Samuel Washington Allen Prize Honorable Mention, selected by Lloyd Schwartz
To My Most Beloved Child: Letters from the Warsaw Ghetto
1. Hidden Letters
How did they get the ink and paper?
Blue ink on yellowed paper
written eight decades ago.
All these letters from his parents
stashed in a large envelope hidden
at the bottom of a suitcase.
Twenty more postcards
to an address in Amsterdam
asking for food parcels
or just one shoe.
2. The knock on the door
Leipzig, October 28,1938
At daybreak there was
a knock on the door.
Did it wake you?
Or were you already waiting?
How did you decide what to take
and what to leave behind?
We still have two things
that you packed that morning
– my father’s prayer shawl
and its blue velvet bag
with his name embroidered
in yellow silk.
Did you bury the candlesticks
in the courtyard?
Or was there no time?
Maybe I have confused the story.
I do know that you left the rooms
with the casement windows
and walked with your bags
to the station.
How did you decide what to take
and what to leave behind?
3. “It is a cold hard winter. In spite of blows of destiny, one endures.”
Warsaw Ghetto, January 1942
The cold wind blows
under doors, up staircases,
through cracks in the walls.
Children run faster, faster.
Thin limbs fly over shadows,
suitcases, bundles of bedding,
around swollen corpses.
A woman sits in a courtyard,
hugs herself
to keep her body heat.
A man stuffs his thoughts in his hat
and wedges it firmly on his head.
The street is crowded and discordant
with music of the braking
of the yellow ghetto tram,
intermittent groans of hunger,
shouts of peddlers wheeling handcarts
of potatoes, candles, old clothes.
Metal, wood and stone collide in hope as
rubble is dug out to create hidden bunkers.
A children’s choir sings an old Hebrew song,
a prayer for the warmth of breath.
People line up, if they can,
for a bowl of thin soup.
They wake in the dark
and grope for the light.
There was only darkness.
4. Four photos of your street
I googled your address
in the Warsaw Ghetto
and my screen burst into flames.
Your apartment building is engulfed
by fire flaring up to the sky.
Nowolipie Street, a cacophony, a community
of courage and daily despair.
There is an image of barefoot children,
begging with howling legs.
And another of a woman
lying across the sidewalk,
her fierce gaze fixed,
staring at death hovering,
a wild beast about to attack.
Even the iconic holocaust photo of a young boy,
holding his hands up above his head,
a submachine gun pointing to him,
this boy with eyes open with fear
was marched along your street.
Did you see him?
Did you know him?
What did you do with your eyes?
Did you feel compelled
to be an unwilling witness?
Or did you shut your eyes
seeking a still moment
from the bestial whipping,
the shooting all night on the street.
5. Then there were no more letters
How did you leave the ghetto?
Were you wounded or maimed?
Did you collapse
due to
typhus?
hunger?
or suffocate
under a pile of rubble?
or corpses?
or were you routed out
from hiding in a sewer?
or a walled up cellar?
Did you survive to march to the station
and be rammed into a train to Treblinka?
Did you unwrap your body of its clothes
and crumble under the shower of fatal gas?
Or all of the above?
You had no choice how you left with your wide awake heart.
You faded away, your spirit wafting up to the sky.
Or you died in your own essence walking in the wind
your wings standing up in the benevolence of darkness.
How did you leave the ghetto?
Where was my grandfather and
Ina, my father’s young sister?
Were you holding each other together
or were you alone
when you broke open?
6. “One must remain a fine human being.”
Warsaw August 1939
Dear Grandmother,
I see in your letters
the risks you took for love.
How you rose to the light,
despite the deadly pit
you were forced in
and how fragile are our bodies.
You catapulted your son
over the wall to freedom.
You grasped hope,
raised money to buy medicine
for your young daughter,
slipped her into a forbidden
ghetto school.
You hugged her close
as if possible
to save her life
in exchange for your own.
You breathed freely
with your humanity,
despite the horrific stench
and how fragile are our bodies
To write was to resist,
your hymn of love.
And we have your letters.
I notice you do not write to my father
of your own mortal suffering.
In turn, he tried to protect us
with his silence.
7. Questions for my father
Who were you speaking to?
I came home from school that day
and you were shouting on the phone.
It was a woman who claimed
to be my sister.
After all these years,
what did she tell you?
I asked her some questions.
She didn’t have the right answers.
What questions did you ask her?
I never heard you speak in German before.
I asked her what did we call our mother and father.
What did you call your mother and father?
I cannot speak about this.
She did not know what my mother called me.
What did your mother call you?
She called me my dear most beloved child.
You hung up the phone so suddenly
and sat staring ahead at the bedroom wall.
Please do not mention this.
When I asked you about it, years later,
you said I don’t remember such a call.
8. “One Thousand Kisses”
Warsaw, September 1939
Dear Grandmother,
You sent a thousand kisses to your son.
What was your face
that launched these thousand kisses?
I am not sure what you looked like
with only one grainy photograph
that I guess is you.
These thousand kisses
hurtled through space, over land and sea
and collected under my father’s breast bone.
It charged his frame,
took him into the privilege of manhood
and then the growth of fatherhood.
There was a gentle glean
that he wrapped and saved.
He secretly carried your letters
in the hole of your oceanic absence.
He measured love with these kisses.
He climbed and poked
at the landfill of history to find you
but you had vanished.
Where does your bone dust lie?
Can we find you?
The answer is in your letters.
Your words reanimate you.
Breathing air into bellows,
they begin to sing.
Susan Sklan is a social worker and published poet whose poems have appeared in Nixes Mate, Polis, Kalliope, Folio, Gulf Stream, Pleiades, Slipstream, Sojourner, Lilith and others.“On passing an old lover’s address” was chosen by the Cambridge MA, Sidewalk Poetry Program, 2018, and installed on a city sidewalk.