Wednesday, January 26, 2022

International Holocaust Remembrance Day -27 January 2022


    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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