to the boy making a holocaust joke

 

i don’t look jewish- you didn’t know

i don’t have the dark hair, the dark eyes

but I still have moses mezuzahs menorahs

running in my veins

and when your words cracked through the air like a whip

or a gunshot

i felt the weight of my heritage sit

heavy on my shoulders

like a leather-gloved hand with death trapped beneath the fingernails

 

i don’t look jewish but that doesn’t stop the dreams

i have them often

they take place anywhere-

in a school, a playground, an airport

a faceless man in a uniform picks me out

i try to hide-

amongst my friends, under a table

but he can still see me

can still see the other-ness that can’t be hidden

still takes me away

before I reach the destination I wake up

heart pounding

head pounding

juden juden juden

 

it was a dusty armchair afternoon

when my saba took me onto his lap and told me

why his family had to leave warsaw

sneaking away in the watchful night

like thieves, criminals

boarding a blank-canvas boat to a future unsmeared with yellow

families with hearts and bodies and loves and hopes

pushed into one dirty category

just one item on the to-do list of

a madman with an army

what else is new?

our story is of exodus, of extermination, of unwanted, of inhuman

 

he told me about how they wrote letters, at first

the aunts, uncles, cousins, friends left behind

even as they were crammed behind barbed wire

as they were squeezed tighter and tighter

as if they would cease to exist if only they were made

small enough

eventually, the letters stopped coming

 

it’s the facelessness of it all - the grey anonymity

the not knowing

if the ragged shoe on the slideshow in history class were my great aunt’s

not knowing

which of the painfully empty coats on the filthy pile had

‘lederman fine clothes’ sewn into the collar

made carefully by my great grandfather

 

it’s easy to make jokes about a history statistic

6 million dead jews

there are 6 million people in singapore

6 million bikes in beijing

 

it’s easy to make jokes when you don’t walk with the six points of the magen david

stuck in your side like thorns

when you don’t feel the ash on your skin, in your skin, that your skin could have been

as you put on your pretty bat mitzvah dress

when you don’t hear

please god please adonai don’t let them take my son my only son please

woven through each synagogue song like a horrible harmony

 

but jewish isn’t just ash

and cavernous faces and empty eyes

piles of tattered shoes and barbed wire

shaved heads and striped pyjamas

 

it’s family and food

and music and candlelight

it’s standing at the bimah

feeling the shape of the words of

the torah on my tongue

knowing that they’re the same words that my

mother, great aunt, grandfather

once said and feeling my heritage not sitting heavy

but settling soft and golden

like a grandmother’s warm, flour-dusted touch

 

Nina Richardson