6 | MAY 12 • 2022
1942 - 2022
Covering and Connecting
Jewish Detroit Every Week
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DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
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The Detroit Jewish
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PURELY COMMENTARY
student’s corner
A Poem for
a Survivor
I
n honor of Yom HaShoah, I wrote a
poem about a particular Holocaust
survivor’s experience escaping a cattle
car on the way to the death camps.
This year’s Yad Vashem
Holocaust memorial
theme is Deportation to
Extinction, and this poem
aims to honor the theme
and the overall message
and meaning that can be
taken away from it for
all of us as both Jews and
human beings.
PROMISE TO PAPA
Out of nowhere came the cattle cars
and our place in them as vermin,
All of our futures so unsure, yet death
so blatantly determined.
Once the sicknesses of man had come
and slaughtered us a few,
A new madness of kine had come to see
the butchering through.
Pained by the constant wringing of the
rags that were their souls,
Every minute on the railway, a plunge
deeper into holes,
But then something unexpected: a hand
stretched towards the window frame,
Its fingers clawing at barbed wire,
painting it bloodily in shame,
A sight that had to be remembered, but
who possibly could live to tell the story?
Perhaps myself, the little boy who could
now fly out the window as a lorry;
A creature of color and renewal,
A hope for life that is not cruel.
Lifting a pile of skin and bones, my
father hoisted me,
So that I could jump out of the train
and grow up with this memory.
I turned to my Papa with frantic eyes
for one last look, one last embrace,
But instead he left me with these words
shut beside my soul forever in its case:
היהת ןב םדא was the last thing I ever
heard my father say,
A precept of three simple words I’ve
carried with me since then every day.
My mother’s body who I left right then,
met its end in plumes of smoke,
But inside my old, cracking bones sits
the gentle, loving way she spoke,
And my אתבס and my אבס, how I wish
they hadn’t met such a fate,
But for our encounters in my dreams,
at the very least, it’s not too late
And for my beloved father, I now write
and think only of you,
I hope you know, in all these years I’ve
kept the vow on which I flew.
Rozie Aronov is sophomore at Frankel Jewish
Academy and a graduate of Hillel Day School.
Rozie Aronov