10 | APRIL 15 • 2021
PURELY COMMENTARY
GIVING VOICE TO THE DEAD
And yet, despite all these flashing yel-
low lights, I, the son of two survivors
of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen who
was born three years after the end of
World War II in the displaced per-
sons camp of Bergen-Belsen, long ago
turned to expressing myself in poetry.
Over the decades, I have tried to give
voice to the dead in my poems, to com-
fort ghosts and to provide a memorial to
the millions who have none. A collection
of these writings, Poems Born in Bergen-
Belsen, is being published this month
by Kelsay Books to coincide with Yom
HaShoah, the Jewish day of remem-
brance for Holocaust victims on April 8,
and the anniversary of the liberation of
Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945.
For me, conceptualizing my poems
is often simultaneously a refuge and an
escape. An escape from the realm of
conventional human experience into
a parallel internal reality. And a refuge
where amorphous phantasmagoric
thoughts and images emerge sufficient-
ly from their nebulous twilight to allow
me to express them, however inade-
quately, in words.
THE NEED FOR POETRY
We need poems, songs and parables.
We need a Kafkaesque, morbid lan-
guage of dreams and nightmares to
be able to penetrate the nocturnal
universe of Auschwitz and Birkenau,
of Treblinka, Majdanek and Bergen-
Belsen, of Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor
and Terezin, of the Warsaw Ghetto,
Transnistria and Babi Yar.
A sparse inscription on a Birkenau
barrack wall forces us to identify with
its author without knowing anything
else about him: “
Andreas Rapaport —
lived sixteen years.” Aware that he was
about to die, a Jewish teenager tried to
leave a sign, a memory of his existence
on Earth. Without pathos, without self-
pity, Andreas Rapaport was the author
of his own eulogy, his own Kaddish:
“Andreas Rapaport — lived sixteen
years. Andreas Rapaport — abandoned,
alone, afraid. Andreas Rapaport — hun-
gry, in pain. Andreas Rapaport — gas-
filled lungs. Andreas Rapaport — inciner-
ated, black smoke, ashes.
”
In “Under Your White stars,”
Avraham Sutzkever, the Yiddish poet
of the Vilna Ghetto, wrote, “stretch out
to me Your white hand. My words are
tears that want to rest in Your hand.”
It is the beginning of a monologue
addressed to God that never turns into
a dialogue because there is no response.
Against a “murderous calm” that per-
meated the precarious existence of the
ghetto’s inhabitants, the narrator writes:
“I run higher, over rooftops, and I
search: Where are You? Where?”
The poems written by Sutzkever and
other poets in the ghettos and even
in the Nazi death and concentration
camps were their way of refusing to
become dehumanized, of defying their
the other three Abrahamic reli-
gions: Muslims, Christians and
Druze.
We visited every classroom
and spoke out against violence,
in the name of our faiths. We
also led discussions with the
students about mutual respect
among the religions. The prin-
cipal met with the 12th graders
and shared with them his opin-
ion that what is important to
God is not primarily which reli-
gion you belong to, but how you
choose to behave and live.
At the end of the event, we
planted a giant olive tree at the
entrance to the campus, and I
was given the honor of putting
up the sign next to the tree.
Unfortunately, when I got up, I
bumped my head on a branch
and was slightly injured. Sheik
Jamal quipped, “Uh oh, when
people see you, they’ll say, ‘Look
what happens when you go to
an Arab city!’”
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
On another visit, this time to an
Arab school in the Galilean vil-
lage of Kafr Rama, I asked the
children if they could answer
a question that has bothered
me for some time: Israel is so
small that its name doesn’t fit
on maps of the Middle East. Its
land is geographically insignif-
icant. And while the number
of people killed and injured
due to the Arab-Israeli conflict
looms large here, it is negligible
compared to conflicts in other
regions.
If so, why is the whole world
focused on this tiny area of the
globe? The children answered
simply, “Everyone knows that
everything started here.
”
Indeed, the Abrahamic reli-
gions, which are all inspired by
events that took place here, in
the Land of Israel, more than
3,000 years ago, account for the
majority of the world’s popula-
tion. The children of Kafr Rama
spoke about the past, but we
can complete their thought: In
the very place where it all start-
ed, we must look for a way to
WRITING POETRY continued from page 6
“Psalm 121 on Fire” by Menachem Rosensaft
JTA
LET’S HEAL continued from page 8