Namesake

about the my family in World War Two

My name is Sima Rose Greenfield

My name is from a history of perseverance

My name is from people that said they would not lay down and die

My name memorializes the struggles, my family endured

 

Sima lived in Poland, when the Holocaust began,

She heard rumors of Jews being taken from their homes

Of Jews never being heard from again

Of Jews taken to ghettos then taken to nowhere

Of Jews hiding in walls

Of Jew running to neutral territory

Of Jews getting fake papers and starting new lives

Then she heard Jews, who were in the woods

Emerging from forest only to bomb railroad tracks, steal guns, and shoot Nazis

They gave guns and food to Jews cramped tightly in ghettos

They helped move Jews from walls to freedom

They made fake papers
they were people that resisted the intolerant hands of tyranny

Because they were human and they were going to fight to exist

And for centuries, they’ve crawled up from hopeless abysses to arise stronger

Sima went to the woods with a gun and a glimmer of hope

She was a fought because she didn’t wanted resist the misguided hate the fuel the Nazi party

Because humans deserve better than dying emaciated in a cloud of blue smoke

 

Rose was told her family was too rich and too Jewish

The Russians sent her and her daughters to freeze in Siberia

And sent her husband and son to work to death in Poland

However Rose would not be told what to do and what to accept

Where there is a will there is a way

Rose found a way from a refugee camp in Siberia to a work camp in Poland

She bought vodka

And her short dress and red lipstick wooed the guards

She told them her and her daughter wanted to party

And while the guards drank away their boredom

Rose’s other daughter snuck Rose’s husband and son out of the camp

As the guards got wasted

A family reunited

With their tears reflecting moonlight in the forest

With their feet snapping twigs and crunching leaves

They found a way from Poland’s woods to and Austria refugee camp

From a Austrian refugee camp to the warm embraces of cousins in Danville, IL

They lived their days running a liquor store in Danville, IL

They didn’t have to hide their Shabbat candles anymore

They could light them for a family

 

Mikael Grunsfeld came to America from Czechoslovakia

After world war one, lynch mobs

Seemed to get more and more popular

So the Grunsfelds decided they didn’t want to wait until they were raped, stolen from again

They didn’t wanted to wait

Until they were hunted down and murdered

Simply because they did not eat pork or shell fish

He took a boat across the ocean

He passed Lady Liberty

He was of the huddle masses she lifted her lamp for

He docked in Ellis Island

Where they told him

You can be Michael Greenfield

If you want to be American

 

My name is Sima Rose Greenfield

I’m Jewish American

A bad man tried to eradicate my people

My family told him we would live on despite him