Yom Hashoah

Holocaust Remembrance Day is tomorrow, April 25.

How can you remember something you’ve never known?
No ancestor of mine wore yellow stars.
There’s nothing written in my blood or on my bones.
Treblinka’s just the name of someplace far.

I’ve only seen the newsreels: boxcars painted black
barbed-wire fences, chimneys spouting smoke
the ones who went quiet, the ones who died fighting back
the desperation and the desperate hope—

it’s all on the news right now. It happens every day.
If you don’t remember, learn it all anew.
“The things that happen...”—no, don’t look away.
It’s not what happens. It’s what people do.

Learn it anew, and try not to forget
the Holocaust—it isn’t over yet.