A collection of 10 poems about the Holocaust. OTHER POWERPOINTS: HOLOCAUST ART PowerPoint: at URL: http://www.slideshare.net/yaryalitsa/powerpoint-holocaust-art

1. In Memory of the Holocaust by Josef Elgurt, 1994, sepia-drawing (71 x 46 cm).
The original is on permanent loan to the Jewish Museum of Riga. ©1994 Josef Elgurt.

3. "REMEMBRANCE"
by Tawnysha Lynch
Here I stand in the midst of Auschwitz
My mind racing with memories.
Silent people walk
Where living skeletons worked.
There is a silence,
But I hear the cries of my people.
A slight breeze passes,
But I feel the beating of a whip.
My hands sift through what seems like ashes
And I glimpse a sea of bodies aflame.
There is an open field,
But I see innocent people beaten.
A lone building stands in the distance,
But I see a place of death.
A place where terrible things took place
Horrors not even known to man.
With wistful eyes, I observe this place
Seeing things of the past
This place being as I left it
With an echo of remembrance.
Excerpt from Remembrance, copyright 2001 ISBN 189123157X

4. Holocaust
by Barbara Sonek
We played, we laughed
we were loved.
We were ripped from the arms of our
parents and thrown into the fire.
We were nothing more than children.
We had a future. We were going to be
lawyers, rabbis, wives, teachers, mothers.
We had dreams, then we had no hope.
We were taken away in the dead of night
like cattle in cars, no air to breathe
smothering, crying, starving, dying.
Separated from the world to be no more.
From the ashes, hear our plea.
This atrocity to mankind can not happen again.
Remember us, for we were the children
whose dreams and lives were stolen away.
Man reaching out for help,
Holocaust Memorial, Miami Beach

5. Reveille
by Primo Levi
In the brutal nights we used to dream
Dense violent dreams,
Dreamed with soul and body:
To return; to eat; to tell the story.
Until the dawn command
Sounded brief, low
'Wstawac*'
And the heart cracked in the breast.
Now we have found our homes again,
Our bellies are full,
We're through telling the story.
It's time. Soon we'll hear again
The strange command:
'Wstawac‘
(*“get up” command in Polish used at Auschwitz)
Auschwitz, Poland

6. Shema
by Primo Levi
You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk
on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
Holocaust Memorial, Miami

7. DANIEL
by Laura Crist
And the child held her hand
A child tiny for almost eight,
Deep blue eyes that dominated his face,
When he explained new events to her,
That funny doggy,
That pretty rock,
And the freckles on his cheek,
No one saw a sunrise more perfect,
To her,
She so vividly smells the fragrance of
His hair,
His ears,
His breath in the morning
She vividly hears that little heartbeat,
That was hers
Always hers,
And the laughter,
That raspy little laugh,
When he caught her in a conundrum.
All this,
But this is merely the surface,
As she watches her little God sheared,
And stripped,
For the gas chamber.

8. Ghetto Uprising –
Lachva, Poland
September 3, 1942
by Evelyn Roman – Holocaust Survivor
The last September morning
Without a miracle from above
From his invisible being
Or from the world below
Abandoned, we were doomed
Our ghetto was to be consumed.
The sun rose blood-red that morning
Ever faithful to its course
Shamefully it went on shining
While death was waiting at our doors
That day of judgment
Our fateful moment.
Jews an uprising staging
Germans caught by surprise
Ghetto house blazing
Eight Nazis killed
Barbed wire stormed
Few of us survived.
All visions were ending
Gone was all hope
Cruelty was raging
In unimaginable scope
Good bye childhood dreams
And times yet to be.
The chaos this morning
The murder of my kin
When torment meant living
Days cruel beyond words
With no time for grieving
While roaming the woods
I often was heartened
By the love they imparted
Their piercing screams resounding
Recurring in my brain
Time can never heal
The gnawing pain that I feel.

9. Frozen Jews
by Avrom Sutzkever
July 10, 1944
Have you seen, in fields of snow, frozen
Jews, row on row? Blue marble forms
lying, not breathing, not dying.
Somewhere a flicker of a frozen soul -
glint of fish in an icy swell. All brood.
Speech and silence are one. Night snow
encases the sun.
A smile glows immobile from a rose lip's
chill. Baby and mother, side by side. Odd
that her nipple's dried.
Fist, fixed in ice, of a naked old man: the
power's undone in his hand. I've sampled
death in all guises. Nothing surprises.
Yet a frost in July in this heat - a crazy
assault in the street. I and blue carrion,
face to face. Frozen Jews in a snowy
space.
Marble shrouds my skin. Words ebb.
Light grows thin. I'm frozen, I'm rooted in
place like the naked old man enfeebled
by ice.

10. First They Came for the Jews
by Martin Niemöller
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

11. Something
by Michael R. Burch
for the children of the Holocaust
Something inescapable is lost—
lost like a pale vapour curling up into shafts of
moonlight,
vanishing in a gust of wind toward an expanse of stars
immeasurable and void.
Something uncapturable is gone—
gone with the spent leaves and illuminations of autumn,
scattered into a haze with the faint rustle of parched
grass and remembrance.
Something unforgettable is past—
blown from a glimmer into nothingness, or less,
and finality has swept into a corner where it lies
in dust and cobwebs and silence.

12. The Butterfly
by Pavel Friedmann June 4, 1942
The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.
Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing
against a white stone.
Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly way up high.
It went away I'm sure because it wished to
kiss the world good-bye.
For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto.
But I have found what I love here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut branches in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.
That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don't live here,
in the ghetto.