posted by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
devohoneybee at 07:30am on 25/03/2011
devohoneybee at 07:30am on 25/03/2011This poem hits hard.
*****************************
I Didn’t Have the Privilege
I got away in time and God concealed
The terrors from me -
Why, why did I leave Poland ?
I did not have the privilege together with my nation
to go the way of flames,
and like an unforgivable sin, torments,
the guilt of remaining alive,
of remaining alive and composing rhymes.
The guilt will poison me,
unless I follow one of three figures,
who stand ready to hide me from guilt,
who wait and who heatedly call me:
One figure is holiness - the second is insanity,
Suicide is the third.
But suicide is too strong for me, the weakling,
My smallness cannot allow itself holiness,
And I can’t even go out of my mind.
Poems of the Holocaust and Poems of Faith
by Aaron Zeitlin
http://www.jewishwebsight.com/tseytlin.html
*****************************
I Didn’t Have the Privilege
I got away in time and God concealed
The terrors from me -
Why, why did I leave Poland ?
I did not have the privilege together with my nation
to go the way of flames,
and like an unforgivable sin, torments,
the guilt of remaining alive,
of remaining alive and composing rhymes.
The guilt will poison me,
unless I follow one of three figures,
who stand ready to hide me from guilt,
who wait and who heatedly call me:
One figure is holiness - the second is insanity,
Suicide is the third.
But suicide is too strong for me, the weakling,
My smallness cannot allow itself holiness,
And I can’t even go out of my mind.
Poems of the Holocaust and Poems of Faith
by Aaron Zeitlin
http://www.jewishwebsight.com/tseytlin.html
(no subject)
Honestly, I can't actually imagine what it would feel like to be a child of a survivor or even, a Jew at all, given what happened. The closest I've come to feeling it was when I saw Schindler's List with my mother and she was unexpectedly affected when she realized that the little girl in the red coat would be exactly my mother's age, and that she had had a red coat just like that at the same time. It really hit her in the gut how it was just dumb luck that what was happening at that time was not happening to her.
And she is neither a Jew nor European. How much more appalling it must be for you.
I was happily chatting with my friend Jack once about my interest in genealogy and I asked him about his own family. He shrugged and said he didn't know much about them. They were all killed and the records of their lives were burned. So much for that conversation. O_O