Penny Postcard, Wrong Address

Penny Postcard, Wrong Address

by Michael R. Burch

(for the victims and survivors of the Holocaust)

We saw their pictures:

tortured out of our imaginations

like golems.

We could not believe

in their frail extremities

or their gaunt faces,

pallid as our disbelief.

They are not

with us now ...

We have:

huddled them

into the backroomsofconscience,

consigned them

to the ovensofsilence,

buried them in the mass graves

of circumstancesbeyondourcontrol.

We have

so little left

of them

now

to remind us ...

It was my honor to work with survivors of the Holocaust as we translated their poems and prose accounts into English as a way of preserving them and making them available to larger audiences. Unfortunately, time waits for no one and the Holocaust survivors I worked with are no longer with us. But their words and testimonies remain, if we will only take the time to read and consider them. Keywords/Tags: Holocaust, victims, survivors, mass graves, pictures, images, tortured, frail, gaunt, skeletal, emaciated, thin, malnourished, golemic, horror, terror, inhumanity, madness, racism, antisemitism, slave labor, slavery, death camps, concentration camps, gas chambers, ethnic cleansing, genocide, murder, torture, world war II, memory, remembrance day, memorial day, tribute