My people are gone

When I hear their names, I cry their tears
As if their memories were my own

I think of the poets, shot before their pens could strike paper
Or the painters, whose necks were hanged in place of their portraits

Instead of screams, and the sounds of bullets, or the percussve striking of bombs
I try to hear the symphonies that might have been created under different circumstances

I imagine what books they might have written
Without envisioning the burning pyres that evaporated so many words

I account for their lost fortunes, and what they might have funded in a better world
While ignoring the pillagers who fattened themselves from their spoils

When I cry, do the tears come from pride, that they lived as they did?
And not from the immense sorrow that they are dead?

^^^^


Last week, I interviewed author Anna Porter, whose latest book, Kasztner's Train, tells the story of Reszo Kasztner, a Jewish journalist from Transylvania who negotiated a controversial deal with the Nazis that brought a number of Hungarian Jews to safety on a train bound for Switzerland during the Holocaust. The book has been nominated for a Charles Taylor Prize in Literary Non-Fiction, and the winner will be announced next Monday. Just before the prize is given out, my interview, in a shortened form, can be heard on CIUT's Take 5 Morning Show.

My grandmother, her parents, and a cousin were on that train, the only members of that family who survived. Everyone else perished at Auschwitz and

Listen here.