For this year's International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I offer some poems by Miklos Radnoti and one that I read on Sunday. The date itself commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army. in 1945.
The link immediately below gives some biographical information also.
https://allpoetry.com/Miklos-Radnoti
My poem Unfinished Kaddish" appears in the Fall Lines Volumes VII/VIII, from the Jasper Project in Columbia, SC. I wrote it a few years ago as increasing anti-Semitism spread over the world, even in Western democracies The poem was written before the Pittsburgh Squirrel Hill synagogue shootings and the recent hostage-taking in a Texas synagogue.
If one group is singled out for hatred, attacks, and extermination, any group can be.
Unfinished Kaddish
Alef
Cures for cancer and the common cold,
Novels, plays, symphonies and sculptures,
landscapes and portraits, all these
suffocated in boxcars to oblivion,
vanished as smoke from countless
crematoria,
staggered on zig-zag forced marches,
a danse
macabre through a dying Reich,
blood-stained poems found on the
corpse of Radnóti
Beit
Don’t
ask Bruce about his relatives.
Why
doesn’t she remove the tattoo?
Stalin
killed more people anyway,
If
anyone deserved it, it was them.
No
one knew what was going on.
None
of it was true, none of it!
It
could never happen here.
Voices of the aftermath, like backwash
in the wake of a million ships.
Gimel
The drumbeat starts again, steady
and strong. Unchanged from before,
panacea for all that goes wrong.
Headstones desecrated, temples
vandalized, lies repeated rapidly
in social media and during
political rallies. Western Civilization’s
dirty little secret surfaces once more
as lies repeated on social media.
Dalet
Is Aliyah
an answer, or an error?
Discussion ranges from Knesset
to condominium, from headlines
to the dinner table. Where does
Eretz
Yisrael begin
and end?
Regardless, living is defiance to
the lies, half-truths, and scorn.
Living is creating, improving the
world, gladdening the heart.
Hei
When hard times came again
like a cold winter’s wind,
angry echoes resounded on
the banks of the Danube and
Elbe, a refrain rising from the
Seine and the Thames. Look,
look to the emptiness of Auschwitz,
the silence of a score of other camps
and reflect on all that was lost.
Should these steps be taken again?
Arthur Turfa, © 2018 Fall Lines,© 2022
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