POETRY ON THE SHOAH






HALINA BIRENBAUM


THE TREES ARE SILENT


The trees have seen and heard a lot
Have imbibed and covered much
But even when rustling
They remain silent
 
They would not tell us about
That what they have witnessed
 
They tell us
Neither about the wonders
That happened in their shadows
Nor the horrors
 
They climb toward light
Like we they are thirsty of sun
Dye in darkness
Wither of atrocities
 
And do keep silent – always remain silent
 
With their shade of secret they shroud
Wipe out equally well the traces of
Love and crime
 
... And in Auschwitz too
The trees grew and climbed to the sky
Imbibing into themselves
The screams the fire the smoke
 
And they did stubbornly keep silent
 
And I
When being marched amongst them
Found in them signals of life
The proof of existence
That was forbidden to me
 
I stared at the trees
Breathing in their fresh smell mixed
With the smell of burnt human beings
 
With my eyes I passed on them
My desires
My cry for life
For the faith
That life be
Also allowed to me
 
I prayed that the traces be preserved
Of my existence once in this world...
 
Many like me confessed to the trees
Begged for remembrance
Wanted to climb up to their tops
To fly away
 
Traces of those have vanished
Have been blown away
Dispersed
 
The trees saw and heard all these
But in their habit
Kept growing and getting green
And they kept silence
 
They did not lament over human suffering
Perhaps they even laughed at it?
 
Became drunk with the stench of burned people
With a diabolic spell got bewitched?
And were turned into something different
Than had been until then?
 
The trees have perpetually been silent
 
To me, the little one, it was granted to survive
In order to tell
About the German Nazi monsters
About their victims and the witness-trees
 
About trees' keeping silent
In the face of every sight
Of every calamity
 
Yet
I did love and still do love trees
To their shades I confide
My pain my longing my daydreams
 
In their rustle I unite
With my loved ones
Doomed and perished
 
And with the world
That once had existed
but has been destroyed
And I within it – We
 
In the solemn silence of the trees
Their inveterate mysterious keeping silent
THEN there was hope
 
And today
       A consolation


1998-2003



* * *



HALINA BIRENBAUM


"THE PIANIST"


A small cinema in Herzliya, Israel,
my husband and I
 
German bombs on Warsaw
on the screen
 
Death, Nazis,
armbands with the Star of David
The Ghetto
 
Shops, Platzovkas, Ausweises,   (*)
the right to live for Jews
 
In the hide outs in cellars, attics,
under the ground
 
Cattle wagons, trains
to Treblinka,
to gas chambers
 
The diabolical Eden of the Aryan side,
the insanity of the loneliness of fear,
Chopin
 
Illusions, memories, forgetfulness
in the silence of daydreams and the wonders of the pianist
today in the cinema
 
Here and now I and my husband,
we from here and from there
in the year two thousand and two
 
amongst a common audience
of familiar strangers
 
Those who were not There
and who know nothing
about us –
 
the dead yet still the alive
from THERE


31.10.2002 ← 31.10.1942



* * *



HALINA BIRENBAUM


IT WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING


We had a neighbor in the Warsaw Ghetto.
She was lived in a rented kitchen,
in the apartment of a widow dentist,
where we also lived in another room.

In all, there were four subtenant families
and the apartment's owner, left paralyzed
after the German bombardment of the city.

The woman was short and silent.
I also remember her husband,
he worked as a forced laborer.

Then I saw her belly grow.
Everybody was whispering,
angry at her daring…

Her husband quickly got thinner and thinner,
his legs became swollen,
he had to remain in bed.

It was cold and gloomily in their dark kitchen,
they suffered from terrible hunger.
The small woman wandered around
and begged everybody for alms…

Her husband became all swollen
– and so did her belly...
When the baby was born –
his father was already dead.

She went on begging for help,
knocked on every door,
the tiny baby in her arms,
bundled in rags and screaming ceaselessly.

Soon the baby's cries became weaker, quieter,
No longer having any strength.
The mother had no milk or any food
– so, the little one died quietly.

Later on, she also faded, passed away
for the same reason – starved to death.

Yet then it was not the worst time in the Ghetto:
The Germans were not yet deporting people
to gas chambers for extermination.

At that time it was only the beginning.


March 12, 1983 – January 2004



* * *



HALINA BIRENBAUM


MY FATHER


My Father read wonderful songs to us
From ancient books
Overfilled with affection and sublimity
He conveyed their beauty to us

I did not understand their sense
But Father's affection and rapture
I did imbibe

Father explained the meaning of Festivals to us
He read the legends about the sacrifice of Hannah
The Hanukkah miracle and others
About the unbounded devotion to Faith

I did not understand much of it
Even the language
Of his ardent prayers
Was strange to me

But I loved Father's loftiness
The expression of his face – the lightness in his eyes
While he read or prayed –
Have lived in me till this very day

When Warsaw was bombed in September 1939
My Father almost cried in his powerlessness
On the Day of Atonement – the Jewish Yom Kippur –
Our house was hit and burnt out

We ran out on the street in flames
Father clasping my hand firmly
Stared in my eyes in despair
As if wanting to offer apologies

I memorized his gaze from the days Then
In the Ghetto he prayed more than before
In God he did search deliverance –
God rejected by the multitudes amid the horrors

First time I saw him sobbing like a child
When he learned my grandfather was killed in Biala Podlaska
Father was then in his forties
And from then on he prayed even more fervently

People in the Ghetto were swollen of hunger
Many were dying in the streets – yet we still had bread
And continued learning in clandestine classes
From the books that were rescued from fires

Several theaters in the Ghetto kept performing
Once my older brother got the tickets
In "Femina" they played "The Princess of the Csardas"
Father did not forgive us that – he could not comprehend

How one could go to a theater when corpses
And dying people fill the streets!
I did not understand him then nor did I listen to his voice
But his voice and these words still sound in my ears

Father told us that we ought to obey German orders
He reminded us the terrible name-punishment: Auschwitz...
In his naivety he underestimated the genocidal plans
Of the German Nazi occupiers

Mother was of the opposite opinion –
Father loved us with holy songs and prayers
With despair in the face of terror
Mother did so with both fighting and accepting fate

My obeisant to God and people Father
Was gassed in Treblinka
My alternately fate-fighting and fate-accepting Mother
Was killed and burned in Majdanek.

My parents' image appears in my eyes and so does their martyrdom
Through my eyes they smile and they cry
They guide me through all roads of my life
They continue to live – until my eyes close for ever


August 2003



* * *



HALINA BIRENBAUM


MOTHER, DO YOU SEE ME ?


In the moments of great sadness or those of joy
I feel an anxiety to
Cry loud – and call:
Mother, do you see me, do you see me, Mother!

I do exist. I have survived.
I have grown up on my own.
I have abided by the principles
You implanted in me

I have built my family, my home
Have brought children to this world
And grandchildren you never saw...

I raised my sons, got them enjoy the meals
As those you used to prepare long time ago
Whose taste I then liked so much

And always, in every situation – I kept asking myself
What would you have said, Mother, had you seen me?
Do you know about all this, do you see me, Mother?

A simple,
An ordinary woman
You were.
A loving Mother!

I always wanted to be like you!
I strived to achieve that.
I carried your image in me.

I have been less courageous and less quiet
Than you were
But faithful to love
And to all you instilled in me.

You had been torn young
Out from this world.

And now I already am older than you were.
I am a grandmother – Do you know it?
Can you imagine this? Can you see it?

But not only from there my emotion comes
And brings your name back to me.

Do you know, Mother, a book has just appeared
Which you are the heroine of?
Written by that one little girl from THERE.
Do you see her now, Mother? Do you hear her?

I so much wanted to rejoice
Nothing but tears instead.
Do you see me, Mother?


April 1983



* * *



HALINA BIRENBAUM


MY BROTHER HILEK


Today is my brother Hilek's Birthday, but he perished
In Auschwitz forty years ago,
having been pointed out in a selection to the left – to death.
Now, it is difficult to believe he existed at all.
He was barely twenty when dragged to the crematorium.

Then, I was a small girl, an inmate of Birkenau.
Now, I can hardly remember how he looked like,
I have not a single picture of him!

At home in the Ghetto everybody in my family
feared that my fate would be the worst,
that it would be me to be first selected to die.

Perhaps, after all They were right.
In many ways I remained There with Them.
Certainly, I did not manage to be a child.
I passed the generations in a terrible rush,
became mixed with the Living and the Dead.
Yet I – a little duffer in my family – have survived
to pronounce Their names,
to cherish the memories of Them
and relay those so the others keep them too.

Today, my Brother could be a father, a grandfather.
My children would have their uncle...
They never saw the faces of their relatives,
but they know whom they descend from – and they remember it.
Maybe not the kin’s dates of birthday and death in the Shoah,
and they will not visit their graves that nowhere exist,
but their names they have heard they shall remember.

My Brother shall live in their hearts,
in their children and in their children's children.

Yet it is not the same!
Hilek was murdered so early in his life, at his prime.
And it cannot be reversed!

Today is Hilek's birthday
But here he was not for long.
Not a trace of him has been left.
The winds carry his scattered ashes,
and will continue blowing them about
till the end of the world and time.

Is it proper that I sign myself with my new name?
The one that exists and lives?
Is it I?
Have I ever had a Brother, so many years ago?
It appears so from the dates, the numbers of days, months...
These come back year after year and haunt me –
without my Loved Ones.


30.11.1982 – 30.09.2003



* * *



HALINA BIRENBAUM


SHE WAITED FOR ME


She waited for me there, near the pathway.
She did know one day I would come
And would perceive her with all my senses –
My mother, beautiful and young

She waited for me there, near the pathway in Majdanek
Across from the "disinfection" barrack – the crematorium's ovens

After forty years I have come here from afar
And see her standing like Then – despite Death
Like on that night we were separated forever:

Dark-haired, not too tall
A long curl swaying over her forehead
And hair braided around her head
Red cheeks, large eyes still enlarged by the lack of sleep
White teeth like pearls unveiling a smile –
The most wonderful smile on Earth – a mother's –
That attempts to comfort her child
In front of the gate to gas chamber and ovens…

A large shepherd's plaid coat covers her body
And she clasps me into it, in order to
Embed in me the strength of human warmth
In this one but last moment
A ray of consolation
In this inferno
The place one could exit only
Through a chimney as a smoke

I have come here again
From another country,
A grownup woman
Yet the same girl I was Then
Whom she did love so much
And over whose fate she agonized.

Entering this gravel road I felt her presence
I ran to her with all my breath
And like Then, I suddenly stooped.
Anguished in pain and helplessness I realized:
They had wrested her away from me
I shall never have her again!

Majdanek – today a sleepy kingdom of death
We were brought here together
Now I am standing here alone

I try to embrace her silhouette, touch it
While drowned in horrible pain.
Small and helpless I stand here again
In front of the gas chamber and the crematorium
That was extinguished too late.
Powerless like Then though now free…

I sit on the ground near the pathway,
Put my head in my hands
Cry aloud almost to unconsciousness
With no self control, no embarrassment.
I cling to the shadow of my Mother killed here
Hold to it with all my strength
Decide to take it home with me overseas
Even tough I would prefer to remain here
Along with my tears that permeate the ground

I will never know how I went back
While she remained there in that deadly silence
I all grew numb
My body was shaking with spasms

A stranger, a Polish museum worker, passed by
From a nearby hill he shouted to me:
"Whom of yours had they killed here so that you're in such a despair?"
Getting no reply – he left.
He addressed me in the language of the living people
While I was with my vision of my dead Mother
With her shadow in the emptiness
With her death at Majdanek – and perhaps with mine own too.


August 30, 1986




Halina Birenbaum is a Holocaust survivor. She is a Polish-Israeli writer, poet and lecturer. She lives in Israel.



Halina Birenbaum




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