Yom HaShoah by Joan Michelson

This week's item is written especially for Yom HaShoah by poet and Chavurah member Joan Michelson.

Thirty years ago, after we buried my mother, her cousin Woolf, joined us for the lunch in my parents’ apartment. Woolf, not often seen at family events, had survived Auschwitz but, as far as I can remember, he’d never spoken about his experience in the death camp. Now, fifty years later with five more years to live, he took the two grandchildren into the next room and talked to them in private.

My daughter, who was nine at the time, remembers they left us crowded around the table sharing the food different people had brought. Even though a room away, Woolf, with his distinct Polish-Yiddish accent, spoke in a low voice. He told them that as the man in front had done, he saved himself from being sent to the gas chambers by saying, he was a baker. This was a useful skill. She also remembered they had to march to the factory singing German marching songs. Although she doesn't remember, it's my memory that she told me he'd stitched a long pocket into each leg of his striped pyjamas. Or do I dream this? Or did he? As he marched back in the evening, a long nose of bread to eat or to barter, was tucked into each pocket; yet it went unnoticed as he kept in step and kept singing.

My nephew, then thirteen, remembers Woolf saying he got the hang of baking fast and also that he escaped through the back door of the bakery. Did he mean he avoided the march back? Or he escaped from the camp, almost impossible to accomplish.

How long was he in Auschwitz? How many days, weeks, months, years? When he was deported, he was fifteen. When my grandfather brought him to the mill town outside of Boston where the family lived, Woolf was nineteen. After their children had married, all nine, and set up their own homes, he stayed with my grandparents into his late thirties. My mother wasn’t sure if he was a first cousin or a second cousin. Or was there a more distant connection?

For the funeral lunch Woolf bought a long loaf of pumpernickel bread and my mother’s favourite beef salami.

This is the only direct family link to Ha Shoah. It remains shrouded in mystery and uncertainty. But it brought the Holocaust into our home. After the war my father helped to settle survivors who made it to Boston and worked with the younger ones as a youth leader. Refugees were frequent visitors to our home. Also, my mother collected a library of books on the subject: history, memoirs, stories, poems. As soon as it was published in English, my parents gave me ‘Anne Frank’s Diary’. From that time, history and literature of the Holocaust has been obsessive reading matter. As a university lecturer, I initiated and taught Holocaust Studies/Art and Literature. And now I find myself creating a series of poems from Holocaust tales.

The poems are a retelling of a Holocaust tale, passed down by word of mouth and recounted by a survivor in the 1970s to Yaffa Eliach who wrote them down. This poem, ‘The Rabbi and the Free-Thinker’ ends with an image of holding onto the coat tails of fathers and forefathers.

A Holocaust Tale
after ‘Hassidic Tales of the Holocaust’
by Yaffa Eliach

A rabbi and a free thinker are being marched
towards a killing pit in the outskirts of L’viv.
The pit’s too wide to jump across
but the loud-speaker order is to jump across.
The friends take opposing views.
The freethinker argues, ‘Why bother?
If we jump and fall and fail, as we will,
it will only give the Nazis pleasure.’
The Rabbi protests, ‘If Heaven decrees
we must jump to our death, we will
reach the World of Truth sooner.’
He looked down at his own broken feet
and into the feverish eyes of his friend;
then he closed his eyes and took hold of his
long departed father’s coat tails.
They flew behind him like wings leaving
a trail of dust and birdsong.
When he opened his eyes, he was surprised
to find his friend standing just behind him
on the other side of the pit, now heaped with
prisoners lying on top of one another.
He asked his friend how he’d survived.
His friend said, ‘I held onto your coat tails.
They flew behind you like wings leaving
a trail of dust and birdsong.’