My Dear Friends and Fellow Poets:
Today, I would like to share with you a set of haiku and tanka for reflections on both the meaning, personal and sociopolitical, of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the responsibility to prevent the spread of mis/disinformation about the Holocaust and its causes/motivations, aftermath and effects on survivors.
for Phil Chernofsky, author of And Every Single One Was Someone
line upon line
page after page
the word
Jew
six million times
NeverEnding Story, January 27, 2014
Chen-ou Liu
Note: Each page has 40 columns of 120 lines — 4,800 “Jews.” The font is Minion; the size, 5.5 point. The book weighs 7.3 pounds.... Its titleless cover depicts a Jewish prayer shawl, sometimes used to wrap bodies for burial. Mr. Chernofsky said it was Gefen’s choice; he would have preferred solid black, or a yellow star like those the Nazis made Jews wear.
“When you look at this at a distance, you can’t tell whether it’s upside down or right side up, you can’t tell what’s here; it looks like a pattern,” said Phil Chernofsky, the author, though that term may be something of a stretch. “That’s how the Nazis viewed their victims: These are not individuals, these are not people, these are just a mass we have to exterminate.
“Now get closer, put on your reading glasses, and pick a ‘Jew,’ ” Mr. Chernofsky continued. “That Jew could be you. Next to him is your brother. Oh, look, your uncles and aunts and cousins and your whole extended family. A row, a line, those are your classmates. Now you get lost in a kind of meditative state where you look at one word, ‘Jew,’ you look at one Jew, you focus on it and then your mind starts to go because who is he, where did he live, what did he want to do when he grew up?”
-- excerpted from Jodi Rudoren's "Holocaust Told in One Word, 6 Million Times" (New York Times, Jan. 25, 2014)
Holocaust Memorial
from an ashen sky
snow keeps falling
and falling
on fallen snow
Runner-up, 2017 British Haiku Society Tanka Awards
Frank Dietrich
as if
still waiting to be claimed
a leather suitcase
in Auschwitz with the name:
M. FRANK, HOLLAND
Skylark, 2:1, Summer 2014
Sonam Chhoki
in spring rain
a long visitor's line
at Anne Frank House ...
did the church bell ring
on that fateful day?
Bamboo Hut, 1:1, 3013
Chen-ou Liu
sunless morning
and yet ...
sunflowers in Auschwitz
Mainichi Shimbun: Best of 2014
Sonam Chhoki
being a German
the "privilege"
of pronouncing
Beethoven and Dachau (FYI: the first concentration camp built by Nazi Germany)
without an accent
The Tanka Journal, 47, 2015
Tony Boehle
written in response to State Senator Scott Baldwin's comment
be impartial
when teaching about Nazism ...
the tattooed number
still visible on grandpa’s arm
and in his broken heart
PoemHunter, January 13, 2022
Chen-ou Liu
To conclude today's Holocaust Remembrance Day Special Feature post, I wrote the following tanka in response to this alarming news, NL Times, Jan. 25, 2023 : "23% of young Dutch have doubts that the Holocaust happened"
"I, too, find it shocking, ”Prime Minister Mark Rutte later said. “We can debate everything, but it is important that we at least agree on the facts.”
Nearly a quarter (23 percent) of Netherlands residents born after 1980 think the Holocaust is “a myth” or that the number of Jewish people killed is grossly exaggerated. That is more than in other countries. One-third to over half of the generations born since 1980 know remarkably little about the persecution of the Jews and genocide in the Second World War.
This Brave New World, LXVII
in the chat room
did SIX million really die
loud and louder ...
more youth enter this guessing game
as the night grows dark and colder
FYI: Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last is a neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial pamphlet published in 1974 by neo-Nazi propagandist Ernst Zündel...In 1983, Holocaust survivor Sabina Citron began a private prosecution under s.181 of the Canadian Criminal Code against Zündel, charging him with spreading false news...The Supreme Court concluded in the 1988 trial that "The pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? does not fit with received views of reality because it is not part of reality." -- excerpted from the Wikipedia entry, "Did Six Million Really Die?"
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