It's been well over a year since I posted to this blog, and I don't have any particularly good reason to start up again now, other than having words I want to share and no better place to put them (long Facebook posts being tedious to read and so fleeting in memory). What follows is not really in keeping with the mission of this site that I wrote out a few years ago, but is a personal reflection on a difficult day.
I'm writing because yesterday was Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. How is it possible to commemorate such a catastrophic event in a day? I'm going to share a little bit about my own experience visiting Poland a few years ago, including a poem I wrote back then.
Some context: I was in Poland alone, it was summertime, a week or so after my brother's wedding in France. I visited Warsaw and Krakow, and from Krakow, went to Tarnow for a day. In Tarnow I found a van that would take me to the small town of Zaklycn in central Poland, where I was able to communicate to a cab driver who didn't speak much English that I wanted to take a ride to Fasciszowa, the village my grandfather came from.
"Fasciszowa?" he asked confused, "No. Nothing."
"Yes," I replied, "Fasciszowa."
"No, no," he said, "it nothing."
"Take me there," I said, and finally he shrugged and got into the driver's seat of the cab.
We drove for fifteen minutes into mostly empty countryside. There were green hills and few farm houses far from the road. We hit the end of the pavement and continued onto a dirt road, where, after a few minutes, the driver stopped. "Fasciszowa," he said. There was nothing. A few barely-visible dirt roads mostly overgrown with grasses, and some dilapidated wood buildings in the distance. Whatever tiny village had once been there, the little inn my great grandparents had owned and operated, according to vague family legend, all of it was gone. I understood my driver's confusion. I'd asked him to take me to nowhere.
The next day was my last in Poland, and I visited Auschwitz. This visit is what the following poem is about. What I recall generally from the day was that it was hot, I was tired and dehydrated, and I was overwhelmed. I wrote this poem in one long burst in the hours immediately after the visit as I left Poland on a train to Prague:
The shrieking crows of Krakow
carriers of my ancestors' spirits,
their small black globular eyes
the last continuous witnesses to the murdered
whose memories are banished
to an eternal fragmented abyss.
This is Poland.
I ask an old man for directions to Zaklyczn,
a tiny town, the closest by public van
to the splendorous hillside country
of the inn my forebears’ ran for generations.
He yells at me in Polish,
his eyes deep and insular and angry --
he has been Polish since the beginning of time, this one --
and I do not understand.
"He is upset you come here
and don't speak the language," says an interpreter sitting beside him.
She is a Polish beauty --
pale translucent skin, blue eyes
that could wash a man of all his sins --
and she is kind. Kindness and beauty are here too.
Perhaps in another life, I would have opened my shirt
and shown her my breaking heart to mend,
but now I am only angry.
I fantasize of spitting in the old man's face.
He is upset I don't speak the language!
He is upset! I have upset him!
Had your father and mother not thrown
my uncles, my aunts, my cousins
to the jack-booted pharoahs
as one throws rats to a snake
in order to sneak by its fangs
I would speak the language better than you!
But I stay silent.
His face is wrinkled,
it twitches with the pains of all his years
he is a tiny infirm hunchback at a bus stop in Tarnow,
the hot center of Poland,
of what use would it be to expel two generations of rage
with spit in his face?
His clothes are shabby, his knees barely able to hold the weight of his body.
I know nothing of his life.
Here is Poland,
Po-lin, here we rest,
It is a lolling beautiful country,
a promised land of hills and golden fields
and swamps. For centuries we dreamed that
demons roamed its lush reaches of forest,
seducing us with lascivious women and greedy prizes,
and we blamed them for our misery, our poverty,
our human mistakes, our crimes, our hatreds,
our status among the others
as less than human.
How foolish were we not to recognize them immediately
when they arrived in the prim gray uniforms of the SS?
How foolish were we to believe them when they said,
"remember the pegs on which you hang your clothes
so that you may collect them after the showers,"
and then marched us two thousand at a time
into the stone chambers of hell
where the fluttering wings of feasting demons
are still audible today, the walls still echoing
with their belching from overflowing bellies
all these years later.
My uncles, my aunts pregnant with my unborn cousins.
It took only twenty minutes to gas two thousand,
but it could take a full day to remove the bodies
and burn them in the furnaces --
a task given to the sonderkommandoes,
those miserly unhuman prisoners --
so they built six more stone chambers
into which they released the Zyklon B,
a boon investment to those cowardly
aristocratic-born of blinded countries
with stock in chemical.
It is a terrible place, Auschwitz. To this day.
It teems with tourists and the sparking of
photos snapped by the hundreds.
A man from Australia holds his itablet ahead of him
to record the entirety of the tour. For what?
Will he watch this again?
Will he show it to his neighbors?
The story of his vacation to Poland?
Who would wish to relive this?
The tons of hair collected behind glass, mountains of hair,
the hair of the poems of Paul Celan,
his mother's hair, his sister's hair,
hair not brown but brown now from the years,
and the spectacles, the spectacles
of eyes disintegrated in Zyklon B. But
it is the tallisim, the prayer shawls,
that make me cry the first time, with the proudly placed
silver amulets on the atarot, the crowns around the neck,
the care made of properly tied tzitzit.
To bring a man closer to God when he prays,
to be wrapped into a womb of one’s deepest wishes
and conversation with God, and now they are
displayed for photos,
additions to the contemporary human art
of collecting experiences.
There is a photo of three brothers holding hands
walking the path from the boxed cattle car to the chambers,
and now they are my three brothers
holding me up under the armpits
as I walk in their footsteps and sing the Hasidic lullaby:
In the name of the name – No.
In the name of Adonai, the true name,
the name known only to the legendary few,
those whose toes touched the mystical waters before
firmament was separated from sky,
the name beyond words
used to raise the soulless Golems to protect us -
in what magic did we muddle to deserve such unreasonable punishment?
- in the name of Adonai, Elohei Yisrael –
And where were you then? Lord of Israel? While the rats
chewed the weakened flesh of my uncles,
you flew with the shrieking crows
watched from the empty abyss of their eyes –
In the name of Adonai, Elohei Yisrael, meyemini Michael,
to my right is Michael, the name of my brother
after my grandfather's brother
whose ashes along with his wife’s and son’s
now mingle with those of a million others behind a plaque
a dirt path’s throw from the ruins of the chambers.
Umismaali Gavriel, to my left Gabriel, the guardian
the annointer of Samson, our most glorious and foolish protector,
the guide to Eliezer servant of Abraham
tasked with finding a wife for Isaac his son,
but Isaac did not live this time.
This time God provided no ram, sent no angel to stay the father's hand
and the knife came down and slit the boy's throat
a sacrifice to no God I know.
Umi'lfanay Uriel, umachorai Rephael, in front of me Uriel
and behind me Rephael, and I am supposed to be
protected on all sides by the angels of Israel,
four great beings spread too thin
by the coordinated blitz of the demon armies,
planned for centuries under the noses of our wisest rebbes,
the Besht, the Seer of Lublin, the Jew of Pshishke,
Meir of Premishlan, Mendl the Dark --
those who preached to sing with joy
to bring holiness and righteousness to each moment of a day --
all blind and deaf to the gathering of weapons, the drawing of plans
by the demon army.
Ve al roshi, ve al roshi, shechinat el, and upon my head the Shechina,
the female presence of God, the Goddess --
and she too distracted by the catastrophe
of the pregnant women, the carriers of future of hope in their wombs,
holding their hands as their hair is shaved
and packaged into numbered sacks,
and their babies birthed into a demonic laboratory of medical experiments,
and the Shechina herself walks the path to the chambers.
My uncles, my aunts, the unborn children in their bellies.
I am told to remember in Krakow, but there is only a tour
of the set of the movie Schindler's List.
That, I remember.
I am told to remember, but there are no records, no photos
of the millions marched directly from the cars to the chambers.
I am told to remember but memory is lost
in the scattered oblivion of the tiny eyes
of those shrieking crows of Krakow.
The monument at the chambers’ ruins reads,
"Here commemorated a cry of despair and a warning to the world,"
but is the world warned?
The demons still wear their human skin,
as they drop flesh eating chemicals on villages,
murder children in their schools,
shoot each other across streets crowded with students
and mothers and brothers.
Better that the whole thing should be destroyed in a hurricane,
but hurricanes and tornadoes and floods do not touch the hill-protected
fields of the middle of Poland, far from water,
safe from any nature I recognize.
It is upon humanity to decide what to do with it and
humanity only ever absconds from decision.
These shrieking crows,
they shriek for the everyday forgotten suffering of my brothers and sisters,
they shriek because words are dead here,
because all is dead here --
this is death's hallowed chamber, his permanent residence.
Not even the lice and rats and mosquitoes of summer
that once plagued my ancestors come here anymore.
Nothing lives here.
What am I to do?
Only to listen to the crows
and let their dissonant high-pitched shrieks
obliterate my soul for a moment or two.
I'm writing because yesterday was Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. How is it possible to commemorate such a catastrophic event in a day? I'm going to share a little bit about my own experience visiting Poland a few years ago, including a poem I wrote back then.
Some context: I was in Poland alone, it was summertime, a week or so after my brother's wedding in France. I visited Warsaw and Krakow, and from Krakow, went to Tarnow for a day. In Tarnow I found a van that would take me to the small town of Zaklycn in central Poland, where I was able to communicate to a cab driver who didn't speak much English that I wanted to take a ride to Fasciszowa, the village my grandfather came from.
"Fasciszowa?" he asked confused, "No. Nothing."
"Yes," I replied, "Fasciszowa."
"No, no," he said, "it nothing."
"Take me there," I said, and finally he shrugged and got into the driver's seat of the cab.
We drove for fifteen minutes into mostly empty countryside. There were green hills and few farm houses far from the road. We hit the end of the pavement and continued onto a dirt road, where, after a few minutes, the driver stopped. "Fasciszowa," he said. There was nothing. A few barely-visible dirt roads mostly overgrown with grasses, and some dilapidated wood buildings in the distance. Whatever tiny village had once been there, the little inn my great grandparents had owned and operated, according to vague family legend, all of it was gone. I understood my driver's confusion. I'd asked him to take me to nowhere.
The next day was my last in Poland, and I visited Auschwitz. This visit is what the following poem is about. What I recall generally from the day was that it was hot, I was tired and dehydrated, and I was overwhelmed. I wrote this poem in one long burst in the hours immediately after the visit as I left Poland on a train to Prague:
The shrieking crows of Krakow
carriers of my ancestors' spirits,
their small black globular eyes
the last continuous witnesses to the murdered
whose memories are banished
to an eternal fragmented abyss.
This is Poland.
I ask an old man for directions to Zaklyczn,
a tiny town, the closest by public van
to the splendorous hillside country
of the inn my forebears’ ran for generations.
He yells at me in Polish,
his eyes deep and insular and angry --
he has been Polish since the beginning of time, this one --
and I do not understand.
"He is upset you come here
and don't speak the language," says an interpreter sitting beside him.
She is a Polish beauty --
pale translucent skin, blue eyes
that could wash a man of all his sins --
and she is kind. Kindness and beauty are here too.
Perhaps in another life, I would have opened my shirt
and shown her my breaking heart to mend,
but now I am only angry.
I fantasize of spitting in the old man's face.
He is upset I don't speak the language!
He is upset! I have upset him!
Had your father and mother not thrown
my uncles, my aunts, my cousins
to the jack-booted pharoahs
as one throws rats to a snake
in order to sneak by its fangs
I would speak the language better than you!
But I stay silent.
His face is wrinkled,
it twitches with the pains of all his years
he is a tiny infirm hunchback at a bus stop in Tarnow,
the hot center of Poland,
of what use would it be to expel two generations of rage
with spit in his face?
His clothes are shabby, his knees barely able to hold the weight of his body.
I know nothing of his life.
Here is Poland,
Po-lin, here we rest,
It is a lolling beautiful country,
a promised land of hills and golden fields
and swamps. For centuries we dreamed that
demons roamed its lush reaches of forest,
seducing us with lascivious women and greedy prizes,
and we blamed them for our misery, our poverty,
our human mistakes, our crimes, our hatreds,
our status among the others
as less than human.
How foolish were we not to recognize them immediately
when they arrived in the prim gray uniforms of the SS?
How foolish were we to believe them when they said,
"remember the pegs on which you hang your clothes
so that you may collect them after the showers,"
and then marched us two thousand at a time
into the stone chambers of hell
where the fluttering wings of feasting demons
are still audible today, the walls still echoing
with their belching from overflowing bellies
all these years later.
My uncles, my aunts pregnant with my unborn cousins.
It took only twenty minutes to gas two thousand,
but it could take a full day to remove the bodies
and burn them in the furnaces --
a task given to the sonderkommandoes,
those miserly unhuman prisoners --
so they built six more stone chambers
into which they released the Zyklon B,
a boon investment to those cowardly
aristocratic-born of blinded countries
with stock in chemical.
It is a terrible place, Auschwitz. To this day.
It teems with tourists and the sparking of
photos snapped by the hundreds.
A man from Australia holds his itablet ahead of him
to record the entirety of the tour. For what?
Will he watch this again?
Will he show it to his neighbors?
The story of his vacation to Poland?
Who would wish to relive this?
The tons of hair collected behind glass, mountains of hair,
the hair of the poems of Paul Celan,
his mother's hair, his sister's hair,
hair not brown but brown now from the years,
and the spectacles, the spectacles
of eyes disintegrated in Zyklon B. But
it is the tallisim, the prayer shawls,
that make me cry the first time, with the proudly placed
silver amulets on the atarot, the crowns around the neck,
the care made of properly tied tzitzit.
To bring a man closer to God when he prays,
to be wrapped into a womb of one’s deepest wishes
and conversation with God, and now they are
displayed for photos,
additions to the contemporary human art
of collecting experiences.
There is a photo of three brothers holding hands
walking the path from the boxed cattle car to the chambers,
and now they are my three brothers
holding me up under the armpits
as I walk in their footsteps and sing the Hasidic lullaby:
In the name of the name – No.
In the name of Adonai, the true name,
the name known only to the legendary few,
those whose toes touched the mystical waters before
firmament was separated from sky,
the name beyond words
used to raise the soulless Golems to protect us -
in what magic did we muddle to deserve such unreasonable punishment?
- in the name of Adonai, Elohei Yisrael –
And where were you then? Lord of Israel? While the rats
chewed the weakened flesh of my uncles,
you flew with the shrieking crows
watched from the empty abyss of their eyes –
In the name of Adonai, Elohei Yisrael, meyemini Michael,
to my right is Michael, the name of my brother
after my grandfather's brother
whose ashes along with his wife’s and son’s
now mingle with those of a million others behind a plaque
a dirt path’s throw from the ruins of the chambers.
Umismaali Gavriel, to my left Gabriel, the guardian
the annointer of Samson, our most glorious and foolish protector,
the guide to Eliezer servant of Abraham
tasked with finding a wife for Isaac his son,
but Isaac did not live this time.
This time God provided no ram, sent no angel to stay the father's hand
and the knife came down and slit the boy's throat
a sacrifice to no God I know.
Umi'lfanay Uriel, umachorai Rephael, in front of me Uriel
and behind me Rephael, and I am supposed to be
protected on all sides by the angels of Israel,
four great beings spread too thin
by the coordinated blitz of the demon armies,
planned for centuries under the noses of our wisest rebbes,
the Besht, the Seer of Lublin, the Jew of Pshishke,
Meir of Premishlan, Mendl the Dark --
those who preached to sing with joy
to bring holiness and righteousness to each moment of a day --
all blind and deaf to the gathering of weapons, the drawing of plans
by the demon army.
Ve al roshi, ve al roshi, shechinat el, and upon my head the Shechina,
the female presence of God, the Goddess --
and she too distracted by the catastrophe
of the pregnant women, the carriers of future of hope in their wombs,
holding their hands as their hair is shaved
and packaged into numbered sacks,
and their babies birthed into a demonic laboratory of medical experiments,
and the Shechina herself walks the path to the chambers.
My uncles, my aunts, the unborn children in their bellies.
I am told to remember in Krakow, but there is only a tour
of the set of the movie Schindler's List.
That, I remember.
I am told to remember, but there are no records, no photos
of the millions marched directly from the cars to the chambers.
I am told to remember but memory is lost
in the scattered oblivion of the tiny eyes
of those shrieking crows of Krakow.
The monument at the chambers’ ruins reads,
"Here commemorated a cry of despair and a warning to the world,"
but is the world warned?
The demons still wear their human skin,
as they drop flesh eating chemicals on villages,
murder children in their schools,
shoot each other across streets crowded with students
and mothers and brothers.
Better that the whole thing should be destroyed in a hurricane,
but hurricanes and tornadoes and floods do not touch the hill-protected
fields of the middle of Poland, far from water,
safe from any nature I recognize.
It is upon humanity to decide what to do with it and
humanity only ever absconds from decision.
These shrieking crows,
they shriek for the everyday forgotten suffering of my brothers and sisters,
they shriek because words are dead here,
because all is dead here --
this is death's hallowed chamber, his permanent residence.
Not even the lice and rats and mosquitoes of summer
that once plagued my ancestors come here anymore.
Nothing lives here.
What am I to do?
Only to listen to the crows
and let their dissonant high-pitched shrieks
obliterate my soul for a moment or two.
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