our town became the ghetto, our own home our new prison
and before my father died of typhus
he and the neighbour built a hiding-closet
when the Gestapo came to round us up
- close enough i could hear them shouting, the bark
of their German Shepherd - i was twelve years old
and my mother told me to hurry and join my neighbour
in the closet, there was room enough only for two. the voices
became louder and i became not boy, neither man, but still dutiful son
and pushed her in, singing the lock home before running
to the square. i slipped away, and we all lived together
a while longer but eventually she and my older brother
were caught and died in Bergen-Belsen, became smoke and ash
as they say. i was caught stealing food and lied, said i was
a Polish Christian boy who had been orphaned, and they sent me
to a work-camp, where eventually a farmer took me home. even after
the war ended i never admitted who i was until one day another farmer
guessed. that farmer and his wife knew and protected me, i think perhaps
but in any case i went to the capital and was given schooling and money
and became a fighter pilot for Poland at the age of 17. i met my wife
quite by accident when i wrote the address of a friend down wrong and
she showed me around her city. she and another child and eight adults
had spent two years in a small hole dug in a barn floor. we have been
very happy together. i only wish my mother might have stayed hidden.
3 comments:
I like the repetition of our in the first line, like a beat.
The running sentences are effective, give the feeling of a breathless storyteller.
The details of the shouting, the German Shepherd, the singing lock are vivid. You could consider specifying the location of the closet, the type of food stolen (bread?), the type of farmer, who gave him schooling, the name of the wife's city - or is this information unknown?
I realize you're using lowercase at the beginning of each sentence, but I find the switch between i and I distracting. Consider making every I lowercase?
The ending wraps up nicely.
I like the understated parts, like how the mother and brother die, no emotions just the facts, though we know how horrific this must have been. Or, “...became a fighter pilot...at the age of 17.” No big explanation, when it had to have been difficult and scary. I can picture the old man telling this story, the way some old men do, with very little embellishment.
I’m wondering about the opening stanza, if feel like the second stanza might be a stronger opening?
I like the ending, going back to the mother.
I can see your point, Louella, about beginning with the second stanza. But then there would have to be some other way to let the reader know that the closet in st. 3 is not an ordinary closet.
Although I can see the symmetry in returning to the mother at the end, the previous sentence, "we have been very happy together" feels like it could work as an ending to the poem. Those words have a particular force, coming just after the lines about living for two years in a hole.
Post a Comment