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

