Childhood Memories of the Holocaust

( Poetry Super Highway 5.2006, for Holocaust Memorial Day)

I was born in New York in 1942
Of my age that day I am not sure
When my mother sent me to fetch a newspaper
From the nearby candy store
How old could I have been?
Four?  Five?
Not more

My mother took the paper to the kitchen window
Where the sun shone through
In a peaceful way
She was probably thirty-five
The age my daughter is today

And when she saw the paper, she cried
And I’m certain I remember the moment
Because I’d never before seen tears fall from here eyes

My child’s eye
Had seen the picture in the newspaper
As I skipped up the street full of pride
Because I was old enough to be sent
On an errand so important

But that child’s eye could not comprehend it
Yet till this day remembers it
And can now interpret it:
A mass grave of men and women
Who had died already skeletons
A site so horrific
That I still cannot deal with it

And then
When I was ten
I saw a photograph of an oven –
A crematorium –
A door in a stone wall
And had a vision
Of being put in
Too weak to call
I too a skeleton
The door shuts
The fires beckon
The flames searing
I wake up screaming
Barely breathing

And from then until I was forty
This dream returned to me
Much too frequently
I the American child
Consumed by a guilt nearly intolerable
How was it possible
That I was here, alive
When all those other children, there,
had died?

© 2004 Helen Bar-Lev