28th Annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Poetry Issue

Send us your poetry. Click here for submission guidelines.

Alan Walowitz

Alan Walowitz, from Great Neck, NY, is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry. His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. From Arroyo Seco Press: In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars. The chapbook, The Poems of the Air, is from Red Wolf Editions, free for downloading from Red Wolf’s site.

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

My mother and I played it in the Sunday Funnies:
The traffic cop stands on top of the lake.
The elephant slides gracefully into second base.
A fish flies a kite, though my mother would often say,
Go fly a kite! when I uttered something ridiculous like,
I’ve got nothing to do,
on a beautiful summer day.

I never played this silly game with my daughter,
though she and I could still have at it
if we only watched the news:
Here, a bent cross scrawled in a toilet stall.
A burning pickup drives through a synagogue door.
Young lovers shot at the Jewish museum.
How can I explain?

I must confess, dear one, it’s all my doing–
this world I must’ve made.
Though was never my intention.
And no matter that our people teach
that our work is to repair–Tikkun Olam–
this is the world I leave for you,
everything out of place, and out of time.
But, oh, so easy to identify.

originally appeared in Poets Reading the News

Alice Reiter Laby

Alice Laby is a lifelong Long Islander. She grew up in Merrick and Roosevelt and went to college in Stony Brook. She now lives in Valley Stream, New York. She ventured off Long Island for her Masters Degree in Counseling from Fordham University. She is proud of her three sons, their wives and her four grandchildren and her two grand dogs. Retired now, she is working on her third novel and receives encouragement from her partner, a jazz pianist, and his African grey parrot.

Your Life Is a Mystery to Me

Your life is a mystery to me
Ershel Reiter
You were my cousin
The cousin I never met I never knew

You lived in Kovel Poland
Born in 1910 perhaps
Your father died in 1914
Your brother’s name was
Abraham
Freidl was your mother

You truly loved our Grandpa Nathan
If I had met our grandfather
I am sure
I would have loved him too

I found out you were
Once a member of my family
When Cousin Ester
Discovered a letter from you
In Yiddish
Two letters from your mother
In a box in her cellar
In Toronto Canada

Letters dated 1936 from Kovel
I had the letters translated

Your letter was to my father
Your Uncle Harry
Your letter speaks of heartache
Your Uncle Harry lived in Brooklyn
You lived in Kovel

My father left Kovel in 1929
He was nineteen
Following in the footsteps
Of his brothers and sisters

From your letter I learned
You were trying to leave Poland too
You mention in your letter
Registration
Interrogation

I asked a professor in Krakow
What did Ershel mean
She said
You were trying to be approved
For a U. S. visa
Registration on a waiting list
Interrogation a difficult interview
With consular or shipping officials

You did not succeed
Now I realize
My father carried that heartache
With him
All the days of his life

Why Dad didn’t you tell me
About Ershel
What was he like
Was he handsome like you
With blonde hair and blue eyes

It was not your fault Dad
That Ershel perished
That Abraham perished
That Aunt Freidl perished
That Grandpa Nathan perished
In the Holocaust

I want to write a letter
To you Ershel
I will sign my letter
B’ahava
With Love

Alyza Lee Salomon

Alyza Lee Salomon is a dancer, poet, and incurable bibliophile. She has enjoyed performing with Natica Angilly’s Poetic Dance Theater Company since 2003. Her fascination with words and languages is rooted in a trilingual childhood with a European heritage. Alyza was born in Israel, grew up in Maryland, and studied at S.U.N.Y. Binghamton—now Binghamton University. She earned her M.A. in English Literature from Sonoma State University, where she fell in love with the writing of Virginia Woolf. She resides in Hercules, California, where her poems have appeared in local anthologies as well as on several websites.

Family Lore

This was the story I knew, as my parents
repeatedly related. We were fortunate
to have a relative, Tante Pepi, who
owned a store and was a rich woman.

She put up money, affidavits, for my grandparents
to get out of Nazi-controlled Europe in the nick
of time—it was already the fall of 1938, and Grandfather
was released from Dachau—to come to the US.

But not only for Omama and Opapa;
She additionally arranged affidavits
for seventeen more relatives.
She was wealthy and could do this.

So when Robert R——– first contacted me
and introduced himself, I said, “I know exactly
who you are! Your grandmother was the
wealthy woman who rescued my grandparents!”

But cousin Bobby corrected the tall tale
I had been spoonfed, like the other
family stories, bobbemeises, with long
versions referred to as “the whole megillah.”

His Grandma Pauline, the family
called her Pepi, was not wealthy.
Yes, she co-owned a tobacco store,
and by this time she was already a widow.
To set up the affidavits, she borrowed
the money from her business partner.

Well shut my mouth! Ausgezeichnet! Unberufen!
The legend can now be revised by the ragged,
humble truth. Yes, we are fortunate to have
had a rich Tante Pauline. She rescued
nineteen relatives, including my grandparents
who arrived in New York Harbor in August of 1939.

She was able to do this because although
her purse was modest, she was indeed
exceedingly prosperous beyond measure,
for she was blessedly gifted with a golden heart!

An earlier version of this poem was published in Carquinez Review 2024.

Amy Barone

Amy Barone’s new poetry collection, Treesongs, will be released by Broadstone Books in 2026. Her book, Defying Extinction, was published by Broadstone Books in 2022. New York Quarterly Books published her collection, We Became Summer, in 2018. She wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing). Barone’s poetry has appeared in The Café Review, New Verse News, The Ocotillo Review, and Paterson Literary Review, among other publications. She belongs to the brevitas online poetry community. From Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she lives in New York City and Haverford, PA.

Time as Shelter

Fragrant spices
permeate the room.
Chants begin.
Wine overflows.
Candles glow.

Exile after the first temple burned
and deportation to Babylon,
they established a weekly shrine in time—
a meeting place between Heaven and earth.
The Sabbath.

Barbara Krasner

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Gratz College. She has published numerous articles, poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction about the Holocaust, including The Color of Time and Other Stories(Blaze/VOX, 2025) and the forthcoming Memory Collector: Poems (Kelsay Books, 2027). She serves as Director, Mercer County Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center at Mercer County Community College, where she teaches in the English and History departments and is co-editor of Kelsey Review, the college’s literary magazine. She lives in Somerset, New Jersey. Visit Barbara on the web here.

Two A.M.

In the early hour, nails scrape from within the wall. Not time to come out. Hobnailed boots can come at any time. No safe place. No safe time. Even silence has a sound. A breath. A false smile. A strand of stray hair. Piercing sirens break the silence. Running motors. Screeching tires. Slamming doors. The breath quickens as the walls grow thin, translucent. In the early hour, a floorboard squeaks. Not time to come out, Yankele. Don’t cough or sneeze, Chavele. Plant yourself, Icekel, like the statue of Piłsudski. Bear down on your mitten, Feygele. Above all else, Avrumele, don’t pee.

Betsey Cullen

Betsey Cullen hails from Kennett Square, Pennsylvania and teaches poetry at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Delaware. A Pennsylvania Poetry Society prize winner from 2019-26, she won two chapbook contests: Our Place in Line (Tiger’s Eye Press, 2014) and We Hold the Bones (Heartland Review Press, 2022.)

A List tacked to the wall at El-DE Haus,
former headquarters of the Gestapo in Cologne

Auschwitz
Belzec
Bergen-Belsen
Buchenwald
Dachau
Izbica
Kulmhof
Litmannstade
Majdanek
Maly Trostencz
Ravensbruch
Riga
Sechsenhausen
Sobibor
Theresienstadt
Treblinka
Tschenstochau
Westerbork

Betsy Mars

Betsy Mars lives in Torrance, California. She is a poet, photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Betsy’s poems are widely available online and in print, most recently in ONE ART, Sheila-Na-Gig, Book of Matches, and the anthology Signed, Sealed, Delivered: The Motown Poetry Review (Madville Press). Her photos have appeared in various journals, including Spank the Carp and Rattle. Betsy has had two chapbooks published, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, co-authored with Alan Walowitz. Her full-length book, Rue Obscure, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Visit Betsy on Facebook.

Spring Recital

In the checkout line at CVS the register
churns out an endless receipt; every winter
the ritual list: cards, foods, chores, gifts.
Every spring we repeat the names of the dead.
Each year the bill comes due but we’ve wasted
our fortune in our endless greed. We go to war
from such a distance we can make believe
this isn’t savagery. We drop bombs on schools,
down chimneys, whether the victims are innocent
or not – after all, they are just vermin—like us.
Each day we can choose to honor those slaughtered:
end this long litany consuming the living.

Brian Wood

Brian Wood lives in Guelph, ON, with his wife, Rachel, and a six year old English bulldog named Sunny Skywalker. Brian is a literary agent (of sorts.) Sunny is an immense help with the creative process: she barks at nothing and chases leaves.

Putsch

There was once a great big beer hall
Putsch at Hofbrauhaus, so many
Drunk Germans, such great fun. And some
Of them tried to shoot an Austrian,
A former corporal, but they missed.

II

Next up, Bavaud, a Swiss bible
Student, who knew, somehow, that this
Former corporal was in fact
Morning star: but there were far too
Many folks in the way: he did
Not even shoot; just no clean sight.

III

Then a carpenter built one bomb
To do one beautiful thing. Just
As he planned, the bomb went off on
Time–and did kill eight Nazis. But
Not the right one, not the target.

IV

Up next there’s Tresckow, the clever
Staff officer, who hid a bomb
On the plane of that bright angel,
Who fell so far from heaven. A
Fallible fuse felled this fun plan.

V

Then Gertsdorff, another staff man,
Another would be bomber; he
Was giving The Fearless Leader
A tour of captured Red Army
Trophies. The plan? Blow himself up,
And with any luck, take out Herr
Fearless Leader at the same time:
There was no luck. None. They both lived.

VI

Finally, Valkyrie, the one
They do movies about…since none
Of us can believe this one failed:
Some fool S.S. trooper moving
Stauffenberg’s well placed bomb. There were
Four Nazis killed, but alas, not
The right one, son of the morning.

VII

The very hairs on our head are
Numbered, for the Bible tells me so.
Such love, such care, that he spared our
Great adversary a sextet
Of chances. Such love that there was
None left for the peculiar
People, passing away one by
One in the fields of Ravensbruck.

VIII

As for the chosen, those happy
Sons and daughters of that solemn
Covenant, now close to the end
In Oswiecim, they must have been
Wondering…Where is Va Shem? Where
Are his mighty acts? As thorns cut
Up, we burn in the chambers of fire.

Bruce Black

Bruce Black received his MFA from Vermont College. He is the author of Writing Yoga (Shambhala) and editorial director of The Jewish Writing Project. His poetry, personal essays, and stories have appeared in numerous publications, including The MidAtlantic Review, Ritualwell, New Verse News, Bearings, Poetry Super Highway, Poetica, The Lehrhaus, Soul-Lit, and elsewhere. He lives in Highland Park, IL. Visit Bruce on the web here.

The silence

On some days the silence
is deafening, our voices
shattered, our tongues
crippled, our lungs
unable to draw a breath

as if we, too, like them,
were trapped by history
caught in the endless maze
that led to their slaughter

and the trains
that carried them
to the death camps,
and the days and nights
of torture, and the sky
filled with more and more
clouds of smoke—

all unfolding
in the past
like a silent film,
the sound
extinguished in the flames
of hatred still burning
in the hearts
of our enemies,

and all we can see now
are faces contorted
in pain and bodies twisted
in fear, and all we can hear
from this distance—almost
a century later—is
the silence.

Camille Norvaisas

Camille Norvaisas is inspired by the Frederick Buechner quote, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” Camille is drawn to images, interactions, memories, or snippets of history that can be beautiful or terrible. And when truly aware, exploring the beauty in the terrible. Her first book is titled, Rare As The Kotuku (Aldrich Press).

New Occupation

Displaced Persons Camp, Germany, 1944

Mother sends us off to get haircuts,
…I’d like to work here someday.
…You get to spin the chair around and rip off the apron.
My brother laughs, Silly, there’s much more to do than that.
The barber greets us, shoulders back, arm extended
and we sit to wait our turn.

A soldier arrives in a fitted gray uniform
and his eyes are pinched
like he’d been looking into the sun.
Everyone in the shop straightens up
does the funny halted wave again.
The barber points to us and the soldier
snaps his head in our direction.

He commands us outside, leads us
to a perfectly polished black car, points
to the rear seats and we slowly slide across
the leather, exchange wide-eyed glances.
We end up at an office where there are more
soldiers like him. He directs us toward two chairs
and asks questions in German. I don’t understand
but my brother knows enough to figure it out.
He touches his own chest, Algis,
then points to me, Jonas.
More questions.
Then Al says our father’s name, Vladis.

The soldier seems satisfied and shouts at two others,
they quickly leave. What did we do? Al tells me to shh.

Eventually, three soldiers enter with Father,
his eyes scan the room until they land on us,
then his shoulders relax a little.
One of the men knows Lithuanian and translates.
Why did your boys not salute the Führer when entering the barber shop?
………….Sir, me and my family are newly arrived visitors to this country.
………….My boys did not know they had the privilege of saluting the Führer.
Well I am giving you all the privilege.
………….Thank you sir.

Father motions for us to get up and stand next to him.
He throws his arm out straight, nudges us both to do the same.
………….Heil, Hitler!

Carol Dorf

Carol Dorf has received fellowships from the Hawthornden Foundation, Zoeglossia, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Their writing appears on the Poetry Foundation website, in several chapbooks including “Theory Headed Dragon” (Finishing Line Press). Carol Dorf’s work also appears in or is forthcoming in journals that include “Pleiades,” “About Place,” “Cutthroat,” “One Art,” “Plume,” “Rogue Agent,” and “Scientific American.” Founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, they taught math and poetry in Berkeley USD, as well as at museums and conferences. They live in Berkeley, CA.

On A Crowded Bus

after Ryzard Krynicki 

A bus from El Paso
is nothing like a train
from Friedrichstraße station
with its memorial to the children
going east going west
 A bus from El Paso
to Los Angeles to Sacramento
is nothing like a trip
through the desert
without water, without food
 Listen
this is where the color goes
the landscape greening with spring rains
yellow mustard blooming
in the fields
 On the oneway sign by the freeway
someone wrote One Tree
At the border the sign reads
There are good people here
 To take, to carry, not to tarry
on the long bus ride
away from the border
the children don’t cry don’t wave

first published in Of The Book, April 2024

Carol Lynn Grellas

Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts with an MFA in Writing. In 2012, her chapbook, Before I Go to Sleep, won the Red Ochre Press Chapbook Contest. In 2019, her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and in 2021, her collection Alice in Ruby Slippers was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize. She was recently awarded a certificate of achievement by the California Writers Club and named Centennial Poet for her contribution to their 100-year celebration. Visit Carol on the web here.

The Difference Between X and O

It was in sixth grade when I first
learned what it was to be a Jew
hater, when I heard the word kike
and asked my mother what it meant,

when the girl down the street with blonde
hair and blue eyes used it to label
the neighbors, a girl whose tongue
was like a loaded gun of ethnic slurs

who didn’t know my father’s thirteenth
birthday gift, a Hebrew Bible, was tucked
inside my nightstand drawer, his initials
engraved in gold letters on yellowed paper,

one satin ribbon dangling over the page
from the inside, separating the middle from
either end. A placeholder as if to say, read me,
start here, near the center, and never forget

never forget, because that’s where the story
lies. I read somewhere the Yiddish term
for ‘little circle’ is kikel, a way to sign a name
for fear an X implied a cross when Jewish

immigrants arrived on Ellis Island. If only
I’d known the origin back then, I would’ve said,
give me your wrist, so I can draw an endless ring,
a kikel with my pen that arcs, bends, and intersects

where love meets ignorance, an O instead of X.

First published in Last Leaves Magazine
Included in upcoming book from March Street Press: Of All That Is Without and Within

Claire Drucker

Claire Drucker is a Jewish lesbian mom, educational consultant, poet, and identical twin. Claire’s first book-length collection of poems, The Life You Gave Me, was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books. Her chapbook, The Fluid Body, was published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press. Claire’s poems have also been published in numerous journals, including CA Quarterly, Jewish Literary Journal, Rust & Moth, Epiphany, Puerto del Sol, and Women Artists Datebook. Claire is the poetry curator for The Sitting Room, a community library dedicated to women’s literature and art with over 7,000 titles. She lives in Sebastopol, CA.

Enough

When their ship sailed into the New York harbor in 1938
When Lady Liberty, regal with her torch, illuminated them
When I asked Omi if someone like Hitler could rise to power
When she said absolutely not/not here in America
When my grandfather, grandmother, uncle, mother waited
too long to escape
When the U.S. did not want the Jews
When my grandfather opened the oven, flew like a raven over
outstretched arms
When they fled Vienna over the voice of his sacrifice.

When my mother crossed the NY street, pretending not
to know her German-speaking mother
When they lit the menorah, bought the tree, decorated
with popcorn and candles
When they were too afraid to let anyone beyond family through
the door of their lives
When Omi worked 12 hours a day sewing chemise for wealthy
customers traveling the world
When I pulled the American flag off the stage at
her funeral
When my uncle yelled to put it back.

When he was elected in 2016 and we walked around in shock
forgetting/remembering the history that made us
When I made my mother grilled cheese sandwiches
When she waited until he lost in 2020
for her papery hand to slip out of mine.

When sleep abandons us
When so many lose their life’s work
When thousands of Americans more American
than this demagogue are thrown
into camps, murdered in the streets, afraid for their children
When families are ripped, fractured, displaced from senseless wars.

When everything we know feels stripped away
When the days of mourning feel like faith has been strung up

When the moon rises, dissolves
When the cries of owls punctuate the night
When the stone of our bodies become the waters we swim in
When we lean into love, beauty as our beacons

When we stand up, dust off our hands yet again
When we pour into the streets with our fists raised
When we lay our bodies and hearts down
When we say enough is enough is enough.

Claudio Perinot

Claudio Perinot is a South African-Italian retired teacher. His poems have appeared in various publications and a selection was Highly Commended in the 2024 erbacce Prize for Poetry. His research on the Eliot – Verdenal friendship is often cited in studies on T.S. Eliot. He is the founder and editor of KUDU A Journal Of South African Writing. He is disabled and lives in Montebelluna – Italy, with his wife and two sons. Visit Claudio on the web here.

Friends of Mine

Edith 7
Rosa 16
Kaspar 11
Jonah 13
Krenar 5
Sarah 9
months old

trains are sometimes one-way rails
leading to nowhere

heat and ashes churning up that chimney
tall and black end of the journey into the dark
belly of pain someone calls life

the tunnel had opened to let us through
and now closed behind

and left us

waiting

time was long

with stories
of the newborn
shot in the head

Uncle had some sugar

my brother sprinkled
with death turning
to look at me
in the late evening light

funny how we had to wait
to die

i don’t know why
but somehow
i survived

Colin Jeffery

Colin Ian Jeffery is an English poet of the modernist movement with development of imagism stressing clarity, precision and economy of language, and has a strong reaction against war, tranny, and oppression of truth and innocence, but unlike other poets in the modernism movement like Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound he has a profound faith in God.

Two little girls

Little dark-haired Jewish girl
Too young to go to school
Striping naked beside her mother
Frightened eyes gazing all around
Seeing women and children stripping
Friends and neighbours from the ghetto.

German soldier hardened to task
Opens shower doors with a curse
Shouting for women and children to enter.
Pushes weeping girl as she passes him
Slams and bolts door behind her
Oblivious to mother’s desperate pleas.

Gas hissing from hidden vents
Terrified mothers hold children
Cradled dying to their bosoms
Trying to hide death from their eyes
Whispering words of love
Victims of Hitler’s Final Solution.

Tall blond SS officer in black uniform
Proud husband and father
Supervises burning of bodies
Goes home to his daughter
Same age as dark-haired Jewish girl
Lovingly rocks her to sleep on his knee.

Corey Mesler

Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Lunch Ticket, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 50 books of fiction and poetry. His newest book, A Troubling of Goldfish, is from Big Table Books. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.

Germany, 1959.

There’s still a man sitting at home
denying his lampshade
is human skin.
Not the atrocity machine for him.
Not the memory of efficient ovens.
He is watching TV
while his grandchildren play round
his chair in a soft yellow mantle that
feels like the warm glow of yesteryear.

Daniel Irwin

Daniel S. Irwin, currently, hails from Sparta, Illinois. A man of many hats currently focusing on poetry (a matter of opinion). Retired military and retired state worker. World traveler {Western Europe and Mideast). He has had work published and posted on-line world wide. Most recent work posted on-line on Beatnik Cowboy, Cajun Mutt Magazine, and Horror, Sleaze, Trash.

Sweet Dreams

The sun shining, the smell of flowers.
Running in the garden chasing butterflies.
People laughing, children playing.
The sweet comfort of youth.
Then,
The sound of the door being thrown open and
The menacing shouts of the guards woke her.
The woman lying next to her on the four-person
Bare plank shelf of a bed was dead.
She died during the night. No one cried.
Some said that she was better off.
The guards said that the lazy Jew died just to
Get out of the morning work detail.
They have the body dragged out to the trash pile.
Another day to add to one’s mind’s diary,
Hopefully to be printed later for the world to read.

Daphne Milne

Daphne Milne’s poems, flash fiction and short stories are published in print and online in magazines and anthologies internationally. She lives near Exeter, UK. Katharine Susannah Pritchard fellow for 2021. Nominated Forward Prize for 2022. Shortlisted Bath novella-in-flash 2023, 2026. Her pamphlet The Blue Boob Club [Indigo Dreams Publishing] selected as book of the month by Poetry Kit where Daphne was invited to be a Contemporary Poet for 2020. A microchapbook of jazz poems Dancing With Mr. Dapperman was published by Origami Press 2023. Her pamphlet Behind Prim Suburban Walls won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Competition in 2025.

Graffiti

It starts with a word
written on a wall — a name
another word another
a full sentence
and then the pictures
cartoons & caricatures
nightmares not comedy
fangs & knives & guns
the language of hate
which is no more
than the language of fear
and the wall is built up
in self defence
blown apart in terror
and still the words
a litany of names
written out of dust
& blood

Darcy Grabenstein

A marketing writer by profession, Darcy turns to poetry as a creative outlet. Her poetry has been published on Ritualwell.com, in two holiday supplements of the Academy for Jewish Religion, and two anthologies published by Moonstone Arts Center. Her writing has appeared in Momentmag.com, The Times of Israel, and in two Chicken Soup for the Soul books, among others.

The Wandering (and Wondering) Jew

I leave behind painful memories
of laboring in the hot Egyptian sun,
limestone dust clogging our lungs
snakes, scorpions and fear our constant companions

I leave behind mounds of rubble
that were once holy altars
upon which sacrifices were made,
now walls, promises and faith broken

I leave behind chimneys
sending smoke signals of the carnage,
babes wrenched from mothers’ arms
pleading eyes, heart-wrenching wails, deafening silence

I leave behind Israeli commuter buses
charred shells of their former selves
as righteous souls comb the area
for bits, pieces, remnants of what once was

I leave behind the Tree of Life synagogue
ripped open at the seams,
survivors ripping their clothes in mourning
a community, a people, a world torn apart

I leave behind a music festival
turned macabre by invaders
then the war to weed out terror
gutting Gaza and our hearts

Ahead of me, my path is strewn
with obstacles of hatred
Where will I find a safe haven?
Who will welcome me with open arms?

I am tempted to turn my head
and look back from where I came
but I force myself to focus
on what is yet to come.

Previously published in “In Every Generation: Immigration as a Jewish Value — A Passover Haggadah Supplement” by the Academy for Jewish Religion

David Eberhardt

David Eberhardt , 85, poured blood on draft files with Father Phil Berrigan in 1967. He spent 21 months in federal prison. has 4 chapbooks of poetry and a peace movement memoir For All the Saints. He was pardoned by Reagon. He considers himself a Goth, Elizabethan and outlaw poet.

In Memoriam Anneliese Frank Version 1

NO Perpetrators!
No Victims!
No Bystanders!

I have met you Anne Frank…
Oswiciem, Westerbork, Bergen Belsen…
And here in the U S.

I saw you at a trump rally
Wearing a yellow star…
And then you and the Muslim were ejected!

Attributed to Stalin:
“One death a tragedy,
Thousands a statistic”…

I have signed up for
Holocaust archaeology
At Sobibor.

Once shipped to the east-
No coming back-
As in U S Congress

Well tuned to
Separate men from the women…
Trains leaving once a week on Mondays…

Resist the right wing
Wherever you find them..
Their property, tv shows….

Selection ramps run by
The republican party
It’s 2016 I have met you.

They are marking the doors
As they did in the Bible
Of those to be deported.

David I. Hughes

David I. Hughes is a writer based in Mousehole, Cornwall whose work explores memory, landscape, history, and the moral responsibilities of the present. His poetry, fiction, and essays often examine how ordinary lives intersect with larger historical and social forces. He has been published in literary magazines and competitions and is currently working on several poetry and prose manuscripts concerned with attention, and the small human choices that impact our daily lives. He is the author of The Listener, a work of speculative literary fiction. Visit David on the web here.

What the Living Owe

Not the numbers.
Not the ash.
Not the roll call of the unspeakable
that turns, in time, to wallpaper.

Something smaller.
Something harder.

To look at any face
and not calculate
its distance from your own.

To understand that hunger
has no accent,
that fear sounds the same
in every language
before it goes silent.

To say this person —
not these people,
not that history,
not a tragedy over there —
but this person, here, now,
made of the same wanting
I wake up with every morning.

The camps began with a comma.
A small pause.
A not quite like us.
A but surely you understand.

So, this is the vow:
to refuse the comma.
To see the face before the category.
To know, with terrible simplicity,
that your child and my child
and the child whose name
I cannot pronounce
are all made of the same
fragile, breakable,
unrepeatable light.

That is not poetry.
That is the only thing
worth remembering.

David Lee

David Anson Lee is a poet, philosopher, and physician based in Bellaire, Texas. Born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he draws on his Native heritage, studies in philosophy, and medical training to explore memory, identity, and the landscapes—both inner and outer—that shape human experience. He earned his B.A. and M.D. from Boston University and completed his residency at the Mayo Clinic. His poetry has appeared in Right Hand Pointing, Unbroken Journal, The Scarred Tree, Braided Way, and Eunoia Review.

The Arithmetic of Bread and Silence

The bread was measured
as grief is measured:
not by fullness,
but by what remains after.

A slice for the child,
a slice for the worker,
a slice for the one who does not speak
but still remembers hunger
as a shape in the body.

Crumbs became a language.
Hands learned to listen
for the sound of sharing,
for the small arithmetic of survival.

In the barracks, night came early,
and someone told a story
with no ending,
passed mouth to mouth
like a promise
no one could keep.

There are numbers that do not belong
to mathematics.
They settle in the skin,
in the quiet between footsteps,
in the way a name
can grow heavier than bone.

I write this not to explain,
but to keep something from vanishing:
the bread,
the silence around it,
the hands that divided what was never enough
and still gave something away.

Because even there,
especially there,
someone refused
to let hunger have the last word.

Diana Rosen

Diana Rosen is an essayist, poet, and flash writer whose full length book of poems and flash, High Stakes & Expectations is available from dianalrosen@gmail.com Her work has appeared in Poetry Super Highway, Rattle, Mad Swirl and many other online and print journals in the U.S., U.K., and India. To read more of her work, please visit authory.com/dianarosen

Modern History (or the Cycle Continues)

One man, aided and abetted by the archaic fear
of being less than, chooses to rule uber alles
especially those darker, smarter, faster, more
this or that. He starts a world war & almost wins.

Peace seems to reign. Hope for equality, liberty,
safety for all is renewed. Yet (this is the point)
Evil lays dormant, quietly planning. This time,
for eight decades, planning an enhanced agenda,

planning a new vocabulary. Loudly, Evil begins
with the oldest of tropes: blame the other for
whatever makes you feel diminished. Blame
the darker, smarter, those with different gods,

different ideas. Evil offers testimony for a world
where rights for alles, meaning alles Aryan. (There,
I said it out loud!) This cacophony of blame battles
the smaller, quieter cacophony of rebellious protests.

The noise stuns for a moment yet vital questions
remain: Will thinkers, protesters, the keenly
observant learn, finally, to do more than run/move
away when threatened? Will they do more to

convince those who deny there’s anything to worry
about that hell has begun? As ever, it’s up to you.
Up to me. And here’s the kicker, that one man?
Then or now, he can’t keep a secret, he lets us

know what he wants, what he will do. The lessons
are: (1) believe him and (2) become like him in one
particular way – – to plan our own necessary agenda
to resist. May the sages, past and present, be heard.

Dominic Bond

I live in London where I work for a trade union. I write poetry among other things and have been published online on and in print in Driftwood Press, Poetry Birmingham and Kallisto Gaia magazines. I picked up a paint brush recently and managed to create something. This makes me happy.

Separated

I taste soot in the air,
 note the subtle touch of raindrops,
scratch my skin again.
I try to sense where they are,
look for their faces in the crowds,
imagine their small hands in mine,  

that we’re making rugelach again.
My sister asks for water
to clean her sores.
I try to be sick,
can’t get it out,
punch myself in vain.

Elizabeth Edelglass

Elizabeth Edelglass is a longtime fiction writer and book reviewer turned poet during pandemic isolation. Her short fiction has been widely published, winner of the Reynolds Price Fiction Prize, the William Saroyan Centennial Prize, the Lilith short story contest, and the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her newborn poetry has appeared in more than twenty journals and was shortlisted for the Fish Prize. Her poem “A Life, in Body Parts” appeared in Poetry Super Highway on May 1, 2023.

Solstice

When Grandma was sent away for a rest-cure in the country, the family blamed winter woes, her hands raw from peeling beets for borscht, her breasts haggard from hungry babies. Wintercearig: my college word I’m sure my Grandpa never heard, evoking punishing raw Anglo-Saxon snows. Imagine him explaining that to the seven uncles (his brothers) in guttural Ashkenazi accent.

Then I found the sepia photo: Grandma – new wife / new American / new mother – in gauzy sleeveless gown, reaching thin arms towards a tree heavy-laden with peaches, Mom says during that month of her retreat from 1930s Newark. Clearly the desolate cold depths Grandma was sentenced to escape had nothing to do with winter.

hands in the dishwater
matzah balls in the soup
sisters abandoned across the sea

Florence Weinberger

Florence Weinberher has gone up the down staircase, from the Bronx to Malibu. Author of six poetry collections, the most recent These Days of Simple Mooring, winner of the Blue Light Book Award, six times nominated for a Pushcart, she has also been published in numerous literary magazines, including The Comstock Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Rattle, thr zi-70 Review, Baltimore Review, Calyx, Mantis, Miramar, The River Styx, North American Review, and The Los Angeles Review. Poems in anthologies include Dissent, When a Woman Tells the Truth, The New Los Angeles Poets, The Widows’ Handbook, and Women in a Golden State.

Cemetery Tourist

I’ve never returned to my mother’s grave.
Ellen Bass

In Prague, in Sighet, in small Ukrainian towns,
I rambled through cemeteries scanning dates,
some newly carved, some nearly erased by
decades of neglect. The eighteen hundreds
drew me—the old spellings, mere traces left
of the incised errors—hours I spent reading
headstones of strangers, rarely laying eyes
on the graves of my parents, my husband
and my sister, lined up in a row under a tree
forever growing taller, its lavish branches
spreading over them a canopy of leaves and
limbs. It is customary to visit the ancestors’
graves during the month of Elul. Once, when
I searched the vast grounds looking for that
tree, when I finally found the family plots, I
wept, for my stumbles through rows and rows
of graves, trying to side-step the dead. Tears
shed in sheer frustration, not the wailing one
tends to hear at gravesites, cries still echoing
in cities like Vilna and Kyiv, in remote villages
where vandals had accessed the oldest Jewish
cemeteries, defacing the headstones, knocking
them over, smashing them to rubble; that’s
where I felt the violated dead. Their peril,
their helplessness and stifled outrage. Dead.
My dead, my own, they haunt my kitchen, they
shop with me, sleep, and seep into my dreams.
They will only be dead when I am.

Garren Small

Garren Wolf Small is a published Poet and Attorney who lives in Manhattan. He is the Founder and Executive Director of The New York Center for Tolerance and wrote the tolerance curricula for The Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center in Glen Cove on Long Island. He is the author of five books on poetry including “A Book for Our Sons and Daughters” and his books are featured at the Walt Whitman Historical Center in Melville New York and The Long beach Historical Center among other Manhattan and Long Island locations.

Am I So Sure

Am I
so very sure
that I
would have been
the great Resistance hero?

Or might I
have been
the cowardly informer?
The betrayer of secrets perhaps?
The collaborator for an extra dollar?
If they promised me
a pension plan
or a nice dental package
might I have been a
Concentration camp guard?

Are You so sure what You
might have been
in desperate times?
I wouldn’t be so certain of your self *

What do you think
the depths of despair
are capable of snatching
from your exhausted Soul?

And what do
You think
your own dark side of the moon
if pushed to the outer limits
of horror is ultimately horrifically
capable of ¿¿¿

Geoffrey Heptonstall

Geoffrey Heptonstall’s sixth collection of poetry, The Truth on the Tongue, is published by Cyberwit. What We Do Well, was published by Cyberwit in 2024. A Whispering, was published by Cyberwit June 2023. His first collection, The Rites of Paradise, received critical acclaim when first published in 2020. Sappho’s Moon and The Wicken Bird followed. He has written for many print anthologies. A novel, Heaven’s Invention, was published by Black Wolf in 2016. A number of plays and monologues have been staged, broadcast and/or published. He is also a short fiction writer, essayist and reviewer. He lives in Cambridge, England.

Battlefield

The bones beneath have known no peace.
In the name of fearful power
echoes of the warrior surround
a history here interred.
As the eye accepts the image
the monument appears to rise
in a sky of cold indifference.
The trees are stark in their wintering.

Following with children,
the women carry their cares
across the wastes of victory.
Yesterday there was safe pasture
for the herds now sacrificed.
The god of wild things rides.
Dark spirits are clouded
with the words of combat.
The world sees clearly the curse
where vengeance conquers
for the sake of taking.
The warriors ignore the pain,
their own wounds bleeding
as a sign of honour.
When empires fall with fire
there shall be a life of rage.

Gerald George

Gerald George has published three books: Figments, Imitations of Indonesia, and A Penitential Prayer (on the Holocaust). His poetry also has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and his verse play, Bailey’s Mistake, was produced in the 2008 Maine Short-Play Festival. He has served on the editorial board of the poetry journal Off the Coast, and coordinated the annual Roque Bluffs Poetry Festival. He lives in Belfast, Maine.

Dung Buckets

In the drab camp she thought a lot about
her chosen vocation before they had come to get her,
the still-lives she had painted, bowls of flowers,
pretty, almost saintly, shy and chaste.
Never, however, would she paint again
as before this misery. Could she paint at all?

Women, thin, in worn-out prison shifts,
bearing buckets of dung from the base latrine
to spread outside to fertilize fields of wheat
for feeding the army. In the labor camp
they ate gray scraps of slop in watery soup.
Would there be for them an “again”?

But “again” came, the camp—liberated!
She resume painting, not little pots of flowers
but gorgeous landscapes of ebullient blooms,
hundreds of bursting buds in brilliant hues:
reds, yellows, oranges, the height of brightness,
as though she must try to find the sun again.

Previously published in Gerald George, A Penitential Prayer: Poems on the Holocaust (Goose River Press, 2022).

H.L. Dowless

H.L. Dowless is the kind of writer who doesn’t just craft stories—he inhabits them. A veteran of more than three decades in the literary trenches, he has built a career defined by relentless curiosity, fearless adventure, and an unshakable devotion to the written word.

Watch What We’re Doing!

We take from you
For more to enjoy.
Your money we no longer
Accept.

Away from your income source!
It does not matter if you are employed
Or supported by
Your own enterprise effort.
Idleness and carousing we no longer tolerate!
Away from your home!
It’s no longer yours anymore.
Out into the dismal streets!
We don’t care if you stave or sleep on the sidewalk
Without any sheets!

Now we’ve changed our minds.
Up off those sidewalks!
Awake from that park bench!
Now get into this large van!
You’re gonna grab a railroad lug wench!
You have no job?
You have no medicine?
You have no food?
So you have no place to stay?
Well,
We have the perfect place for you
In America!

Out of this van
And into that massive inward arching razor wire fence!
There is no more place in America for your kind!
Can’t you see?
Ignore the tremendous cost of living!
Disregard the lack of opportunity!
In today’s America
Nobody won’t need healthcare,
Let alone retirement.
Work makes you free!

Forget all thrills!
Payback that debt!
Your life is this work!
You’ll give us all until you stagger
And fall!
Then into the roaring oven you’ll all go
And away up the chimney
In smoke!

Hanh Chau

Hanh is from the Bay Area, San Jose, CA. During her spare time, she enjoys writing poetry, listening to music, ballroom dancing, and reading. She has a bachelor’s degree and an MBA in business studies. She works as an administrative assistant manager for Kaiser Permanente in the Intensive Care Unit department.

Silent Words

There is a silence that
written on a solemn face
with a carrying instinct of
a deeply emotion filled

with agony and pain
embrace with a mourning
loss in an endless time of rest

from the untold storytelling
of the depression stage
with unspoken words
bring a cast of raindrops
like a flowing river
moving into the shed
of streaming tears

from the devastating
of the horror, vivid image
by the echo whisper voice

leading every laughter

into a sorrow of despair

turning every hope into

a shattered dream in a state

of grief through the eternal

of haunted memory

Helen Bar-Lev

Helen Bar-Lev was born in New York in 1942. www.helenbarlev.com, has lived in Israel for 52 years, lives now in Karmiel; over 100 exhibitions of her landscape paintings. Her latest collection: SPIRIT CAPTIVE, Jerusalem in Poetry, Prose and Paintings. She is the Amy Kitchener senior poet laureate and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2013 and is the Israeli representative for Immagine & Poesia. Helen is the recipient of the Homer European Medal for Poetry and Art. She also has served as: Assistant President of Voices Israel, Chief Editor of Voices Annual Anthology, and Overseas Connections Coordinator.

The Lord of All

This Holocaust Memorial Day
we sleep in shelters
hear the missiles
explode all around us
awaken to sirens
everyone so frightened

Oh lord of wars and holocausts,
Where are you?

Howie Good

Howie Good’s latest book of prose poems, True Crime, is scheduled to be published by Sacred Parasite in early 2026.

Holocaust Remembrance

My cousin Rebecca and her husband went on a trip to former Nazi-occupied Poland with a group from their temple. The climax of the trip was a walk of a couple of miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau, two of the most notorious death camps. It’s called “The March of Life.” I asked my cousin how it was. “Good,” she said, like a tombstone talking to me in Polish, a language I don’t understand.

I.B. Iskov

I.B. Iskov is the Founder of The Ontario Poetry Society. Her work has appeared in several anthologies and literary journals. Her latest collection “In A Wintered Nest”, was published by Serengeti Press, 2013.

The Near Future

“There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions
that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, only worse.”
—– Golda Meir

Broken lights collect in crowded corners,
find their hideaway and stay put.

Dust, debris and emotion
are distractions covering what cowers.

Sudden gusts of day-shine vanquish nothing.
Unguarded bridges permit alien assassins
to strategically position themselves,
pull strings and triggers,
and execute fatal fanatical feats.

Anti-Semitic bullseyes are painted
on synagogues and Hebrew schools.

Beaming, blasted brutes have full freedom
radiating renegade assaults on innocents.

Why is there no armed guard to stop them?
I wasn’t born yet the last time this happened.

Where is the promise of “Never Again” buried?

Millions of history books detail
each and every slaughter,
corrupted crime, mismanaged microfilm
and intimidating misdemeanors.
Millions deny everything
including their own legacies of hate.

I have witnessed past insidious inscriptions.
Inked numbers eroded on naked buried arms.
Once, those arms held doorways open to the truth.
Those same entrances are buried, too among
other artifacts including torture, starvation,
shame, persecution, rape, rage
and loss of hope and freedom.

I stand in front of a mirror
and wonder if I will witness everything
again. Is this what will come to be?

Will I soon be silenced and live inside a history book
accused of by nay-sayers as being pulp fiction?

Will anyone get to witness the near future atrocities?

Most of my fellow hostages will be burned at the stake or
cremated alive in a locked room of poison gas or
starved to death in an underground tunnel or
shot in the back and tossed into an open pit to rot.

My reflection in the light is short-lived.
No conscience crowds even the smallest amount of pitied air.
Propaganda’s dust and debris already choke the world.
This is the newest way to achieve genocide.

Shattered yellow stars will be tossed into open pits,
crumble into dust and disappear.
Broken glass covered with stained tears will starve
in underground tunnels until they, too vanish.
Mezuzahs will be stripped naked off vulnerable doorposts,
forcibly taken in cattle cars to concentration camps
and cremated in locked rooms of poison gas.
The dust left disheveled will collect in crowded corners.

Is this all there is in the near future?

Icegayle Johnson

Icegayle Johnson is a New York City poet who has been published widely. Her collection “Eclectic War” is forthcoming in 2026.

Still a Mystery

Living in the shadows of the holocaust
year after year no one spoke a word-
holidays were the only time remembering

Was allowed. temples held services those who
were in camps came early in the day, you could
feel the dark energy- seeing numbers running down arms

a lost quiet look in their eyes-, they only socialized with other
camp survivors- a group who didn’t socialize with the others
because they wore type of shame- I can’t really put my finger on

what this unbelievable knowing and not knowing is about

Charlie Levin who was my father a night watchman attended
before coming home-who was he-unanswered till this day-
from Vilnius a small town outside of Lithuania

A catholic priest supposedly buried him in the basement of his church
when the Nazis came through – he was separated from six brothers
and sisters- who wound up in South Africa- later in LA –

How did Charlie got to the United States, the story I know-
he was married before my mother,maybe she brought him-
in Jewish law, after five years without children is a reason for divorce!

arguments with my mother regularly-

Charlie-continued to visit her after their marriage ended-
everything is a mystery not making much sense. A life long question with
no one who could answer any of them… most are dead-

Family in LA- became extremely successful with a bar supply
company called “Triple L Distributors” for a short time I lived in LA
met my uncle and found out that they sent me a wedding present of $200

My mother and father kept the money and never told me about the gift-
angry with my choice of marrying the son of a Nazis solider- my father did not
attend my wedding and my mother ran out of the service screaming!

Iris Levin

Iris levin, from Rockville Centre New York, is a retired early childhood educator. She now works at Nassau County Photo Archive Center in Old Bethpage New York, restoring and caring for old photographs. Iris sees her poetry as as snapshots of life telling stories using words to create lasting images. She has been published in Long Island anthologies and has featured at various venues. Iris writes to never forget the human experience.

Kristalnacht night of broken glass

that november 9th
he remembers
seeing the raging rioters
the mobs
the ss troops
his next door neighbors
his classmates
torching destroying
everything that was jewish
little did he know
this was the beginning of the end
the opening pages
of the final solution
a horror story with
too many terrifying chapters
but despite
his deportation
his family dying
his years in the concentration canp
he lived
to joyously see
.glass break again
at his sons wedding

James Fox

James Fox writes from Lodi, California. He is married with adult children and several grandchildren. Jim’s a retired credit manager of a steel supplier, former scoutmaster, and volunteer canoe docent with a state recreation area. Several poems and over a dozen of his short stories were published in periodicals and anthologies. Haiku Journal has published several of his compositions. Inspiration for “The Postmen Came…” was from a discussion, long ago, with a German immigrant. Jim’s one regret is that the late Andy Warhol only promised each of us a few minutes of fame. Fortune would have been much better.

The Postmen Came With Big Steel Pipes

The postmen came; the postmen came with big steel pipes.
I, but a child on that day, the immigrant said.
The postmen came; the postmen came with big steel pipes.
Along our way from school that day, the world turned dark.

The postmen came; the postmen came with big steel pipes.
Memory from his past – the day the world turned dark.
They broke doors, they smashed the windows with their steel pipes.
Along our way from school today, the postmen came.

The postmen came; the postmen came with big steel pipes.
The postmen came in big black boots and postman caps.
They beat that man; shopkeeper man, with their steel pipes.
Along our way from school today, the postmen came.

The postmen came; the postmen came with big steel pipes.
“Mein Gott! Mein Gott! Please you must stop,” an old man cried.
They beat that shopkeeper. Then that old man, the same.
Along our way from school today, the postmen came.

The postmen came; the postmen came with big steel pipes.
Warning the crowd, “All Juden lovers – step away!”
The crowd stood still. No words spoken, few turned away.
Along our way from school today, the postmen came.

The postmen came; the postmen came with big steel pipes.
They broke doors, they smashed the windows with their steel pipes.
Along our way from school today, the postmen came.
The postmen came in big black boots and postman caps.

The postmen came; the postmen came with big steel pipes.
“No! No, my child,” Grosvader said, “no postmen came!
Along your way from school today, no postmen came!
Just party men; the party’s thugs in surplus caps.”

“No postmen came; no postmen came with big steel pipes.
Along your way from school no postmen came with pipes.
I called Police,” Grosvader said, “they will stop them!
Stop those party thugs; party thugs in surplus caps.”

“No postmen came; no postmen came with big steel pipes!
Police must come,” Grosvader said, “they must stop them!”
Policemen came – but they took Grosvader away.
Policemen came, along our way from school that day.

Then our postman came, came that day, with an arm-band.
A Policeman came that day, too, with an arm-band.
None turned away; salute! Obey the party’s thugs!
Along our way from school that day, the world turned dark.

Loyalty, Walking Into The Unknown – Poets Choice Anthology February, 2023

Jan Chronister

Jan Chronister is a former educator, now devoting her time to poetry and gardens. Her work appears in numerous anthologies and journals. She has authored three full-length poetry collections and thirteen chapbooks, including one focusing on the Holocaust. Jan splits her year between Maple, Wisconsin and Albany, Georgia.

Baby Boom

A year after the Allies freed the camps
my sister was born.
First of an explosion
detonated to fill empty wombs,
a bomb to obliterate the graves
of soldiers and civilians
on beaches, in rubble, in pits.
Babies to erase thoughts
of soap made from human fat.

Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice

Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice has work published in Witness, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM, Crab Orchard Review, MER, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Lodged in the Belly (Main Street Rag, 2024), bears witness to her mother’s adoption story and documents her own experience as a queer parent. A long-time high school English teacher, she lives with her wife in Ocala, Florida. Visit her on the web here.

Trying to Hear at Auschwitz

for my poetry sisters, fellow travelers in Eastern Europe

Our Polish tour guide’s voice burrs
into my headset, hard static as I roll
the volume wheel down. She stands
before the group—blue capris, blue
and white shirt, short blond hair.
Her grandparents were in Dachau, lost
their nearby land (still unreturned) to the Nazis.
She is not Jewish. Many regular Poles
were also taken she tells us in a stream
of rapid, over-correct English.

Come to me, she commands,
striding into the mass of visitors,
clipboard to chest, glancing
over her shoulder, motioning
us forward as we lag behind
crowds entering and departing
brick building after brick building
of Auschwitz #1, our packed bodies
curling and stretching into lines
snake-quick along the exhibit halls.

Don’t take pictures of the mounds of hair
like mountains of unspun wool. This darkened
room smells of sweat, damp stone.

Shoes piled in the next room—whitened prints
of toes on sandal beds, shoes tied
to mates, high heels that narrow
to a stylish point.

Our guide rushes by a poster exhibit, points
to the green triangle, worn by convicts,
and the blue. She doesn’t name
the pink, for queers like me, and she’s gone

round the corner. A woman’s Israeli flag
worn as a cape, blue and white billowing,
helps me find our group. I adjust my headphones
as we step down into a courtyard. “There’s a threshold,

and now a step, now cobbles,” my friend Kris’s voice
enters the space where we’re asked to stay silent,
where people still snap pictures of hooks used
for torture, of the execution wall.
Kris leads Elizabeth in, her white stick
tapping along the stones.

. . .

As we emerge from the crematorium,
brick cylindrical ovens, round iron doors
still intact, we seek shade from the July heat
under a lone gathering of trees.

Our guide tells us to drink lots of water
before we board the bus for our next stop
a mile down the road, Birkenau,
the extermination camp.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my headphones blare,
in Birkenau, there are no shadows.

Jesse Mavro Diamond

“Dachau” is the third of four sections from the title poem Swimming The Hellespont, by Jesse Mavro Diamond, published by Wilderness House Press, 2015.

Dachau

In the bunks at Dachau, I lay skeleton
to skeleton with my love, a Catholic girl.
Pregnant by a rape, still, my love’s
faith could not be broken.

I told her I saw in her eyes six-pointed stars.
If we are separated, she said, find me
by the light of those stars.
That day, they took her

to the ovens and I fell into a fever,
my body nothing but porous bone and fire,
my breath a dry wind rattling through
the caged branches of my chest.

I dreamed she was alive, we were healthy,
sitting in a Budapest cafe, drinking sweet wine
from long-stemmed violet glasses.
The world had not yet shifted,

there was a safe place for tender things.
My love wore a cherry beret complimenting
the deep green of her dolphin eyes.
Reaching across the table,

she took my hand, held it lightly as salt,
her fingers, ribbons of cloud.
Then she told me: there is not one world,
but many. When this one ends

and we have lost each other in the Evil Forest
rebuild your memory of me, this night, these stars,
this dream which will seem but crumbs to you.
Follow the crumbs,

bend low to gather them; eat them,
they will sustain you. They will lead you out
of the forest to the banks of the river.
There, lying in bull rushes

you will discover the life my life
gave birth to. Lift the infant high,
enter the water singing, hold the babe
close as you cross

that bloody water. I am waiting for you
here, living on this far bank in the New World.

Joan Leotta

Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. Her folktale programs (ages 5-adult) highlight food, family, and strong women. Her show,“ Louisa May Alcott” is for children and adults. Joan’s a Regional Rep for the North Carolina Writers Network. She’s taught storytelling and writing, for the North Carolina Poetry Society, NC Writers Network, and others. Internationally published as essayist, poet, short story writer, novelist, she’s a multiple nominee for Pushcart and Best of Net. Her publications include One Art, Poetry Superhighway, The Ekphrastic Review, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

Conflict

The night before,
It was scheduled to happen
I found, in my son’s backpack,
a letter from the school that
a holocaust survivor
would be speaking
while he would be at a dental
procedure that now could not
be rescheduled.
I phoned the school
to ask for a recording.
Principal seemed puzzled.
“No one’s ever asked
about that before. In fact,
about half of the families
have signed the waiver at
the bottom of the letter
to keep their children
from hearing the talk.
Several have said there is so
much conflict in the world
right now, why talk about
that old one?”
Now I was the puzzled one.
In the dental waiting room, I phoned
a local schul to obtain
permission to attend a
meeting a few days
later with the same survivor.
They say, “It will be crowded ..”
but gladly add our names to
their admit list.
My conflict issue’s been resolved
it seems, but now my heart’s
in conflict with those who think
that if such horrors remain
unspoken, no such evils
will recur.

Joe Caperna

Joe is a medical doctor and yogi. He has travelled a lot–Europe when a teen, Peru for a summer, and as a doctor in African countries, and a few other cities in Mexico and Latin America. He and people living with HIV have restarted a poetry and writing circle in San Diego. Please join us.

For The Settled

Into boxcars — a hundred where fifty would have been inhumane. Upon postcards pressed into your hand at the gate: Write. Tell them you have settled. Down the long table at Wannsee, they gave murder neutral names: Resettlement. Final Solution. Into the freight car: one suitcase. One coat. In the coat pocket, a notebook. With what he had left, Miklós Radnóti kept writing — his widow plucked the notebook from the skeleton. Between what the world knew and what it said it knew — a gap wide enough to lose six million people in. Toward the sea, the boats — ’45, ’46, ’47 — the British turning them back. To Germany. Out of the ashes, a state. Out of court with our own certainty. Also unsettled. 2000 years later, my people still ain’t settled — So — not as dust, but as light, not gracefully, nor whole — Kerplumph. We do not yet know if it is ground.

I write this for the settled.

We were Jews from Capernaum, כפר נחום —
“village of Nahum,” “village of comfort.”
We settled in Austria, then some to a mountain in Sicily.
One day, my grandmother
came down from the mountain and went to America.
We resettled in the 1920s and missed the Holocaust in Europe.
I am blood from four Europeans escaping 19th century poverty.

Kerplump is the sound the word settle makes when dropped
from a great height onto what actually happened —
and could be the settling or unsettling
of you.

Umsiedlung nach dem Osten —
Resettlement to the East:
the German word for deportation,
for the train, for Treblinka.

They handed out postcards at the platform.
Write to your family.
Tell them you have settled.

I write this for the settled —
for the living.

Never forget. Never again.
(Le’olam al tishkach. Le’olam lo od.)
A long poem. Please join me.

I. RESETTLEMENT

Into boxcars, a hundred where fifty would have been inhumane —
On the platform at Warsaw, Yom Kippur, 1940,
a notice: all Jewish residents will relocate.
The holiest day chosen. Not accident.
Upon postcards pressed into your hand at the gate:
Write. Tell them you have settled.
Down the long table at Wannsee, January 1942 —
the lake shining outside the window,
minutes recorded in careful German —
In the language of the warrant,
they gave murder neutral names:

Resettlement. Special treatment.
Evacuation. Final Solution.
Clean German. Official type.
The language of a well-run state.

This poem requires a different word.
Ungainly. Impossible to make sound dignified.
Impossible to put in memos.

Into the freight car, into the dark,
for two days. For four.
No water.

For what they could carry:
one suitcase. One coat.
In the coat pocket, sometimes,
a notebook.

II. ONE WHO COULD NOT BE SETTLED

Settle up the debt of six million names —
not all at once. Plenty of klumps.
One name. Then the next.

With what he had left —
matchbooks. Scraps. A small cross-ruled notebook
procured in Bor, Serbia —
Miklós Radnóti kept writing.

Could not be settled.
Would not put down the pen —
beaten for scribbling,
on his death march,
writing his death
into Postcard 4, his last poem,
before the guards shot him roadside
near Abda, November 9, 1944 —
the guards anxious to reach camp by nightfall.

Shot in the back of the neck.
That’s how you too will end,
I whispered to myself.
Just lie quietly.

Settled into the mass grave,
his body down with the notebook.
Two years later
his widow plucked it
from the skeleton.

He had written them, he said,
‘for reminders to future ages.’

He bequeathed us the unsettled sentence.
The poem that could not lie down.

III. SETTLING

Back through the gate, the shoes —
the mountains of shoes.
Not metaphor. Photographs confirm this.

Over the gate: Arbeit Macht Frei.
Work will make you free.
Around the perimeter, wire —
not metaphor either.

Among the living, the Muselmann —
the camp word for one
already gone, still breathing,
too broken even to lift eyes —
the one who had settled, finally,
into dying.

Settling: to calm. To rest. To put down roots.
To subside into dying.
The same word.

Against the wall, the children —
twenty of them, Hamburg, April 20, 1945,
hanged in a school basement,
one week before the last gassing,
two weeks before VE Day.

There was no single last day.

Liberation was not a shock.
It was not one blow.
It was slow.
Tank by tank. Camp by camp.
The world waking the way a person wakes
from something too large to wake from quickly —
not a shake, or snap,
but a long, grinding, mechanical arrival.

The Allied tanks rolled in one by one.
July 1944 to May 1945.
Ten camps. Then five.

And even then — there.
Not here. Over there.
A there that took years to become anything.

Auschwitz. Bergen-Belsen.
Dachau. Buchenwald.
A litany, not a date.
Finishing.

Beneath the jargon, one word survived:

malineh —

the hiding place,
from the Hebrew lina: to briefly rest.
They called survival brief resting.

Through the wire, January 27, 1945:
Soviet soldiers. Seven thousand left behind —
the ones too sick to march.
For most, no definite moment.
The camp had to be believed slowly.

Between what the world knew
and what it said it knew —
a gap wide enough
to lose six million people in.

IV. THE ROOT

Toward the sea, the boats —
’45, ’46, ’47 —
the British turning them back.
The survivors on the Exodus,
beaten with clubs in Hamburg harbor,
returned to Germany.
To Germany.

Under the Mandate, the word Palestine —
a word that meant different things
to everyone who needed it to mean something —

the Yishuv:
the Hebrew settlement, the root y.sh.b —
the same root as to sit, to stay, to rest —
the word a people had carried for two thousand years
to mean home —

the same people
whose word for home was built on settling
were being told they were being
resettled to the east.

Klumps and cracks like sha-KAHs,
cracks like nafals —
the sound of settling, sinking, falling
in three languages
toward the same earth.

Settling. Unsettling.
Depends entirely on what you’re landing on.

Out of the ashes, a state —
May 14, 1948 —
not the end of the story,
the beginning of another.
Also unsettled.

Out of court with our own certainty —
we who came after,
we who have had eighty years
to settle what happened —

V. THE LANDING

I write this for the settled —
and for Radnóti in the coat pocket.
For the ones who could not be settled.

2000 years later, my people still ain’t settled…

So —
not as dust,
but as light,
not gracefully,
nor whole —

Kerplumph.

Like sha-KAH. Like nafal.
We’ve landed somewhere.
We do not yet know
if it is ground.

José A. Alcántara

José A. Alcántara is the author of The Bitten World: Poems (Tebot Bach, 2022). His poetry and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Threepenny Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, & The Slowdown. He is the recipient of the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle and fellowships from VCCA, Willapa Bay AIR, Fishtrap, and The Sun Magazine. José lives in Pasadena, western Colorado, and wherever he happens to pitch his tent. Visit José on the web here.

Epitaph

Shot while trying to escape
is how, in the beginning, most Jews died.

In 2026, Renee Good was shot
while trying to run over ICE agents.

Alex Pretti, while trying to massacre
patriotic Americans.

In ‘44 and ‘45, Jews stopped being shot
while trying to escape

they stopped suffering
from unexpected heart attacks and strokes.

Who had the time
for such niceties?

We should be grateful
they’re still lying to us.

When they start telling the truth
it will already be too late.

Joy Gaines-Friedler

Farmington Hills, MI poet, Joy Gaines-Friedler, is a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee; and award winning author of five books of poetry, including Capture Theory, a Forward Review Indie Press, Book of The Year. Her is included in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. As well as James Crews’ The Path to Kindness, and Gerry LaFemina’s, Fantastic Imaginary Creatures: An Anthology of Prose Poems. Joy teaches poetry and memoir for non-profits in Michigan including work with male-lifers in prison, asylum seekers through Freedom House Detroit. Her latest book Secular Audacity came out in 2025 from Mayapple Press. Visit Joy on the web here.

The Polish Café

for Shiffra

Reading the menu, I am dipping in and out
of an unforgiving feeling. I am smoke
by the window disappearing then reappearing between
light and shadow. Self-conscious, dark haired,
I feel I’ll be discovered, handed a yellow star, tattooed.

Maybe, I’ll order pierogi
so much like my mother’s kreplach,
dumplings stuffed with meat, and I think
of how the selling of kosher food became a crime,
how the butchers went missing,
how the locals spit in the ghetto wells.

And right here in this family restaurant
filled with smokers and drinkers I want to stand up
and yell. I want to tell the couple at the table next to me
that my mother was only thirteen for God’s sake —
snatched away, thrown into a cattle car,
war put inside her,

that still, night whistles wake her
weeping for her mother, transferred,
like those dirty dishes, to extermination camps.

I can get crazy like this, let my imagination fill
and stuff, think I owe the dead something. Come on,
these hungry drinkers and smokers have nothing
to do with history except to live in the safety beyond it.

They’re here to eat Kielbasa.

The waitress holds a pen to pad, a menu under her arm.
Was it her mother who turned-in my starving uncle —
watched him shot for trying to steal a potato
from her compost pile? And just when I’m thinking,
Christ,

the day’s become a ripped shirt, a terrible hunger,
forgive, forgive, orders are orders, just order,
I notice above the bar a portrait of John Paul II,
his cotton face, his hand raised in a gesture of what?
Humility? Finite Distance? He blesses this place

like one who sees life in terms of them and us,
as one who comes out on top in the knowledge of that.
I consult my menu, smell nutmeg infused onion
and the repulsive stench of burning flesh.

I order potato pierogi without gravy, tell myself,
just finish your dinner and get out.

Published in Poetica Magazine, 2014
In Dutiful Heart, 2013 – Joy Gaines Friedler, (Broadkill River Review Press)

Joy Lebof

A child of the 60s, Joy is a born and bred Londoner. Married, she has a son and a daughter. and is currently living just outside Leeds, in West Yorkshire. Her pen name is Simcha Lebovitch. A teaching assistant by training and of long experience, she began to write poetry as a vehicle to help her pupils with their understanding of phonics. She has had poems published on Poetry Kit, in their publications, Lunch and On Course as well as in Poetry Super Highway’s Holocaust editions, and at times contributes to poetry threads on X.

O Lord, Save My Soul From False Lips

From A Deceitful Tongue (Psalm 120: Verse 2)

Never Again is a mere phrase today
rabid hatred the fodder that fuels the fires
of crazed genocidal desires

No sane rhyme or reason needed
where money plays out its sticky net
Programs for the young and old

fixes thinking with the poison apple
of mankind’s darkest hatred
thoughts swilled from the trough of their Goto Source

They take on the yoke of no true friends of theirs
though if they don’t do the hard graft
they won’t know until the trap snaps shut

around them truth an inconvenience
where it splits them from the pack they prowl with
Better to be bad and part of the crowd than outcasts

Or so they think until they find it’s too late
and those who rule the roost come for them too
It never ends with the Jews

Judith R. Robinson

Judith R. Robinson is an editor, teacher, fiction writer, poet and visual artist. A summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, she is listed in the Directory of American Poets and Writers. She has published 100+ poems, five poetry collections, one fiction collection; one novel; edited or co-edited eleven poetry collections. Teacher: Osher at Carnegie Mellon University. Her newest poetry/art collection is The Painted Poem, Forest Woods Media, 2026. Her last gallery exhibit was The Art of Friendship at the Jewish American Museum, Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania. She won First Prize in The Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition, Voices Israel, 2025.

After The Shoah

A young woman found a Nazi’s knife.
She sliced through bags of grain
piled at a forgotten bunker
strange burlaped mounds of wheat
she opened and scattered,
flinging handfuls of the mealy stuff
into the warm, rushing wind.

Each hardy piece pierced
a small spot of ground;
chaff at edges melted away
in every generation;
but the sturdy core was undestroyed.
The hardest nubs
ground into the dregs
climbed and fastened
climbed up buoyant
vines her daughter’s daughters
lived to harvest.

Judy Lewis

I write because it is my way of connecting to my Jewish past and in the hope that my poetry will do the same for readers. My poems have appeared in many publications and won awards. My older poems are in my book, “Heart Beats & Soul Sounds.” What I enjoy most is reading aloud and seeing that I have touched something in listeners. I am most proud of having been named Poet-in-Residence at Temple Israel of Catskill (NY), my synagogue, and I continue to write whenever I am so moved.

Never Young

When she was eight
Maryam danced
in her new white toe shoes
with long streaming satin ribbons.

When she turned twelve
Minka felt her first kiss
from the red-headed boy
who lived just down the road.

In her seventeenth year
Danska graduated from gymnasium.
She received an award for her poetry.
Her mother could not restrain tears.

Broynka was engaged at eighteen.
Her young man was a tailor’s apprentice.
They would marry in the springtime.
Loving him gave her a warm pink glow.

A klezmer band played at Basha’s wedding.
Family and friends came to celebrate.
The bride wore her grandma’s gown.
The scent of gardenias was everywhere.

Yudit’s baby was born in May.
At the bris, they named him Hirsh.
Surely he would grow tall like his father
and be learned like his grandpa.

But the truth must be told.
Maryam never learned to dance.
Minka never felt her first kiss.
Danska never started school.

Broynka had no time to love.
Basha never smelled gardenias
and Yudit’s baby was no one’s namesake.

Maryam and Minka, Danska and Broynka,
Basha and Yudit, died in the fiery ovens
of Bergen Belsen.
None had a chance to live.

Julian Alper

Julian Alper, of Tiberias in Israel, is President of Voices Israel Group of Poets in English and has had poems published in Voices Israel Anthologies, The Deronda Review, IAWE’s arc31, The Jerusalem Report, The Lehrhaus and other literary journals. He photographs nature in Israel and blogs about it (https://natureofisrael.blogspot.com/). And in his spare time, he works as a hi-tech consultant.

Humanity?

The sky is pale and colourless
the clouds weeping
the wind wailing woefully
the sun won’t show its face.
Tearful trees, mournful, sway to and fro
crestfallen birds quiet
perched on branches out of view
forlorn flowers listless, almost lifeless
sullen animals skulking
not knowing where to put themselves.
And where is humankind?

The human race silent
while angels on high are crying
in uncontrollable anguish
and God Himself is grieving for lost humanity.

Previously published in the Deronda Review 2025

Karen Marker

Karen Marker is an Oakland, California poet and a retired school psychologist whose writing has appeared as part Jewish services and in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including Calul, The MacGuffin, The Monterey Poetry Review, Slant, Wordpeace and New Verse News. Her first book of flash memoir/ poetry, Beneath the Blue Umbrella, was published by Finishing Line Press in spring of 2025. She is in process of completing a full-length book of poetry of protest and resilience in response to news of the past year. Visit Karen on the web here.

At the Yizkor Memorial Service
on Yom Kippur

-Reflections on Western Lithuania

As the afternoon light streams through the synagogue
windows onto the rabbis and choir in white

we repeat the words in the prayer book
to those who perished in far off forests
and lonely fields lost to the eyes of grieving kin

and I am back in Silantai, climbing the path
up the hill through pine forests,
finding memorial plaques almost hidden on a ledge,
reminding us of those marched here
to be buried in pits they dug themselves.

I am back in Kelme searching for a graveyard
so hidden that even our guide
Simonas needs to ask for directions.

At the end of the dirt road, at the edge
of a farmer’s field small dogs barks,
cows graze. Grasses scratch my legs,
thistles sting among the mess
of fallen markers.

When we walk away tiny frogs leap out
of the rain-soaked clover. Storks circle
the heavy skies. We clearly see a rainbow.

And then I am back to this room of prayer.

Kate Landishaw

Kate Landishaw writes and paints as she meanders through a treasure house of words and art supplies in a Greenville, SC studio. Her career has included copywriting & editing, teaching writing & visual art, and corporate writing and design work. She most recently won the visual art prize in Equinox Literary Magazine Vol 10, and the Dawn Powell Alumni Poetry award from her Alma Mater. Both her poetry & painting appear in the April 1st 2026 “Abyss & Apex”, and she’s been published in Geelong Writers ekphrastic challenge. Visit Katie on the web here.

Aging Tears

Brutality reigned
Long ago only in years.
Memory still hard.

Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca

In a career spanning over four decades, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca has taught English in Indian colleges, AP English in an International School nestled in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in India, and French and Spanish in private schools in Canada. Her poems are featured in various journals and anthologies, including the four issues of the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English. Kavita has authored two collections of poetry, ‘Family Sunday and Other Poems’ and ‘Light of The Sabbath’, and a Centennial Celebration volume “Nissim Ezekiel Poet & Father.” She lives in Calgary, Canada. Visit Kavita on Facebook.

Ladies and Gentlemen Lunch is Served

After Tadeusz Borowski’s ‘This way for the Gas Ladies and Gentleman.’

The well-groomed student
Formal yellow jacket, white shirt, black pants bow tie
Starched white napkin over his left arm
Announces lunch at the College of Catering
Where I teach English in a pristine environment,
‘Ladies and Gentlemen lunch is served.’ he says
No pistol by his side, no baton thrust into my ribs
No barking command for immediate compliance.

A flash of white sarees, black pants and white shirts
Move in animated chatter
Professional dress as per the code
Rushing up the stairs to the dining room
Following the tempting aromas.
Taking our seats quickly, we study the menu
Devour the three course French meal
Served to us in style, the company delightful
No food fights necessary, portion sizes are generous.

A walk around the campus
Works off the meal and it’s back to work.
No guards or dogs to chase us
The walk is leisurely, pleasant
The hot Bombay sun the only thing at my back
I imagine the barbed wire around the campus
My imagination cast back to prison walls
Only beautiful trees and flowers bloom happily.
Here by the friendly gate.

Borowski lived history, I read its horror
Dazed people stumbling out of cattle cars
Stripped naked headed for the gas chambers
Unaware of their gruesome destination
Unlike me headed for a sumptuous meal.
What evil could devise this violent plan?

I want to give away Borowski’s collection
With the haunting title, but to whom?
Everyone wants to read something edifying
So many are in denial
Survivors don’t lie, make up stories.

The plateful of food before me now could feed two
I put some back into the pot, remembering
The children starved by hatred
The women beaten violently
The man calling out to his God
His mouth dry, his thirst unslaked.

When white smoke emerges from the chimneys
Here in the winter landscape
I see the blackened sky
The birds fly frantically for fresh air
Trees turn to the color of ash
Some birds disappear and I weep
When I can’t see them.
The six million blur my vision.

What violence prompts people to herd others
Like cattle over a cliff?
Violent thoughts stirring in a violent mind.
The camps an invention of cruel machinations
The journey the deliberate torment of hell.

What violence urges change the color of red blood
To the color of inhumanity in the arteries
What heart beats with sounds of violence?
Psychology proposes answers
It will not return the six million.

I cry out to the oppressors with Borowski

*Your country — a stock market transaction  and hoarded sacks of grain. My country — the gas chamber and the Auschwitz flame.

Two Countries – Poetry of Tadeusz Borowski
(Published in the Jewish Writing Project and Usawa Literary Review)

Kevin LeMaster

Kevin’s poems have been found at SheilaNaGig online, Gyroscope Review, Hive Avenue Literary Journal, Main Street Rag, Barely South Review, Mantis, Amistad and others. Kevin Has work forthcoming in River and South Review in Winter 2025. Kevin is the author of two chapbooks. “Mercy” (Arroyo Seco Press, 2023) and “In The Throes Of Beauty (Finishing Line Press, 2024). Kevin is a three time Pushcart Prize nominee.

Survivor

When the train arrives, and the travel-worn
disembark, a small girl, glistening with rain,
tugs the tattered coat of a woman who, like others,
evaded the chambers where many choked
on the heaviness of their own breath, their gasps
lost to the warm wind of an all consuming fire.

some were bludgeoned and battered, some received
a bullet for their faithfulness, some for lack of food,
expired like the end of a song, the needle of a record
scratching, its length, much shorter than the one
they used to inject the poison after begging to die
wasn’t enough.

this girl looks up at the sunken, hollowed-out eyes
and the smooth bald scalp hidden by a ratty
hat, laces her fingers into her bony digits
and without a word, walks with her
to the identification area, where she
will reclaim her name,

where she will never again
be just a number.

Lance Mazmanian

Word/visual Lance Mazmanian: Random House with Harlan Ellison, got coffee as payment. 84+ publications since 2025, Fiction On the Web UK, Lothlórien (Paris), more. 2026 Pushcart nom. Nicknamed “Lance Vegas!” by Janusz Kamiński; screenwriting gigs coming in 2026. Leonard Cohen (RIP) wanted chapbooks with Mazmanian. Til “Scrapbook File” imploded. Learn more here.

Dachau Glid

In Dachau, streak of cold wind through
dead trees and paint make flag and rhythm to
Nandor Glid with hot stones under feet spreading all
around as reminders and banners to what happened
long ago once wrapped with silence, til the end
which came as spiral move, down so slow, and today
is felt
with “Den Lebenden zur Mahnung” on sculpture and memory and a walk
by fell past administrator buildings that crushed life
like soul of black light in a place coffee and
sausage once ran well for men and women on full days of moving
deaths of shriveled bodies from impossible housing to
cremation chimneys across the
yard, and
now we hope for “Never Again” and know it’s a thing
to guard and learn and live with old vile sunbeams
from hell in ash and the evil
melted
like fallen stars, again.

Larissa Shmailo

Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic. Shmailo’s recent novel is Sly Bang (Spuyten Duyvil); her first novel is Patient Women (BlazeVOX). Her poetry collections are Dora/Lora (Unlikely Books), Medusa’s Country (MadHat), #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books), In Paran (BlazeVOX), the chapbook A Cure for Suicide (Červená Barva Press), and the e-book Fib Sequence (Argotist EBooks). Shmailo’s poetry albums are The No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. She lives in New York City. Visit Larissa on the web here.

Kalinivka

Kalinivka
Kalinivka, Kalinivka: The ground over the mass graves is hard, the soft grass grows. The Ukrainian Guard, boy and girl, make love, happy to be alive. In the Ukraine, collectivized, they walked on corpses. And the Germans alone protest, her father tells the girl. Siberia, purges. Like the Irish, their parents collaborate; Hitler fights the Russian, English masters of their rural lands. Now here, Kalinivka. The mass graves crack with green life. 41 forgotten in the summer of ’43. She is 19, pregnant soon.

Prymsl
By 1943, the ghetto holds the few not deported, living in tunnels, basements, caves, the hiding ones, the ones who know. All the rest to camps in Poland, Germany, or dead. The boy no longer likes the girl, but through her, he got his Kapo job. Even his mother says, marry. Have a child. The female Kapo bears a boy through the camps, Prymsl, through the unknown tombs of Poland, the unmarked graves, the walls marked with Jewish blood, the bloody broken nooses, the dark rain. She wants the boy to marry her, he makes excuses, says, the Germans won’t permit. That the child will die soon after the war, that she will beat her head upon the grave until it bleeds, that sorrow is unknown. The death of the Jewish children is unseen. Poland is always green.

Dora
Germany, Harz Mountains. From Erfurt to the extension camp, Buchenwald’s new Dora Northausen. Here they spare the rope to hang. The Germans turn now, now SS. The war is failing. Fewer the slaves to command, the girl, heavy with child, translates, working, starving, carried in rail carts for miles to build the V-2s. A rachitic Jewess cleans the barracks, the boy’s eye turns with lust; he gives her bread. All are hungry, the Germans too. The Allies bomb the industrial camp. Liberation. Rows of corpses, the eternal rows, line Northausen. The Germans are forced to respect the dead. Kalinivka, Prymsl, the unseen dead, now here in respectful symmetry, no longer piled in heaps, but rectangular, marked. The flowers grow, the burghers sing, “After every December, there comes a new Spring.

Laurie Kuntz

Laurie Kuntz is a four time Pushcart Prize nominee and two time Best of the Net Nominee. In 2024, she won a Pushcart Prize. She published seven books of poetry. Her latest book published in 2025 is Balance, published by Moonstone Arts Center. In 2026, her 8th book, Shelter In Place will be published by Shanti Arts Press. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College. Her themes come from working with Southeast Asian refugees, living as an expatriate in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Brazil, and raising a husband and son. Visit Laurie on the web here.

Winter Baths

In pine tubs, the numbers tattooed
across her wrist appears to melt in steam.
The dried skin flakes from her body,
each cell coats the water in frothed memory.

Her fingernails have the edge
of a woman who snips away at everything
that grows past a clean point of order.

Her commanding voice smothers
into an accented whisper
when she calls relatives lost
in the denizens of the mind.

Her spirit weathers this shadowed landscape
in the prompt of a past relived in uneasy sleep.
Her body scrubbed to a bright red; a glaring memory.

She lets me wash her hair, knotting grey,
then touches my long strands spiraling in the humidity
and mutters, “The color of Rebecca’s…”
Her younger sister, a name that loiters in the dry bone of memory,
a murmur in the tunneled halls of her house
heavily scented with ammonia and wood polish.

Winter in Treblinka, from a line of girls
they pulled Rebecca to the showers,
passed over my grandmother, over a chorus of screams.

From the creases in her forehead, I brush strands of hair,
pull them into a tight knot of silver,
the light dims to a sound of crickets.

In the chilling air we slide lower
into the heated tubs, memory’s taught muscle loosens,
my grandmother wipes the folds beneath her eyes,
slaps her hand across the night air, to rid it of crickets,
a chorus of screams that time cannot revise.

LaVern McCarthy

Lavern McCarthy has published five books of poetry, seven books of short stories and three journals. Her poems have been published in Capper’s Weekly, Home Life Magazine, Metasteller, Midnight Magazine, Stygian Lepus, California Poppy and many more. she is a life member of Poetry Society of Texas. Her poem was nominated for the Pushcart award in 2023. She lives in Blair Oklahoma.

Ghetto Music

That Father’s violin might not be lost
when war began, with evil on the way,
he kept it with him through the Holocaust.
He played it in the ghetto every day.
It calmed the dreaded thoughts of pain and doom,
such music as would make the angels smile.
The people listened raptly in the gloom.
They sang along, rejoicing for a while.

My father left his violin for me.
I cannot play it well, but this I know.
My son has all the talent that can be
inherited. Each time he plies the bow,

exquisite harmony in every score,
the souls of those who perished sing once more.

Linda Crate

Linda M. Crate (she/her) is a Pennsylvanian writer whose poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has seventeen published chapbooks the latest being: only the future knows (Alien Buddha Press, November 2025).

“never again”

i will never understand
the evil that walks in this
world,

“never again”
was supposed to mean
never again for
anyone;

but as i see all of the
families and beautiful people
lost in palestine my heart aches—

i don’t understand how
nothing was learned
from the holocaust;

i don’t want to repeat
all the vile and repulsive things
in history that we should’ve
long since righted—

i watch society regress into
an evil it promised to do
never again.

Lorraine Schein

Lorraine Schein, a NY writer, has published in Strange Horizons, Vallum, Scientific American, Michigan Quarterly, and the anthologies Strange Fire: Jewish Voices from the Pandemic, Underland Arcana and Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath. Her books include The Futurist’s Mistress (poetry, Mayapple Press) and The Lady Anarchist Cafe (stories and poems), available from Autonomedia and Amazon.

Survivors

Spring’s green card migrates me
past the icy wall of winter,
over dreams’ border to my childhood
in the scorned outer borough
only destined for burning

where I sat alone
yearning for an escape
that never came–
for explanation and deliverance from
my mother’s Holocaust nightmares.

My father took a German name
because of the immigrant quota
to cross over on a ship
from the refugee camps.

His sisters had already
passed death’s dark border.

It snows in these pasts
that dissolve into my future.

One day we’ll seek safe transport
to the refuge of the sky;
the sky has no quota for stars.

First published in Strange Fire: Jewish Voices from the Pandemic, 2021.

Lyn Davidson

Lyn Davidson is a multilingual journalist, poet, and tour guide based in San Francisco. She served as associate editor of the Heritage Florida Jewish News from 2004 to 2011. Today, she can often be found in Mexico and the Czech Republic. In November 2025, she created and led a historical walking tour called Prague Through the Eyes of Its Poets, in celebration of the city’s annual Den Poezie event honoring Czech national poet Karel Hynek Mácha.

Distortion #60 (1933)

After André Kertész

our bodies
our only bread
we knead them
moving our hands in spirals
tired hands
to try ||
we need ||
to hold ||
bread
to bring it to our mouths
the dance
the folds of our bodies
we dance
in the maw of the monster

its one eye
a camera
a glamour || a blink
from the bottom
of the abyss

the film on the water
bread on the surface
faithless glimmer
water || the dance floats
the black lake || a shawl
spread out for a feast
under the eye of the monster

your face is a shield
a shield from your monsters
we dance on the lake
we break our bread ||
bodies break
they fall

in the depths of the lake
this love has teeth

Marc Frazier

Marc Frazier has published poetry in nearly a hundred fifty journals. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry, he has also been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two “Best of the Nets.” His four books are available online. Marc has also published memoir pieces, photographs, essays, fiction, flash fiction, and essays. His latest poetry book If It Comes To That recently won Silver in the Florida Writers Association contest. Marc, an LGBTQ author in Fort Lauderdale can be found on his website www.marcfrazierwrites.com. X @marcfrazier45, Insta mcfj45.

Seeing Those Black and White Films and Photos

—Nie wieder

first time:
bony bodies with caved-in faces
(tomb-ready)
cram wooden bunks
and defy the physics of space

starving children in mud

striped pajamas
wasting bodies
sex organ shadows

barbed wire
a bulldozer pushing
and re-pushing skeletons into a hole

after viewing many times:
……………………smell of urine-soaked straw on their cattle car’s floor

……………………scarecrows rush a crumb tumbling from a careless hand

……………………bargains with guards: the weight of complicity
……………………how to eat dark
……………………a stolen secret: hidden crust of bread

in dreams:
……………………the projector’s whir
……………………its sudden silence
……………………and
……………………the sound of something
……………………being broken
……………………broken again

……………………and broken again

Margot Block

Margot Block has been published in Zygote Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Juice, Voices, the Collective Consciousness, Grub Street, Cholla Needles, the Black Scat Review, Blank Spaces, Bakwa Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, the Taj Mahal Review and the online journals BlazeVox, Kaleidoscope Online, Kritikos, the Blotter Rag, Brief Wilderness, Scissors and Spackle, the Bombay Review, Oddball Magazine, the Big Windows Review, the American Diversity Report, the Lothlorien Poetry Journal blog, Rusty Truck, Literary Yard, Cajun Mutt Press, the Poppy Road Review, Dark Winter Literary Magazine, Travel Artist’s Hub, Voices & Visions Literary Journal, Chrysalis Arts & Literature Journal and others.

The Frank Experience

how do recall vividly the experience of death
is it among the emaciated thousands of the skeletal shape of life
do you count the moments leading up to the gassing of five million people
where a pretty boy says the numbers do not add up to genocide
you say I do not understand the white garb
bringing a Jewish oppression to be more than economic insecurity
the creation of the first ghettos growing out of building up of white rage
from one World War to another and yes Hitler whom they called a genius of Mein Kampf
how the modern ear turns away from the bleak picture of our most recent holocaust
numerous names on memorials who have been lost in the shuffle of racism at its most developed worst
how do we recall this experience to our daughters who will grow and burn and rage and then sleep
it is a sweetened kind of justice that our dear Anne Frank will outshadow Adolf and his SS and all his cruel machineries
it is almost as though I should have written this poem twenty years ago
when first there was passion and the first reading of a diary meant perish along with the last vestiges of Jewishness and could there be more
in the end our last vision is of a girl torn from family to die her last death in a camp filled with impoverished Jews and no more or less than that
that is the last horrific moment of the genesis of the first white supremacist in cloth
where there will always be a birth for those views, that white rage
and idle time on his hands

Martha Kaplan

Martha Kaplan is a former teacher, child therapist, and activist. She is the recipient of the Zylpha Mapp Robinson Award, two Editor-in-Chief Awards from Möbius the Poetry Magazine, as well as awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and is a Pushcart nominee. She is widely published in both journals and anthologies. She’s a native of Seattle who has lived in Houston and Chicago, among other places, and who is now lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Her book, Wind Eyes, is forthcoming in 2026 from Mad Hat Press.

Stolpersteine

Berlin

The stones lie here
set in the foundation of streets and sidewalks,
in front of buildings, or sites of former buildings,
where those deported and murdered
had lived, or worked, or studied.
They are pedestrian, ordinary, easy to pass, easy to miss,
simple to step on.

They are meant to make you stumble
to lean down to look,
to bow to the names inscribed in the burnished
brass pounded over small concrete blocks
and buffed against the pervasive gray
of the cobbles.

ten centimeters squared
set slightly higher under your feet
a name, a date, a fate

Previously published: Möbius The Poetry Magazine, 29th Anniversary Issue, 2011.

Melissa Mendelson

Melissa R. Mendelson is a horror, science-fiction and dystopian author and poet. She has two publications with Wild Ink Publishing. One is a prose poetry collection, This Will Remain With Us, and the other is a short story collection, Stories Written On Covid Walls. Melissa R. Mendelson lives in Monroe, NY. Visit Melissa on the web here.

We Were Not The Lucky Ones

We were not the lucky ones,
but should we even dare say, lucky
because luck packed up its bags
and chased after Karma,
who just threw the towel in.
And we were left behind in the dirt,
cutting ourselves on self-made rocks,
wondering how the hell did things get so bad,
but we won’t look at ourselves.
We’ll just look at the clock.
2073, and it’s laughing at us
because the writing is on the wall.
And we still don’t want to see,
but we see in fragments now,
broken mirrors, distorted vision.
What is real anyway,
and why is everything insane?
No one’s doing anything,
but standing there, not saying a word.
Is Karma coming back?
When did our luck run out?
We are so far, far from the lucky ones,
even if we are just trying to survive.

Michael Burch

Michael R. Burch lives in Nashville, Tennessee. His poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into 23 languages, incorporated into three plays and four operas, and set to music, from swamp blues to classical, 86 times by composers.

Childless

for the mothers of the Holocaust

Mightier than Atlas,
she shoulders the weight
of one fallen star.

Michael Pedretti

Michael Pedretti lives in Williamsburg, Virginia. He is the author of several books of poetry and memoir, including Twenty Poems Written in 2020, The Universe and I, Time to Journey Home, and The Book of Agnes. His work has appeared in American Theater, New Millennium Writings, Sybil, CC&D, the Mime Journal and more. He is currently writing Volume XI of The Story of Our Stories, a twelve‑volume project tracing an immigrant family across centuries.

Frank Shatz

Looking Back @ 99

Out of Parkan
Came George,
A printer, poet, forger, and
Frank, sporting a Levente
Decorated with a Fire Cross,

Carrying forged passports
Fresh off George’s printer
Concealed in a bag filled
With a kilo of white flour and
Half a dozen Napoleons
As ready bribes.

He made some generals a little richer
Thousands of refugees safer
A few less hungry.

Once delivering
A suitcase of gold
To Adolf Eichman
Ransoming hundreds
Earmarked for his gas chambers.

He married wise,
Escaped,
Wrote three thousand columns,
Interviewed the finest
And the brightest,

Made the case for kindness
And understanding.

Some will remember him
For outwitting the Arrow Cross,
Escaping from a slave-labor camp,
Navigating through
Stalin’s paranoia playground—

Escaping his home country—
Once upon a time a democracy—
With little more than
The clothes on his back
And a stole away copy
Of his bible,
“The Anatomy of Peace,”

Persisting solely on wit
Ingenuity and instinct.

Others for his ubiquitous beret,
The Reves Center at William and Mary,
Originating the Frank Shatz Award,
Writing “Reports from a Distant Place,”
Appearing on PBS.

No doubt, there are some
Who will wax over
The catalogue of the
Powerful and famous
He befriended and interviewed:

Winston Churchill,
Henry Kissinger,
Madeleine Albright,
Margaret Thatcher,
Among the hundreds.

Looking back,
Frank wrote,

“I think delivering
those fake IDs
to people in hiding
is the most enduring legacy I will leave behind.”

Michal Mendelsohn

Michal is a Rabbi, attorney, teacher, vocalist, published poet with about 28 poems published. One of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart prize, 2 were translated into Chinese in a publication called “Blue Sky.” Her first book of poems is “Chasing Moonbeams” and her Memoir is on steroids as it includes 20 poems that relate-entitled RABBI, YOUR CLEAVAGE IS SHOWING– on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and bookshop.org. She is working on another poetry book called DROWNING IN THE DESERT, which contains poems, prayers and all things relating to Judaism and Israel.

Cloak and Dagger

Inside Dachau
a piece of holy, dirty cloth
torn, shredded, burned
beyond recognition;
tales untold
songs unsung
suffering the flak of history
like dirt ground into threads,
woven like rough burlap
like the knapsack of a donkey,
burrowed in the mud untouched.

Someone in the sky
attacks a threadbare carpet
hanging over my piece of earth
and I am the dust in the rug.

Is that someone God?
There is no God in Dachau.

Mike Everley

Mike Everley lives in Swansea, Wales, UK. He has been writing for many years and has had poetry, short stories and articles published in numerous publications and online. He was a member of both the NUJ and the Society of Authors before retirement. Now, a silver scribbler, he devotes his time to creative writing. He was Seventh Quarry Press Poet of the Month for February 2026. Note: In the UK, Holocaust Memorial Day is in January. This poem was written after attending that event and helping out.

Genocide

As I stood in a doorway
handing out programmes
at the Holocaust Memorial,
I couldn’t help but wonder,
as people rushed passed
down the tunnel
into the auditorium,
of those millions passing
down other tunnels
into gas chambers
thinking they were showers,
while an orchestra
played calming music
to prevent panic.
Fox trots and classical works
by Schubert, Mozart and Brahms
pervading the heavy air.
Genocide on an industrial scale
requires compliance
for death’s conveyance
to proceed in orderly fashion.
No human emotion to clog
its ruthless gears.
No empathy to slow
its inevitable progress.
Jews, Romany, Trade Unionists
all caught in its iron jaws.
Outside a flower perishes
a casualty of human ash.

Miriam Jaskierowicz Arman

Internationally renowned Vocal Pedagogue, Author, Lecturer, Poet, Artist, with numerous publications in English, Italian, and German, and winner of many international recognitions including the “Switzerland Literary Prize “ (2023) for the poetry publication ‘L’Urlo dell’Anima’ (Scream of the Soul) and the “Premio Internazionale Virdimura “(University Catania 2016) as well as special recognition by the “Società Italiano di Storia della Medicina”, (Rome) for her innovative works in Vocal Pedagogy, Autism, Antisemitism. etc. (www.miriamjaskierowiczarmanfineart.com) She is the Founder of the ‘National Completion of Poetry for the Shoah and Peace ‘(2021/26) in Italy. She Returned to Israel July 2026.

Wedding Day June 24.1945

Bergen Belsen

Bright, translucent sun today.
Hurry, it’s your wedding day…
The warmth of the sun burns away all evil,
Washes away tears, sorrow, melancholy.
Light surrounds OUR feast, we will rejoice!
Today, my very special day.
Birds sing melodies of spring
Trees trembling, soft June breezes –
A fairy tale…one thousand and one nights
Mila Weds Today!
How young she is, how beautiful….
Benumbed, eyes shrouded in pain – a smile!
Distracting thoughts, far away.
Shadows of the cruel lot…Camps, resettlements,
selections – sadness, sobbing, fear, deprivation –
Hunger, torment, emptiness, humiliation.
So frail, in her magic chair… images fade.
“Mother, father, sister, family – (screams her soul )
Where? Where are you?
Abandoned, deserted, alone….
No! No bitterness today, no tears!
Music!  drown my sorrow.
Laugh clown at world around you; PAPA ALWAYS SAID!
Let sunshine smooth your furrowed brow
Squash that worm of bitterness–Laugh!
My G_D Don’t judge me please.
I WANT TO LIVE, be happy, carefree and forget!

A voice, drifting on angels’ wings wipes her tears:
“You will be happy! your road paved with roses
DEINE MATUNE VON DEM OIBESCHTER _(Your gift from G-D)

Adapted from my mother’s writings Mila Jaskierowicz

Moe Shapiro

Born in the City of The Angels 72 years ago, he is a mystic, poet, lyricist, and stay-at-home dad, npw living on Ramaytush Ohlone land in the Presidio of San Francisco. Torn apart and reconstructed like Dionysus Zagreus on a number of occasions, he has nonetheless managed to work as a Teamster, an astrologer, a marketing researcher, and a book cataloger. None of this defines him, as he is undefinable, as is every other human. His main purpose in life is to spread this truth. See Moe’s book “Pots of sun” here.

Heart to Heart

When did I first know? I was only five when I began
to question the existence of our ancestral God. Maybe
it was before that because it feels like I’ve always known

People, millions of people it seemed
wanted to kill me, burn my body, or
bury me neatly in a mass grave
People who’d never met me, didn’t know me
People I’d never hurt, never laughed at
never even known existed, but they
blamed me for all the world’s ills. It was
my genetic code you see, the one that differed
from theirs by, at most, a tenth of a percent

Most of my friends aren’t Jewish
I don’t know if they quite understand
how this knowledge affects a Jewish kid
Some of us get fearful, looking over their
shoulders, always wondering what people
are thinking about them
Some get angry, ‘don’t trust those goys!’
take every opportunity to resent
Me? I got sad and mystified
How can someone just kill their own heart?

I was forty when I visited the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, D.C., it’s neither a pretty nor an
impressive building, and why should it be?
It’s not a monument to anything pretty or impressive

I passed through the gates, “Arbeit Macht Frei“
written above, like at Auschwitz, the Nazis lie
to those it wished to die
I progressed soberly, solemnly through the exhibits
the sober, solemn catalog of almost unimaginable events
of horrific heart-killing crimes. I was stoic, the
anguish I felt let out in sober and solemn breaths

Finally, come to the last room, a different catalog
of the righteous gentiles. I picked a card at random
the story of Chrysostomos of Zakynthos
Greek Orthodox bishop of a small Ionian island
The Nazi governor called him into his office
pushed a paper and pen across the desk
“Make me a list of all the Jews on this island!”
Chrysostomos of Zakynthos took the pen and paper
wrote his own name down and pushed it back.

Then it was, then
when one human heart
beat as every human heart
then at last I wept, great sobbing gasps
like I wept the day my father died

Nina Glueckselig

Nina Glueckselig is from New York City now living in Cleveland, Ohio. She studied writing with Frank Bergon at Vassar College and with Luis Urrea at the Harvard University School of Continuing Education. She is a member of Larissa Shmailo’s Writing Resilience Workshop. She has published in the Writing Resilience anthology and the Holocaust Remembrance issue of the Poetry Super Highway. Her subjects include being the daughter of Holocaust survivors, mental health and the current political situation. She will participate in a panel at the Leo Baeck Institute, where she will speak about her experience as a daughter of Holocaust survivors.

What I know

I know how to make something out of nothing.
Where there is a blank piece of paper
I add color, shape, and texture.

I know how to learn notes off a page.
Creating sounds out of silence.

I know how to put pen to paper
The fountain pen
smoothly gliding over the page.
I tell stories.
I like graph paper and a moleskine notebook
like my uncle Fritz did.
He carried a worn briefcase
with books and poems wherever he went.
He never wrote on a computer.
His letters were tall and shaky.

I know how to magically crochet
waxed cord, shiny sterling beads
and sparkling gemstones into a
twinkling circle of light.

I can take portobello mushrooms,
carrots, lentils and potatoes
and make a casserole.
Roast chicken with garlic, onion, dill,
lemon and soy sauce.

Will this even matter?

I can sit on a shower chair
and wash myself with vanilla infused gel.
I dress every morning.
In the summer a tank and leggings
in the winter thick tights and a corduroy dress,
embroidered suede boots.
I adorn myself with a necklace
of charms.
A blue and greenlampwork glass bead reminiscent of a cactus
in the center.
A silver lotus flower, dragonfly, bee, owl, bird,
a bronze mandala.

I know how to create beauty.
People tell me I am creative
and do so many things.
I have no choice.
I could not survive without it.
Especially now.

Will all this even matter?

What I know is how to love.

My children.

My solid, analytic, brilliant, active
once curly haired, first born.
My creative, sensitive, empathic, wistful
younger child.

We stumbled together
through childhood and adolescence.
Now they are grown.

The older argues legal cases.
He seeks justice.
The younger roasts strawberries
infused with lime and hibiscus.
I never knew that was even a thing.

What I know,
is that I loved Ita and Leo,
and my childhood room
with the Steiff lion
and the books I clutched close to me at night.
Blueberries for Sal
Where the Wild Things Are
Yertle the Turtle.
Anne of Green Gables when I was older.
I sat in a corner,
between my bed and the bookcase
reading love comics,
solving math problems.

I grew up
in the absence
of flagrant persecution,
in what felt like a democracy.

What I know
My parents lost everything,
My father and uncle arriving in New York
with eight dollars between them.
They walked up Fifth Avenue to
the Frick on their first day.

What I know
I loved the scratchy sound
of my father’s rapidograph pen
on paper.
A large pen and ink drawing
of a man drinking coffee,
reading the New York Times
with the headline,
Monet’s Garden’s Bloom again.
A tank looming in the background.
The peace of life in his adopted country,
the memory of war.

He drew me looking at
the barracks of Auschwitz in the distance.
A clown in the arms of a baboon,
one shoe off, one shoe on.

So often a New York City water tower
in his pictures.
A Cubist rendition of the streets
of Washington Heights,
a portrait of himself in the crowd.

I wait for spring,
after a day when I look
at snow clinging to the trees
outside my sunroom window.

What I know is that spring will come,
and then the long, hot, moist days of summer.
I will watch the hibiscus
bloom its yellow flower every morning,
drop it by afternoon.
A new one erupts the next day.

What I know is that I can reconstruct my life.
I can come back from hard times.
Create a house with granite countertops
in the kitchen,
a buttercup yellow bedroom,
a living room with a velour couch and leather chair.
I coax small plants into big ones.

What I know
is that I don’t know what is going to happen.

In Ukraine do flowers bloom?

Partha Sarkar

Partha Sarkar, a Bengali graduate, born in West Bengal, 1967, writes poems to protest against human’s oddities and its cruelties to nature.

A new normal in the stable death

The hunger is in the midnight. The breathing of a skeleton. Long ago there was
A well in the city where thirsty crows used to come to drink nectar.
Gone are the days. Here comes a sad postcard with a postman who has forgotten
All addresses he used to remember.

The white cellphone. The deformed soldiers are in the market. What do they search for?
The ancient clock. The bloodless carnage. The drooping alleys.

Another time of the merchant
Scheduled for the frolic statement
To count the innocent skulls of joy
During depression after losing toy.

The white doves. The green chariot. The violet horizon and no stable for the lame excuse.
and knows every tree that after the afforestation, a beheaded perfume will come to
devour every embryo of the age
and then there will be no catalogue to show the sunny story.

Patricia Carragon

Patricia Carragon received a 2025 Best of the Net nomination for her haiku, “Cherry Blossoms,” from Poets Wear Prada. She hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. She is the editor of Sense & Sensibility Haiku Journal. Her latest jazz poetry collection is Stranger on the Shore (Human Error Publishing, 2026). She lives in Brooklyn, NY. Visit Patricia on the web here.

Ashes

Did ashes forget
that they were once skin and bone?

Did numbers become smoke—
lost to the atmosphere?

Did pain and anguish join them?

Did this stone
become dust?

Forgotten?

Unspoken?

Lost?

Peter Bernstein

I live in a community bordering Jerusalem. I am a semi-retired cherry grower and a full-time grandparent

Plea

Someone out there hear my plea
Let my cry come unto thee.
Herded into gas filled caves
Abandoned souls no-one can save.
Piled up in a funeral pyre
Reduced to ashes in the fire.

Schnell, Schnell,go straight to Hell
For whom exactly tolls the bell.
Anyone can be discarded
Whose humanity is disregarded.
Butchered, raped and starved to death
Screaming with their dying breath.

Hatred is a festering sore
Never satiated,demanding more,
Thoroughly evil to the core.

Ramona Thompson Felton

Ramona Thompson Felton has been writing for over 25 years. She is currently at work on a collection of her poetry in book form and a massive YouTube music project called Bon Ouija-a mix of heavy metal and horror. Fans/readers may connect with her at anytime on her instagram.

Always Remember

Always remember the dark and the light that somehow came from it
Lost so many but gained so much hard fought wisdom
Women, men and children whose spirits forever will live on in our memories
A nightmare that will haunt forever
Yet still hope lingers for each new day that dawns
Somehow, someway better days for all men will come to pass
Once we learn that
Love is always stronger then hate!

Richard Widerkehr

Richard Widerkehr fifth book of poems is Missing The Owl (Shanti Arts Publications), which also published Night Journey. His poem “Saying The Mourners Kaddish” won second prize in Poetry Super Highway’s contest. His work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Writer’s Almanac, and Verse Daily. He won two Hopwood first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan and first prize for a short story at The Pacific Northwest Writers Conference. He has worked as case manager for the mentally ill. Richard lives in Bellingham, Washington.

After the Bondi Beach Massacre

Sometimes at twilight when black shadows reach out from the edge
of our chip-seal road, I want to say the period of tolerance for Jews
is over. You say I don’t see the support we have. Next morning
as we pass standing pools of rain in our neighbor’s field that reflect
fir trees on the ridge-line of the mountain, there is this sleet turning
to rain, not much light in the heavens. Can I say the word “heavens,”
maybe even say how used to being scared some of us have become,
not wearing our mezuzahs outside our shirts but inside. Even in light
wind from the east, south-east, these slivers of wind.

Rita Monte

Rita Monte wrote her first poem called Italy, upon arriving in the U.S. at age twelve. She has since won several poetry contests. She has read her work at many venues and open mics. Her work has been published in several anthologies and literary magazines. Rita has studied creative writing at Nassau Community College and attends writing workshops regularly. In 2023 she co-hosted The Word: Celebrating all Voices. A Festival of the Spoken Word. Rita is currently working on her first poetry and Haiku book. Rita’s quote- “A true artist is one that knows to stay humble”

Beyond the Barbed Wire

Beyond the barbed wire
Time forgot its name
Metal thorns held breath in place
While smoke carried what words could not

A child’s glance
A crust in two-
Small lights refusing night

Ash fell
Memory stayed
Beyond the barbed wire the soul did not

~Poem insipid by book of Liliana Segre, an Italian Holocaust survivor and senator for life.

“I chose life despite the temptation to succumb to death; suicide was always a readily available option- such as touching the electrified barbed wire fences”

Roberta Beach Jacobson

Roberta Beach Jacobson is a woman of few words. From her home in Iowa, she writes flash fiction and short-form poetry. Visit her on the web here.

at the fence

at the fence
a butterfly lands
on his hand

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro has published in the New York Times (Lives), Newsweek, and more. Nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net, her short stories and poetry have been published in Prism, The MacGuffin, Euphony, Penumbra, Harpur Palette, the Iowa Review, and many more. Visit Rochelle on the web here.

A poem can be a message in a bottle that somewhere and sometime wash up on land

—Paul Celan with lines from Black Fugue

Celan lived through the Hölle, the Sheol, L’Enfer, the Hell
that turned the living into shades.

Ghosts cried to him from the shadows, the voices
of Margarete, of Shulamit, and all the lost, the damned.

O, black milk of dawn, of bitter mornings, of mourning,
the voices still praying, pleading from their graves in the sky.

Seeing what he saw, what he could not unsee,
one Passover, on Hitler’s birthday,

Celan threw himself into the Loire,
and drowned like an unsaved Moses,

Celan, who stood at the maw of the gas chamber’s
choking death to tell the fortunes of the soon-to-be-gassed,

the soon-to-be-ash, tell them they would live again
with their beloveds on a farm, in a city, anywhere but here,

with the commands of the guards
to jab the spades deeper to deepen the graves.

Roger Funston

Roger Funston came to poetry late in life, inspired by his wife, an accomplished poet. He writes about his life journey, his travels and his ancestors. His work appears in Alchemy Spoon, Last Stanza Poetry, Synkroniciti, 300 Days of Sun and Stick Figure Poetry. He published a chapbook- “Travels Inside and Out.”

Uncle Simon

I met Great Uncle Simone and his wife Lesha when I was 18. This is the first time I had met this branch of my mother’s relatives. They were approaching their 80s and were visiting from their home in the Netherlands. They listened carefully to my plans, which was very encouraging to a young man with dreams. They offered encouragement, which was in short supply from my parents.

Simone was a short, round man. He had his pants specially tailored so the waistband sat around his diaphragm, held up by suspenders. They both spoke fluent English with a heavy Dutch accent. Simone and Lesha were both energetic and optimistic, with big smiles.

My mother was born in Belgium. Her relatives lived in Holland and Belgium. My grandfather, foreseeing the coming war and what was happening to Jews in Europe, was able to obtain a visa and move his family to New York in 1939. Simone owned a toiletries factory in Holland. My grandfather was able to get a visa for Simone and his family and bring them to New York in 1940, just months before the Nazi invasion.

When the Nazi army moved towards France, they came across the border between Holland and Belgium. My mother’s relatives in Holland were trapped, but six of her relatives in Belgium, including her grandmother, were able to escape by car into France. They drove across France, just ahead of the Nazi army. My mother’s grandmother was diabetic and didn’t have enough insulin for the trip. Through sheer will, she managed to live until the she saw the rest of the family arrive safely in Spain, at which point she passed away. Eventually, my grandfather was able to bring the rest of the relatives from Spain to New York.

After the war, Simone returned to Holland, expecting to see his factory in shambles. What he saw was a factory in full operation, with the same people running the factory before the war still in charge. Nothing had changed, as if time had stood still. No money had been embezzled and nothing had been stolen. This was a time when there was still a social contract between employer and employee, even during the difficult years of occupation.

Evil destruction
beacon of goodness
in the midst of chaos

Rose Cervone-Taylor

Rose Cervone-Taylor, a retired mental health professional, lives in Oceanside, NY. Publishing credits include The Scene, various anthologies including Bard’s Poetica, Gathering 2025, What Unites Us (an anthology about the Constitution, Democracy, Rule of Law), NCPLS Review 2025 and LIQ 2025-2026. Rose has performed her writing at many Nassau County venues, including Molloy University. Her photos and poetry have been exhibited at numerous galleries such as the Salmagundi Club in NYC, Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, CT, and others in the tri-state. Rose is a member of Celebrated Authors of NYSOSDIA, LI Writer’s Guild, Performance Poetry Association, Shore Poets, Writer’s Circle & others.

It’s Unimaginable

It’s unimaginable people would be treated in such a way,
separated from family, stripped of their livelihood, identity, dignity,
placed in concentration camps for being Jewish,
wrong and evil yet it happened,
the Holocaust was real.

No matter that you try to deny or erase the past,
this assault on humanity took place
not to be forgotten, ever.

Are we to remember each soul lost, most definitely…
each child, adult, perished in this genocide, mattered
their memory must not be disregarded,
but inscribed in our hearts and minds not just on
this day of remembrance,
but for eternity.

The unimaginable darkness experienced by so many
will not have been in vain if we but remember.

No matter how unimaginable this travesty was,
there were survivors whose resilience grew stronger
with each unspeakable suffering endured…
the power of the human spirit unshaken, unbreakable,
bringing hope and light for remaining generations to come.

Sandy Rochelle

Sandy Rochelle is a notable poet, actress, filmmaker, and voice over artist from Englewood New Jersey. A Voting member of the Recording Academy in the Spoken Word Category. Both Grammy and Emmy nominated. Publications include: Impspired, Dissident Voice, One Art, Verse, Virtual, Amethyst Review, Wild Word, Haiku Universe, and others. Her chapbook, ‘Soul Poems,’ was published by Finishing line press.

Refuge

The wandering spirit.
The homeless.
The stateless.
The silent and heroic.
Make yourself at home in me.

The Undertaker.
The undertaker prepares the ground big enough to bury the stars.
It is for the unnamed.
You cannot bury the soul.
The vultures watch, but do not comment.
They know the names of the uninvited.

Sarah Prindle

Sarah M. Prindle received an Associates in English from Northampton Community College. She loves reading everything from historical fiction and memoirs to poetry and mysteries. She hopes to someday publish her own novels and poetry collections and has already had her work published in several literary magazines and websites.

Thousands: The Disabled Holocaust Victims

When Hitler came to power
a tsunami of hate
came with him.
People who were physically
or mentally disabled
were among his
first targets.
Among them was Heidi,
a little girl with a limp
brain damage
and the sweetest smile.
Heidi loved petting dogs
and hugging her parents.
Hide-and-seek
was her favorite game,
though she gave herself away
with her giggling.
Heidi may not have
walked well or talked well,
but how could anyone
not love her?
Until the Nazis came
and called Heidi
and others like her
“useless eaters”.

A tsunami of hate
flowed through Germany,
flooding the veins
of cold-hearted killers,
who then took the lives
of thousands of patients
throughout hospitals
and mental institutions.
Thousands of families
were then told
their loved ones died
of “natural causes.”
Thousands of lives,
thousands of lies.
Heidi was fortunate—
she lived because her family
took her to England
before the war came,
before the borders closed.
Heidi got to pet dogs
and play hide-and-seek again.
She survived,
but we must never forget
the thousands who didn’t.

Sari Dworkin

I live in San Luis Obispo, California and have been sporadically writing poetry since I was a child. Currently, I am retired. For twenty years, I was a Professor of Counseling at Fresno State in Fresno, California. I, also had a private practice that dealt mainly with LGBTQ+ clients. In retirement, I am writing more poetry and getting my poems out in the world. I consider myself a social justice warrior and am out as a Jew dedicated to social justice and as a bisexual lesbian.

Wrestling with God

Adults roam the hallways of my building in The Bronx
Numbers tattooed on their arms.
Danger!……..Danger!

I am five. I am frightened, I do not understand.
My mother shushes me. We do not speak of it.
Danger!……..Danger!

The Rabbi speaks of Jews as chosen people
And I don’t understand
Danger!……..Danger!

My father speaks of pogroms in the old country.
And I don’t understand.
Danger!……..Danger!

I protest the Vietnam War and progressives
tell me as a Jew I am responsible for the occupation in Israel.
I understand.…Danger!……..Danger!

I come out as lesbian and my mother shushes me.
Don’t draw attention to yourself.
I understand. Danger!………..Danger!

AIDS, The Gay Disease
Silence equals death.
God remains silent.
I cannot be silent in the face of danger.

I take to the streets as a proud Jew.
Brown people will not be detained and deported, in my name.
The concentration camps will not happen again, in my name.
I wrestle with God.
I leave God.
I will not be silent!

Scott Norman Rosenthal

Bizarre part of autistic spectrum. Not allowed to finish high school. Studied poetical composition by invitation of Professor Stephen Dunn. Stockton State College, Fall Semester, 1977. Currently lives in dangerously substandard housing in Philadelphia,Pennsylvania.

Holocaust Poem, Spring, 2026

In these countries
.even gypsies
do not roam.
Ancient prophecy,
.bells, chanting
now mourning for the dead.
The harmony
.of violins gone.
The lament of mourning
.is the silence of fear.

Seretta Martin

Seretta Martin is the managing editor of San Diego Poetry Annual. Her writing has appeared here and abroad in Gyroscope Review, Poetry International, Web del Sol, Collateral Journal, Serving House Journal, Patterson Review, Frogpond, Modern Haiku and others. She is a Phillip Levine, Washington Prize and Atlantic Review finalist, holds an MFA from SDSU, and teaches poetry at Oasis Learning Center and San Diego Writer’s Ink. Her most recent book is Holographic Reality. On a cool, windy night you can find her strolling in the foothills of San Diego under a blue moon, imitated the mating hoots of local owls.

Jars of Pickles

At the club house, Polya in glittered regalia
looks like she’s ready for another cruise
with Elena, her widowed daughter.

This will be the last time we see Polya bring
a tray of perogies. I wonder why, even at a party
she always sounds like tears are near.

She won’t go out for her daily stroll again
not even with her red walker.

After an evening of gaiety, we see her
fall on the steep walkway as she
trips on a cuff of her slacks.

Neighbors scurry to help. One brushes
gray hair from her tired eyes.

A man rushes awheel chair to her.
All of us follow her home.
The retired nurse says she’ll stay.

Polya’s offers us jars of pickled tomatoes
lined up the kitchen table like a platoon.

Calmed, she clutches a faded photo,
“Here I am on the day they released
me from Auschwitz, I was four.”

Sharon Denson

Sharon Denson is a member of the Shore Poets of in her home town of Long Beach, NY. She lives in West Hartford, Connecticut. She is the co-founder of Able Voices; a poetry contest for high school students with disabilities.

Where Our Ancestors Sojourned,
Remembering the Holocaust

My daughter asked where our ancestors came from
I told her Belarus
And the Ukraine
At the time
They left
It was the Russian empire
The Pale of Settlement
The only place
That Jews could live
Second class citizens
Living in poverty
Creating light
Out of darkness
In a land
Where we were strangers
Religious and cultural brilliance
Wiped away
By unthinkable
Hatred and violence
I searched for
The towns where
They lived
So long ago
In Belarus, I found Minsk, Rechitsa, Vitsyebsk and Schedrin
And Kamenskyi Podelskyi in the Ukraine
The map included
Photos of each of those cities
Municipal buildings
Empty town squares
I have no desire to
To go there

Most of our family left
For America by 1910
Less fortunate cousins memorialized
In Yad Vashem
Such violence
And hatred
Are hard to comprehend
Which is why
We repeat the phrase
“Never again”
It’s important to make those words
More than something we say
And this is why we honor
Holocaust Remembrance Day

Sherri Moye-Dombrosky

Sherri J Moye-Dombrosky (Liberty, South Carolina) is a retired English teacher who loves travel, animals, reading, and poetry. SJ grew up on a farm and enjoys integrating childhood experiences into her poetry. The interaction between nature and humanity is often the theme of these poems. SJ loves writing haiku, tanka, and free verse poetry, and several of her poems have been accepted in publications such as The Haiku Shack Magazine, The Writer Monk, Zest of the Lemon, Ribbons, Laurels, Haiku in Action, Haikuniverse, and The Haiku Society of America Anthology, as well as multiple other sites. Visit here on Facebook.

always the horror…

always the horror…
but the room…full of shoes…
and seeing

Shira Solomon

This poet resides just outside of Dallas, Texas. She is a creative at heart who has been writing poems since childhood. Her poetry expresses a variety of themes in many forms. She is also a musician and composer who loves to get lost in the world of free-flowing notes, melodies, and songs. She finds poetry as a beautiful, healing, freeing, and transforming outlet. Sharing poems with others is a small gift she is glad to contribute to this world.

The Why

There’s this Big Blazing Nagging WHY
Written across history’s SKY
A Screaming unending collective CRY
   We can never FORGET nor DENY
The shadows of the Shoah
   The Insanity
The shock
No words
   No REPLIES
   Only TEARS
FOREVER
In our Eyes

Simone Yehuda

I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with my husband, historian Barry Shapiro. I started writing poetry as a child (THAW and LIFTING WATER), began writing plays as an adult (one play, WILLING, produced Off Broadway), and post-retirement, I am also writing screenplays (JERUSALEM ROAD, THE NEW EVE, AFTERMATH). My father was a Holocaust survivor form Berlin, and my French Catholic mother’s mother, Blanche Molino, was a leader of the Resistance in Lyon who rescued my father, as well as many other Jews. The trauma of their lives is embedded in my soul. Visit Simone on the web here.

Exile, Reencountered

You know, ever since October 7,
I haven’t been able to count to eleven.
I lose myself, get stuck half way
through every single wretched day:
my parents eternal loss of home
again coating my soul like a secret poem.

I try not to imagine the unimaginable slaughters
of so many fathers, sons, mothers and daughters.
I struggle to learn how to abide
the ambiguity of the “other” side.
Perspective is was and is what matters most,
but what do I do when it’s become a ghost.

Today I a seared by the kind of pain
that keeps me awake, leaves a dark stain
on the fragile skeletons of deathless grief
birthing anew old mountains of disbelief.

I must endure yet one more time
the hopelessness, the endless climb
to a world of safety, imagined or real,
where I’ll be allowed to really feel.

Published in The Washtenaw Jewish News, November 2024 issue.

Susan Beth Furst

Susan Beth Furst is an award-winning haiku poet and children’s picture book author. She is the founding editor of the Instagram Journal, Word on the Street Haiku, and is a JHUI certified ukulele teacher. Susan lives in the Shenandoah Valley with her husband, Herb, and a canary named Mozart. Visit Susan on the web here.

Passover, March 26,1956, Baltimore

They passed him around the table
the American relatives, and Uncle Mike’s eyes
smiling longingly at the laughing fourteen-month-old,
Yitzhak, his Hebrew name.

His mother, stunningly beautiful tilting
back a crystal goblet of Passover wine,
the second cup, the cup of affliction. Her smile
lights up the room and his father, at the head

of the table, remembering a short eleven years
back, running from a train and rolling into a ditch,
bullets flying through an upraised bucket just missing
him, and Uncle Mike, or even further, to Riga,

where he came home to an empty house, a cup
of cold coffee on a table set with breakfast for three, shoes
left in a tangle by the door. Bullets can make a sickening sound
when they hit their target.

a starry night
in the promised land
still counting

Susan Olsburgh

Susan Olsburgh has lived in Israel for 15 years. She taught literature and British culture in schools and universities in the NE of England. Her parents escaped to the UK from Nazi Germany in 1938. Susan served 5 years as the president of Voices Israel and currently coordinates the Sharon/Netanya group. She also voluntarily facilitates a poetry appreciation group for AACI Netanya and recently has initiated another poetry group for over 65s in Netanya. Susan is about to publish her third volume of poetry.

Grandma’s cake

I hadn’t realised till you asked
that I had never tasted my grandmother’s cake.
I am sure she knew how to bake but
she was not around in our childhood
living far far away in Chicago.

A weekly letter on blue airmail paper
with her loopy script full of love
helped bond the divided family –
Hitler’s escapees.

For ‘Grandma in America’ I nightly prayed
and loved it when in the Fifties
she flew in on a first visit
with Bazooka bubble gum – but no cake.

Suzanne Austin-Hill

Suzanne S. Austin-Hill lives in Ruskin, a crowded suburb of Tampa, FL. She writes (and submits) from a home office in a house built on what used to be a thriving tomato farm. Her poems have been recognized by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies and the Florida State Poets Association in their annual contests. Her literary credits include Of Poets & Poetry, CADENCE, Silver Birch Press, The Zest of the Lemon, TELEPHONE, Persimmon Tree, Lifestyles AFTER 50, and the Sandhill Review. Her book of poetry is Sixty-seven Pages from the Heart.

Quagmire & Atrocities

Hatred and prejudices – curses in life that
One man brought on the living.
Long, tortuous journeys where children, dripped with fear, shook like leaves in the wind.
Oh I don’t want to remember, but how can I forget?
Created hell on earth – mothers searched for bread, and their children, in vain.
Aromas of snow-melting blood scented the night, massacres’ indelible tattoo.
Undulating shouts of the Raiders, proof they enjoyed the hunt for
Souls condemned to a shorter life by conversion to ash.
Truth is I have to remember and never let you forget.

Note: “I Cannot Forget”, two poems by Alexander Kimel
https://remember.org/witness/kimel2

Talya Jankovits

Talya Jankovits is an award-winning writer of poetry, essays, and fiction. Her poetry collection, girl woman wife mother (Kelsay Books, 2024), received First Place in Contemporary Poetry in the 2024 Bookfest Awards. Her novel, The Very Unremarkable Life of Mrs. Etty Bloom (Running Wild Press), is forthcoming in June 2026. She holds her MFA in Creative Writing and resides in Chicago with her husband and their four daughters. Visit her on the web here.

Playing The Anne Frank Game

We play it at night in our heads.
We play it across the table
during a business meeting
when asked about the origin of our names.
We play it when we embrace
a friend, a lover, or a colleague.
We play it during times of peace.
We play it during times of war.
We play it when we meet new neighbors.
We play it when we are assigned a dorm mate.
We play it so as not to lose
the way our parents, grandparents,
and great-grandparents once lost.
We play it because we are scared.
We play it because we want
to trust, to believe.
We play it because we need an exit plan.
We play it because history has a painful
compulsion to repeat itself.
We play it because we know
there are righteous people.
We play it because we also know
there are not righteous people.
We play it because genetic trauma
is real, pulsating in our blood
like 35 trillion red-celled heartbeats.
We play it because we have no choice.
We play it because we need to
know who is on which side of the game.
We play it because someone did it for Anne.
And we can’t stop asking ourselves,
would you do it for us?

Tom Laichas

Tom Laichas is author most recently of Three Hundred Streets of Venice California (FutureCycle Press, 2023). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mudlark, Prairie Schooner, the Amsterdam Review, The Los Angeles Times, Plume, The Moth (Ireland), The Irish Times, and elsewhere. He lives in Venice, California. Visit Tom on the web here.

Jewish Cemetery, Kletsk, Minsk Voblast, Belarus.

Dead Jews of Kletsk: without passports, you have slept in four countries.

The chevra kadisha removed and folded your clothes, washed your bare skin. Naked and supine, your bodies moved from king to king, from realm to republic.

Back and back, forth and forth. Borders in circling flocks whir above you. The registries burned years ago. There are no property records, no census returns. This new country, the one that now claims you, does not know your names.

What are these borders? They are Angels of Death. They shadow your lintels, proud of their wings. One day Poland darkens your sky. On another, Russia swoops in, fierce and unforgiving. Then a German ashfall. Now, stumbling into some blind future, Belarus.

We’ve walked other cemeteries, my wife and I, places abandoned to firepits, broken glass, mattresses, needles, and condoms. Schoolkids are blameless for what they do in these places. In this world, every abandoned lot falls off the map, forgotten by parents, neighbors and police. Every ruin’s a refuge.

But this place? You have eluded even the children. Though the ground has gone feral, there isn’t a bottle or burned match.

I know the way in. To open your gate, I recite my name backwards, cant an old spell, turn a key counterclockwise. By the side of the cemetery road, our driver turns up his radio. We drop from his sight and into shadow.

Broad tree trunks clamber toward canopy. Once they were saplings. Now they’re a cold-weather forest: birch, black almond, scots pine. Some grow from crypts, right out of your ribs. I see this myself.

A toppled gravestone. A family name. An uncle? A cousin? A grandmother’s great-grandfather? We place three pebbles on the slab. Then we wander. The treetops sway in the borderland breeze. On the ground, the air is close, huddled, hot, as if the leaves were cut from linen shrouds.

It doesn’t have to be like this, you know. The war is over. You’re free to go. Leave this soil and its spells behind. Your bones were never the best part of you.

Tuyet Van Do

Tuyet Van Do lives in Melbourne, Australia. She loves poetry and writes whenever inspiration strikes. Her work has been widely published in various journals and anthologies. She was nominated for the Touchstone Award for Individual Poems (2022, 2025), and was the winner of The Irmo Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Contest (2025).

in blue stripe uniform
a toddler eating his meal
holocaust photo

William Miles

William (Bill) Miles is professor of political science and former Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. As Stotsky Professor, he convened the first-ever symposium on Third World Views of the Holocaust. His twelve books include two National Jewish Book Award finalists: Zion in the Desert and Jews of Nigeria. An Afro-Judaic Odyssey. His articles on Jewish themes have appeared in such scholarly as Shofar, Midstream, Middle East Journal, Israel Affairs, Journal of Holocaust Education, and The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. Recipient of five Fulbright research awards, Bill is also past winner of the National Bible Contest for North America. Learn more here.

Birkenau Haiku

Sitting on the tracks inside the camp
Few people – but
……….a dog barks
……….a deer grazes
……….a worm wriggles
And I, a Jew, live

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