Leo Yankevich
THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST
1. Red Star, 1933
The Arctic wind impales us without halt
and in our wounds the devil himself leers.
The star above the gulag burns like salt
until we lose all track of months and years.
And yet we sigh again the wry insult
we let slip into comrade Stalin’s ears.
We sigh until we sigh it by default
and wrinkles are the riverbeds of tears.
2. Neighbours, Eastern Poland, 1940
for Jan Gross
I turn my shoulder to the grey and think
of Yosel, son of Saul Rabinsky, how
he slammed the doors of crowded cattle cars
bound for Siberia, although the faces
inside were those of neighbours, Catholic Poles.
How haplessly they looked back through the cracks,
their petty gentry voices cursing him
and the red star on his cone-shaped traitor’s cap,
their love of Poland beyond his comprehension,
their foolishness not worthy of his grief.
He did not know few would survive the journey
and those who did would perish in the gulags,
their tundra-bitten bodies heaped beneath
Lavrentii Beria's orders, like forgotten
enemies of a freedom-loving state.
The son of Saul Rabinsky did not know
the Wehrmacht would attack within a year
and soon behind them come the Waffen SS
to mock the bearded rabbis of the town
and herd its Jews into a killing field.
He did not know he’d be betrayed by neighbours,
who, in a cabal of silence and revenge,
would watch the gendarmes drag him through the square,
neighbours with whom he’d played and gone to school
and whose unbridled hatred matched his own.
3. Vengeance Is Mine, Says the Lord, 1943
in memory of the German
and Russian soldiers
buried together in mass graves during the battle of Stalingrad
If but the sun had burned less brightly
upon the faces of the dead
He saw heaped high that winter day
inside a pit dug in a field,
one could say who was good, who bad,
who was a sinner, who a saint,
but those He saw were saved in death
and share one grave beneath His land.
4. Poland, New Year’s Day, 1982
The final snow of the year, riddled and hard,
assailed by wind and rain, still covers the field,
while heaven above, a milky upturned ashtray,
lingers like a promise never fulfilled.
Smoke rises past the limbs of walking trees
toward blocks of flats that are a thousand greys.
Coal miners cough laments down muddy streets
to greasy taverns, and in shop displays
Christmas trees thirst for drink in dented pots.
Coal hills lie waiting for ice picks and shovels
as flocks of children drag ramshackle sleds
toward the toppled ruins of Eskimo hovels.
And at the roadside shelter Jesus sleeps
in the cradle of his weeping mother’s arms,
the light that leaks through small cracks in the roof—
forsaken as the sparrows that chant him psalms.
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