a people of memory without strength
a people of knowledge without
wisdom
are a people doomed to repeat
a history well remembered
I pray for wisdom to battle hate
I bind my mind with t’fillin[4] of discipline of the hand
and love between my eyes
I mourn destructions and deaths in dirge and sirens
And celebrate Warsaw rebellions, Maccabean redemptions
Engage in pilpul[5] and hevruta[6] among
The untaught and unremembering
practice the arts of understanding
kindness
firmness
resistance
and war without quarter
or mercy
| Baruch anachnu hasordimba’alei zikaron k’dosheinu asher kidashnu et atzmeinul’sherut ameinu la’ad |
Blessed are we the survivors masters and owners of our martyrs’ memories who have consecrated ourselves to our people’s service forever |
Amen.
Yom Ha’Shoah Ve’Hagvurah[7]
April 19, 2001
[1] Eternal flame, a light of remembrance
[2] Groups of students who learn together, or Jewish Reconstructionist congregations
[3] Small congregations of Orthodox or Ultra-Orthodox Jews meeting is small synagogues or family homes
[4] Leather phylacteries, leather straps and parchment boxes worn on the arm and head during daily prayers by Orthodox Jews
[5] Argumentative give-and-take used to understand and learn an academic point
[6] A pair or group of students learning together
[7] Holocaust and Heroism (Remembrance) Day
Seeing Google congratulate me on my (purported) birthday gave me quite the startle. Not that I have a birthday: that I forgot that Google Knows All (even if the date it chose wasn’t quite right due to my obfuscation). However, it brings up a thought on writing: prompts. There are prompt generators [1][2][3] to help, but I’ve got two dates that I’ve used, more or less regularly, as starters for poems. Yom Kippur (the Jewish holiday commemorating the ‘sealing of the judgement’ of a person for the coming year), and my birthday.