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Holocaust Memorial Day 2007
This poem marks two episodes in the life of an imagined holocaust survivor. During my research I was struck with the importance of names in Jewish tradition, and in our own daily battles to assert our own identity. Though this piece starts with a description of an experience in the Jewish community, it broadens to include other groups who suffered during the holocaust, and touches on the need to keep an eye out for future genocides
A name for every star
1943, Krakow
The biggest soldier said, no pins. You stitch it,
so it cannot be undone. Our mothers understood
and turned back to the ghetto.
Yemakh-schmoy, said one – Rub out his name!
We girls were sent to fetch the button box.
A dozen women at our table spread their long-loved skeins,
as fine as hair; their hoarded buttons pearly like a fingernail.
The morning count. We stood against the wall
and waited. Soldiers stalked into our tall grey square,
their eyes like glass in August sun.
Two dozen pinpricked hands at rest. Our chests
thrown out like athletes. Stitched on every breast, a star.
Stitched on every star a word.
Their JUDE, in our hand –
in satin-cushioned emerald silks; vermilion chain stitch;
gold thread bright as Rumpelstiltskin’s triumph.
And then our names, our own names, stitched and beaded;
HENDA proclaimed in slicks of peach and silk-smooth ivory:
my BINA like a banner of bright azure.
That day we were all different, all the same.
Our own names were our own, and still we shared one name.
It could not be undone.
The streets were filled with us: with yellow stars, pink triangles,
with all the shames, with signs instead of names.
We learned to see the ones we had not seen.
We learned to see too late, and then they came.
2003: Manchester
It rains a good deal, but tonight the sky is clear.
I’m here.
I’m here in this small yard beneath the clothes line,
seeing stars.
A star for every name;
the names of the Righteous,
the names of the Dead,
the names of the Bystanders,
the names of the Holocausts.
A star for every name,
and the names expanding infinitely.
I say my names, the names of my lost,
naming them out of namelessness
and into justice.
I cannot see the face of God,
whose face must not be seen.
But I am praying in my small yard,
beneath the clothes line,
if he is ready to hear.
Let the earth blaze with them like a tended hearth –
the pink triangles and yellow stars; the brands, tattoos and barcodes,
the heretics, the deviants, the unsound, the insane
for if every one of us is different we are all the same.
Let each one in darkness hear a thousand voices
joining in the shouting of his name.
The little ones ask why their teacher wears a hijab.
She is different, they say, she is not the same.
Never mind the headscarf, I say – what’s her name?
Jo Bell
January 2007
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