Tag Archives: Holocaust

June 2, 2025 · 7:30 am

Displaced People

Milt Zolotow (z”l)

(with his daughter, Nina Zolotow)

Note from Nina: I want to tell you a bit about my father. He grew up in New York, the child of immigrants, with Yiddish as his first language and a fairly conventional Jewish upbringing, which meant he also learned Hebrew. During World War II, he served in the army and was sent to North Africa, Italy, France, and ultimately occupied Germany, where his ability to speak Yiddish helped him understand German. Well, you can imagine that because of this background he had some interesting adventures in Europe. In his old age he outlined a memoir about his war years, which he never actually wrote. I cobbled together a one-sentence story years after his death about an experience he had in Germany. In it I use information and phrases from his outline, a kind of a posthumous collaboration, which you can read below.

During the occupation we were sent to a small German town near a camp for Displaced Persons, where all the DP’s were women, and someone had the bright idea of sending a truck down to invite any interested women to a dance we were giving—with musicians and food, too!— and when the truck filled with girls arrived, we brought out the schnapps and food, and soon there were couples making out in the bushes outside the cafe and everyone was as drunk as raw schnapps can make you, but then as I was drunkenly dancing with a pretty girl, I suddenly realized that I clearly understood every word she was saying because she was speaking to me in Yiddish, so after that I sobered up pretty quickly and listened as she explained to me that no one in the camp knew she was Jewish because she carried the identity papers of a Pole (she had jumped off the moving freight train carrying her to a death camp, found a young Polish woman who was roughly her size and coloring, and then she killed this woman, took her identity papers and lived as a Pole in a Nazi work camp) and that she had come to the dance to try some Yiddish phrases on everyone she danced with and finally succeeded in making contact with me (quite a miracle since there were only two Jews in my battalion and the other one was not at the dance), and all I could think to do was to take her back to my quarters and give her every bar of soap and carton of cigarettes I could find, however, that kind of backfired because when she returned to the DP camp laden with my gifts, she was immediately the center of hostile attention—no other girl had been so lavishly treated and suddenly suspicions rose: she was different, she was a Jew—and the officer running the camp saw the ruckus, knew she had to be separated, and phoned our HG to tell us what happened, so then I made some calls and found a quartermaster truck that was going south to a Mediterranean port, put the girl on it and got the GI driver to agree to put her on board a ship to Palestine, but later I learned that the British turned back all the Jewish refugees trying to get to Palestine, so I guessed she must have ended up stranded in some French waterfront town, and I still wonder if I did enough (I never heard another word about her because the very next day I was given a two-week pass for the French Riviera).

Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, where there is both brand new and older works, and you can also subscribe to her on Substack, where she is releasing one story a week. Nina has also written or co-written four books on yoga (seeyogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right. 

Milton Zolotow was born in New York City, the child of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Trained as a fine artist as well as a graphic designer, he enlisted in the US Army during World War II, hoping to join the map making division in New Jersey. Instead, he was assigned to a tank battalion and after training was sent to North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany. Because of his drawing skills, he mainly did reconnaissance for his unit. But during the occupation of Germany, he was used as a German translator due to his knowledge of the Yiddish language, and his ability to speak Yiddish as well as some Hebrew and French also led him to have some interesting encounters with other Jewish people in Europe. After the war, he returned to New York City, where he created a body of war- and Holocaust-inspired artwork and where he met his future wife, Edith. After a couple of years of studying art in Mexico City, Milton and Edith settled down in Los Angeles, California, where they raised a family and Milton worked as a graphic designer and taught graphic design in art schools. In his retirement, he began to create black and white drawings that continued to explore imagery that evoked war and the Holocaust. 



1 Comment

Filed under American Jewry, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, Polish Jewry

Tagged as , , , , ,

April 21, 2025 · 7:30 am

Sonnet for the survivors.

by Linda Laderman (Commerce Township, MI)

Praise the Holocaust Survivors who ask us never to forget, but live life 

in the present and the future. Praise their resilience, the ones who dance 

the Hora at their grandchildren’s weddings, the grandchildren they couldn’t

imagine they’d have, the weddings they couldn’t dream would take place.

Praise the pastries they take home wrapped in a napkin, because they can’t

know for sure if the cake will have to be left in haste, a dish of dry crumbs.

Praise their unwillingness to take freedom for granted, to refuse to bow to

the demands of demagogues, to stay clear-eyed about our new fear mongers.

Praise the man who hid in plain sight, moving from place to place to evade

the Jew hatred, then began a life in America where he believed he was safe.

Praise him, and his wife, who at 83, bakes cookies because, she says, every-

one deserves sweetness in their life. Praise the children who come to visit 

the Holocaust Center, then walk wide-eyed around the train exhibit, and ask

why Jews were forced into cattle cars. Praise their young eyes, because they see.

Linda Laderman grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where her family belonged to B’nai Israel Synagogue. Though she attended Hebrew and Sunday School, no one spoke of the Holocaust. In 1959, when she was ten, Linda had a Hebrew teacher with numbers tattooed in her arm. Curious, she asked what they were, but her question went unanswered. Years later, as a docent at The Zekeleman Holocaust Center near Detroit, she came to better understand the reluctance of many survivors to talk about their painful past. Linda is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize and has received a Pushcart Prize nomination. Her poetry and prose have appeared in many literary journals and media outlets. She lives near Detroit with her husband Israel Grinwald. Linda dedicates this Sonnet to the survivors of the Shoah. For the six million who did not survive, may their memory be a blessing. 

If you’d like to read more of her work, here are two poems that she shared previously with The Jewish Writing Project: Observations and An Invitation.

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry, European Jewry, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

March 31, 2025 · 7:30 am

Henoch: An Inventory

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

After Lauren Russell

A butcher’s apron pockmarked with dried blood that banging it against the river’s rocks cannot erase. An abacus to calculate the change he owes his patrons. The skill to sever an animal’s carotid arteries, jugular veins, and windpipes in one swift move. A sharp butcher’s knife to cleanly sever a chicken’s head and to break a cow down to its finest parts to sell at a premium to anyone who can afford it. His cleaver whacks away his disappointments until his own fingers bleed with hope for his children. Evening candlelight to read the sacred texts and pray. Meetings of the Baron Hirsch School trustees. His children, even the girls, will get an education, damn the naysayers. An American stamp on his passport from when he arrived in New York with younger brother Benzion. An Austro-Hungarian Empire stamp on his passport from when he returned because Pesia was pregnant. She needed him. No photographs to fold into Chava’s hands when she leaves for America. Plans for his widowed mother’s aliyah to Palestine. The burden of this place and time. No prescience that all but two of his children–the eldest and the youngest–will be murdered. Of the four grandsons named for him, only Herman Krasner is born under the flag of the American Dream.

while the others lie

in the sky in the ashen

shadow of the moon.

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies (HGS) from Gratz College, where she teaches in the HGS graduate programs. The author of two poetry chapbooks and three novels in verse, her work has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, Tiferet, Minyan, Jewishfiction.net, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She serves as Director, Mercer County (NJ) Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center.

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry, European Jewry, Family history, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , ,

March 10, 2025 · 6:30 am

My Mother Museum

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI) 

First Gallery

My father lost her cookbook after multiple moves, the black-and-white student’s notebook in which she wrote down her favorite recipes in bold, foreign-looking script. It was the one possession of hers I wanted most after she died.  I relished watching her cook with the ease and flair of a professional chef in our dimly-lit Washington Heights kitchen with a view of another Depression-era apartment building across the street.  Same gold and brown bricks, with an equally ridiculously English name like The Windermere in a neighborhood that had been filled with German-Jewish refugees and was slowly becoming Hispanic.  But the book was unique, my mother as curator.

Second Gallery

The small cameo brooch of a woman in profile must be fifty years old or more but looks brand new because she never wore it.  A friend brought it back for her from Italy is all I remember her saying.  But who?  Was it the Polish man I heard about from a family friend after she died, the man she “should have married,” a socialist from Vilnius like her instead of my born-on-a-farm father?  Why did she keep it if she never put it on/why did she never put it on?  What did it mean to her?  I’m asking these questions too late.  It nestles in its white cardboard box lined with cotton, untouched, pristine, a buoy in a mysterious sea.  

Third Gallery

The cream-colored enameled compact weighs over half a pound, is embossed with leaves and a bird in flight.  Embossed in gold and made in France: modèle déposé, registered design.  There’s room for a lipstick, there’s a mirror inside on the left, there’s a lidded compartment for face powder on the right.  It’s an object out of a film noir, the kind of thing a lustrous femme fatale would use with magical, elegant hands to make herself up while people stared at her effrontery, her chic.  Oh, she was definitely chic.  One of her students from Belgium said “Elle avait du chien“: French for desirable, intelligent, and strong.  I see that in some photos from the late 40s.  By the 50s the look has disappeared and she’s an American housewife.

Fourth Gallery

Hanging in her closet in a plastic dry cleaner’s bag like any ordinary dress was the slave labor camp dress she was wearing when freed by Americans in eastern Germany, April 15, 1945.  Dark gray strips that seem almost purple on light gray stripes.  Thin, grim cotton with a roughly-sewn beige number patch above her heart.  The number helped me access German records of her incarceration in ghettos and camps.  Was this relic kept as evidence that she might not have survived if WWII had lasted longer?  That the crimes she endured were real?  It won’t tell me.  Can you really call it a “dress” or even a “uniform”?  Reality seems too big for such small words, for the bomb lurking there day after day. 

Last Gallery

This particular lined notebook has not been lost, but I wish it had been.  Black-and-white exterior, starker still inside: a record of her deepening dementia caused by years of chain smoking.  Here, instructions are repeated about when to take which pill.  Bits of news randomly copied from the New York Times.  Worst of all, grotesque, are the definitions of “Memory” she transcribed from a dictionary.  Remember, Remember, Remember says every miserable page.   The desperate lament of a mind drifting out to sea, the words of a voluble, witty, multi-lingual woman ordered at first, then scrambled, finally misspelled, broken, gone.  I want to destroy it but I can’t—it’s her anguished Last Will and Testament.

Gift Shop

CLOSED

Lev Raphael is an American pioneer in writing about the Second Generation, a project that he began in the late 1970s.  He’s the author of Writing a Jewish Life, Dancing on Tisha B’av, My Germany and 24 other books in many genres.  His work has appeared in fifteen languages and he’s done invited talks and readings in Israel, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, England, Scotland, Canada and all across the US.  Venues included the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Oxford University, and The LIbrary of Congress. Lev taught creative writing at Michigan State University and Regents College in London, and has been invited to teach at Leipzig University in Germany.  Michigan State University has purchased his literary papers and they are available to students and scholars for research.

The piece first appeared in The Chaffin Review and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

5 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, European Jewry, Family history, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

February 10, 2025 · 7:30 am

I Cannot Scrub Your Blood from My Bones

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

Deep within my marrow

flows my DNA, your blood,

your ambitions, your regrets,

your aches, your pains, your nightmares.

Deep within my memory

I call up your shtetl, its fields,

thatched roofs, unnamed streets.

Bold numbers nailed to door jambs,

revealing the town plan. Deep within

this hiccup murmurs your Galician dialect

of southeastern Poland, the bleats 

of goats, the shofar during High Holy Days.

Deep within the walls of the stucco homes

childbirth cries. Deep within

the burrows of the streets resounds the beat

of hobnailed boots and rapid gunfire.

You weren’t there during the invasions.

You weren’t there for mobile killing squads.

You weren’t there during deportations.

But you experienced it all the same,

just as I did. 

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies (HGS) from Gratz College, where she teaches in the HGS graduate programs. The author of two poetry chapbooks and three novels in verse, her work has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, Tiferet, Minyan, Jewishfiction.net, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She serves as Director, Mercer County (NJ) Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center.

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry, European Jewry, Family history, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry, Polish Jewry

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 27, 2025 · 7:30 am

An Odyssey to Auschwitz

 by Cara Erdheim Kilgallen (Trumbull, CT)

I entered the gruesome gates of Auschwitz on a recent journey to Poland with my parents and husband.  Half-way through our guided tour, my stoic husband Bill turned to me and said, “I feel like throwing up.”  

The humid June air did not help our collective nausea.  As the sun beat down upon our shoulders, the four of us toured two of the darkest death camps from history and witnessed true Holocaust horror.

As a Jew with family members who perished in the Shoah, I had always felt determined to visit Auschwitz.  My eighty-three-year-old Dad, a Jewish former Marine who proudly wears a Star of David that says, “never again,” came along.  So did my mom, a seventy-seven-year-old dynamo who has worked as a psychoanalyst with Holocaust victims and their children.  Bill, my Catholic husband, wanted to experience history and planned the entire trip.  It had been on our bucket list for sure.

We began with Auschwitz, designed initially as barracks for the Polish Army, and then moved onto the darkest death and extermination site, Birkenau.  The structures at Auschwitz still stood, but they somehow didn’t feel real and the buildings almost resembled college dorms from the outside.  When I walked inside, the death site became more palpable.  Hairbrushes, belts, shirts, toothbrushes, and other discarded items from various victims highlighted the utter inhumanity of it all.  We began the brief bus ride to Birkenau, the neighboring camp, which was worse.

“Brace yourselves,” warned our guide Chris.  This next site will be tougher to take.”

“More difficult than this?” I asked incredulously while thinking about the gas showers we had just seen.

“Sadly, yes,” Chris responded.

Birkenau, the adjoining death camp to Auschwitz, made us all even sicker.  

As Bill and I stood in shock staring at the piles of wood upon which victims slept, Chris explained how those on the top bunks often bled onto those below.  The prisoners slept in old horse barns, each one of them containing hundreds of innocent human beings.  I wondered if they received blankets in winter and learned that groups of twelve or so sleepers were sometimes allowed one small sheet.  We stood inside these cramped quarters, which smelled like death.

My shock and sorrow manifested in an intense back pain that I had never felt before.  There was no place to sit on our three hour walk through dark dungeons and barren barracks.  Feeling too guilty to rest amidst all of the documented human suffering that we witnessed, I tried to stretch out my back as the tour guide led us into a room filled with children’s shoes displayed in a large case secure behind a glass wall.

Until this point, I had not cried at all, perhaps out of sheer shock; however, as the mother of a toddler, I could not contain myself at this point and my eyes filled with tears.  I thought instantly about my daughter, back home in the United States with excellent caregivers, and juxtaposed this privilege against the extreme evils.  The Nazis robbed every ounce of innocence from these young lives, for no reason other than their difference, which most often was their Jewish identity.  

We learned about the pride that those running the camp took in exterminating as many victims as possible.  Chris told us that the Nazis viewed destruction as economic productivity and recorded their killings with precise record keeping.  Furthermore, so many corporations profited from this loss.  Human hair from the deceased was used for clothing, and gold teeth were removed from mouths of the dead.  

Survivor and author Eli Wiesel has written and spoken poetically about the overwhelming silence at Auschwitz.  I felt this quiet all throughout our visit, and my normally inquisitive self held most of my questions until the end.

“As we conclude our journey today, I would like to leave space and time for questions,” Chris kindly offered as though he sensed my overwhelming curiosity and that of my mother the psychologist.  

“Have you encountered any Holocaust denial in any of your visitors?” My Mom jumped in almost immediately.

“Just once,” Chris responded.  “A man on one of my tours questioned why a picture contained no chimney smoke and claimed that this absence meant no gas chambers.  I countered him immediately with the truth that this very photo had documented a factory in Krakow, not the death camp, which contained countless ashes and human remains as evidence.”

I marveled at Chris’s calmness, intelligence, and sensitivity.  He explained that he and his wife had met giving tours at Auschwitz and felt more determined than ever to educate their young children on these historic atrocities.

“Although it would have made our commute to work easier, we stopped short of moving closely to the camps,” Chris emphasized when I remarked about the tennis courts down the road.  “We want them to be Holocaust aware, but having our home on site was too close for comfort.”

“Of course,” we all responded, and then discussed the clear contrast between Chris’ humane response with that of the Nazi Commander who chose to live and raise his family, children playing in the yard and all, on top of the gas chambers.

My family and I left the site of Holocaust horror, and immediately saw a woman run to the bathroom to vomit.  The one silver lining was that others had felt touched and moved by this experience.  They recognized and respected the most profoundly painful parts of human history.

How could I not have journeyed here before?  Why did it take my Catholic husband to plan such a trip for my Jewish parents and me?  My Mother had travelled with a friend twenty-five years ago to Auschwitz, but she has always felt determined to return with family.  

Bill, who had felt profoundly moved by reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning at his Catholic high school, made it happen.  A survivor of multiple concentration camps, Frankl founded Logotherapy after his entire family perished in the Holocaust; he spent his life empowering others to discover purpose within their own lives. 

My intergenerational Odyssey to Auschwitz and Birkenau has strengthened an interfaith marriage, solidified firm family bonds, and made each moment of life feel all the more meaningful and precious.

Cara Erdheim Kilgallen is a mother, an author, an academic, an athlete, and a professor who truly treasures family and friendship.  She is dedicated to teaching literature and writing, as well as a lifelong ice skater and someone who is deeply passionate about sport (particularly tennis and golf).  Raised culturally Jewish, Cara deeply values her roots and embraces Judaism as foundational to the Judeo-Christian tradition and beyond.  She hopes for more interfaith and intercultural dialogue.  Cara hopes that through Jewish storytelling, this piece speaks to the horrors of all human suffering, which the world sadly has far too much of at present.

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry, European Jewry, Family history, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism

Tagged as , , , , , ,

July 22, 2024 · 7:30 am

A Home With Dignity

by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca (Calgary, Canada)

(A poem about belonging)

 I want six million Jews back to their homes

To their hat shops, their loved ones, and their bright mornings,

To awake in their beds with soft sheets and warm slippers

To put their feet into, and cross the threshold to kitchens 

Smelling warm with the baking of Challah bread.

I want sisters to whisper to each other from bunk beds

Scurrying up and down the ladder to exchange places

Laughing without fear of being muffled,

Like we did many nights with sleeping parents who

Unaware of our sibling shenanigans, dreamed in peace.

I want six million Jews to watch the butterflies 

Flitting across a kind sun that warmed their hearts

With promises of hope, of births, graduations, weddings 

Dressed in satin gowns with silver stars, the yellow ones 

Out of stock, discontinued, banned forever.

I want six million Jews to look out at the fields with cattle grazing

From train windows, with the fresh air blowing on their faces

Going on a family holiday to the beach with free minds

Surfing the waves, swimming with the dolphins,

Returning to their homes to wash off the sand from their happy feet

To wear shoes of the right size with no holes in them.

 In a career spanning over four decades, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca has taught English in Indian colleges, AP English in an International School nestled in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in India, and French and Spanish in private schools in Canada. Her poems are featured in various journals and anthologies, including the Sahitya Akademi Journal Of Indian Literature, the three issues of the Yearbooks of Indian Poetry in English, Verse-Virtual, The Madras Courier, and the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, among others. Kavita has authored two collections of poetry, Family Sunday and Other Poems and Light of The Sabbath. Her poem ‘How To Light Up a Poem,’ was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2020.  Her poems celebrate Bombay, the city of her birth, Nature, and her Bene Israel Indian Jewish heritage. She is the daughter of the late poet Nissim Ezekiel. 

Author’s note: Challah is a special bread in Jewish cuisine, usually braided and typically eaten on ceremonial occasions such as Shabbat and major Jewish holidays. Ritually-acceptable challah is made of dough from which a small portion has been set aside as an offering. The word is Biblical in origin. (Wikipedia)

(Editor’s Note: “A Home with Dignity was published in “Light of the Sabbath,” the author’s chapbook, as well as in the anthology “Heartstrings,” an anthology edited by Sanjula Sharma). It also appeared in the 25th Annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Poetry Issue of Poetry Super Highway, April 2023, and is reprinted here with permission of the author.)

1 Comment

Filed under Canadian Jewry, European Jewry, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , ,

April 15, 2024 · 7:30 am

The Gift

by Cynthia Bernard (Half Moon Bay, CA)

Aunty Anne always wore 
lovely dresses with long sleeves,
even on that sunny day in August
when I sat next to her
at the picnic table,
soft yellow silk slid up her arm,
and I glimpsed the numbers.

What’s that, Aunty Ann?

Oh, just something for grown-ups,
Shayne meydele, she said,
gentle fingers kissing my cheeks.
Go and play.

And so she blessed me
with a few more years 
of childhood

Until that day in fourth grade,
somewhere on the cusp between 
only myself and the larger world,
when I learned about
the six million
and began my search for understanding—
which, of course, 
I have never found.

Cynthia Bernard is an Ashkenazi Jewish woman in her early seventies who is finding her voice as a poet after many years of silence. A long-time classroom teacher and a spiritual mentor, she lives and writes on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 25 miles south of San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Multiplicity Magazine, Heimat Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Journal of Radical Wonder, The Bluebird Word, Passager, Persimmon Tree, Verse-Virtual, and elsewhere.

Note:  This poem was first published on December 11, 2023 in Ritualwell and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , , ,

April 18, 2023 · 7:00 am

A Yom HaShoah Reflection

by Howard Debs (Palm Beach Gardens, FL)

“How does one mourn for six million people who died? How many candles does one light? How many prayers does one recite? Do we know how to remember the victims, their solitude, their helplessness? They left us without a trace, and we are their trace.” — Elie Weisel

In the mid-80s I was privileged to experience “The Precious Legacy,” an exhibit then touring the United States consisting of a selection of Jewish artifacts from the collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague. (As it happens, Prague is very close to home, my ancestral home, actually. My paternal grandfather came to America from Riga, Latvia in 1886.) 

One of my areas of special poetic interest is ekphrastic poetry, a form which takes its inspiration from pictorial and other artwork. The artifacts in the collection were silent witnesses from the time, and I realized that I could give them a voice, and, in this way, let them speak for themselves through me — a bold but plausible idea. 

I contacted Jakub Hauser, the curator of the vast photographic collection of the Jewish Museum, and presented my idea. I asked if the museum would grant permission for me to select and use a number of archival photographs from the collection for a series of poetic statements about them. The museum agreed.

My intent was to explicate and illustrate the indomitable spirit for good juxtaposed by the inevitable potential for evil — what in Hebrew is called yetzer hatov/yetzer hara, “good inclination”/”evil inclination.”

I chose Terezin as the focus of the work, as the camp has become associated with the spiritual resistance of the Shoah. Thirty-three thousand perished at Terezin. In all, some 140,000 Jews were transferred to Terezin, of which nearly 90,000 were ultimately sent to points further east and to almost certain death. Fifteen thousand children passed through Terezin. Approximately 90 percent of these children perished in death camps.

Here’s one of the poems that I wrote after viewing the collection and with which I began my journey to bear witness:

The Suitcase to Terezin

Josef Ernst is the name on the suitcase.

What can we know from a suitcase?

285 is the number the Nazis assigned to him

for purposes of his transport to Terezin that

day on the train identified as AAw,

and so from lists that were kept

we know he was taken away on the

3rd of August, 1942 from

Horomeritz a quaint Prague village the name

of which appears on the suitcase, his captors

being meticulous about the details of such things

as this and from such records we know Josef Ernst

born 24 June 1900 was liberated from Terezin,

he survived the Holocaust this we know, he had

a life after Terezin and surely now he rests in peace,

we can but hope that he forgave the human race.

For some 30 plus years, I’ve searched for a way to continue bearing witness to the Holocaust, and feel blessed to have written such a poem and to have founded the New Voices Project as a way to help others bear witness, as well.

— 

Howard Debs is the founder of the NewVoicesProject newvoicesproject.org. He received a University of Colorado Poetry Prize at age 19. After spending the past fifty plus years in the field of communications, with recognitions including a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Educational Press Association of America, he resumed his creative pursuits. Finalist and recipient 28th Annual 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards, his essays, fiction, and poetry appear internationally in numerous publications. His photography will be found in select publications, including in Rattle online as “Ekphrastic Challenge” artist and guest editor. His book Gallery: A Collection of Pictures and Words, is the recipient of a 2017 Best Book Award and 2018 Book Excellence Award. His chapbook Political is the winner of the 2021 American Writing Awards in poetry. He is co-editor with Matthew Silverman of New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust and is listed in the Poets & Writers Directory. 

As a writer, you’re invited to help the NewVoices Project. Please visit The Goodreads/Amazon Reviews Challenge for more information.

Note: This story is based in part on Howard’s essay, The Poetry of Bearing Witness, which he wrote about creating the New Voices Project for Krista Tippett’s On Being Project. https://onbeing.org/blog/the-poetry-of-bearing-witness/

His poem series, “Terezin: Trilogy Of Names,” was originally published in China Grove Literary Journal, Vol.3, and is partially reprinted here with permission of the author. Name and information are from the database of Terezin Initiative Institute entries for Shoah victims and survivors.

1 Comment

Filed under European Jewry, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , , ,

April 3, 2023 · 6:30 am

What I know

By Marilyn Schonfeld-Davenport (Louisville, CO)

I am a first generation American and a second generation Holocaust survivor. 

My mother was born in Korosten, Ukraine. 

My father in the shtetl of Oleszyce, Poland. 

They came to this country in 1950 with my three-year-old sister who was born in a displaced persons camp in Ansbach, Germany.

They were lucky, my mother always said. They were not in concentration camps.

They met during the war on a Russian state-owned farm (Sovkhoz) in Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan.

I do not know the name of the farm. I do not know how my father ended up there. Only that while in the Russian army, he jumped off a train to escape banishment to Siberia and found himself on the same Sovkhoz. 

They were lucky, my mother always said

They were not tortured. They did not starve.

They did not have to hide underground or in sewers or cellars with rats. 

They did not have to strip down naked and suffer inhuman conditions and humiliating treatment. 

They did not have to forage for food in the forests. 

They did not have to watch their children die.

My parents were lucky. 

Not like their dear survivor friends whose tragic stories I overheard as a child, amidst the shuffling cards and the clicking chips of the poker table. 

But still, their young lives were thwarted by the horrifying rampage of a madman.

They were scared. They were on the run. 

They were separated from their families. 

They scampered to strange places, seeking refuge and safety.

Their fate collided at the Sovkhoz where they fell in love and lived in relative peace. And waited. And wondered, when will it end?

They worked in the fields, repaired small machinery, slept in bunkers and occasionally had a decent meal of more than watered -down soup.

My mother worked in the canteen and snuck my father extra bread and cigarettes.

That’s all I know about their life there.

After the war, they got married and returned to Korosten so my dad could meet his in-laws and my mother could say hello and goodbye to her family. 

My dad set his sights on America. 

The land of promise. The land of opportunity.

She was going with him.

But first he wanted to go back to Poland to see what happened to his family. 

He had no idea if anyone was still alive.

Somewhere, somehow he discovered they all perished in Belzec. 

Except for one sister.

She escaped with the help of a priest and was in a displaced persons camp in Ansbach, Germany. 

And so they went there.

My mother said they walked.

But how? How did he find out about her? How did they walk all that way? 

Who helped them? How long did it take? 

My past is a patchwork of fragmented stories and unanswered questions.

They hang suspended looking for a place to rest, to make me whole.

My father never talked about his past or his childhood.

I try to seam it together through any research I can do, any tidbit I can find. 

A box of papers from the DP camp; sponsor forms, luggage tags, passport pictures, a diploma from ORT that said my father could make a shoe.

But I reach a dead end when it comes to my Polish family. There is so little.

There are only imagined faces of my relatives instead of photos that do not exist. 

Imagined lives in places I cannot fathom.

I never asked enough and they never said enough. 

I do not know enough. 

But I do know this.

I am a first generation American and a second generation Holocaust survivor. 

I am defined by that more than anything.

Marilyn Schonfeld-Davenport has always held the stories of her parents and her ancestors deep inside her, those few that she knows, those fragments that she can piece together. These stories composed the backdrop of a relatively carefree childhood in the suburbs of Chicago, but beneath the surface was the lingering impact of her parents’ trauma: her mother’s anger and fear, her father’s quiet introspection.

Throughout the years, Marilyn has returned to those haunting stories of her youth to try to weave the pieces together and better understand her past. She is currently working on a memoir of sorts, based on her mother’s notebooks of recorded minutes as the secretary of the Trossman Family Club. Uncle Sam Trossman, the patriarch, brought her parents and sister to this country after the war.  She lives in Louisville, Colorado with her husband Mark and dog Wilson. Her two grown sons live in Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota and she misses them every single day. 

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry, European Jewry, Family history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry, Polish Jewry, Ukrainian Jewry

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,