Get up, schweinerei, my father says, waking
us late.
And at dinner, my dyadya, talking drunk and
loud,
says
that he and my dedushka guarded railroads
in the war. For the Germans. The railroads
are old,
but this country is new: not the Soviet
Union, I ask?,
not wanting to know. Barely breathing: the
world,
hard, atrocious, and cruel, falls into
place.
And Babushka? Babushka worked at the
railroad, too.
(I feel her hard hands braiding my hair,
the stern lips
mouthing: zhid). I remember my mother,
seeking salvation
at her grave, saying (but lying): “I once
opened a gate.”
The
world falls into place. What was on those rails? Who?
And what did their guards do? Somehow I
knew, I always knew.
Tonight, I hear my mother’s reedy voice
simper, singing,
Nach jeden Dezember ihr kommt ein Mai. Her home of
gemutlichkeit, comfort without joy. Her love for the
German tongue; how often she said “There were good
Germans, too.” As Ukrainians, save the martyred few,
they were gvardia, collaborators, too. Did they have a
choice? Starvation
in the kolkhoz, bodies lying, dying
in the streets, and only
the Germans, said my mother,
protested Stalin’s rape and collectivization of the
Ukraine. How much victim? How much
volunteer?
Did my mama, my papa, my dyadya,my baba, my
dyedushka commit atrocities in the war?
In Kalinivka, the mass
graves; my family was there.
In Prymsl, deported Jews;
my family was there.
In the Harz Mountains,
Northhausen and Dora-Mittelbau;
my family was there. What
other families? Who survived,
and why? (There was no
crematorium in Dora, my mother
lied.) In the face of starvation, of death, of Stalin’s camps,
tell me, you, well-fed and safe, judging me
and mine: is there
complicity when there is no choice? (Was
there choice?)
The stories, the lacunae, the lies. Now I
know why I always felt
like a Jew. O, Adonai, why? Why these
origins for me, why no
orisons for me? The dead are dead, but not
within me, my
holocaust today, forever my bread.
This poem appeared in The Common Online.
