ONE BY ONE

It’s time to speak their names,
silenced through the years.
Children taken from homes and off streets,
rounded up by French police;
forced to face oblivion.

Boxcars of human cargo
railed through dark space;
the engine’s whistle screamed
as innocent voices cried to escape.
Hannah shivers in a puddle of urine,
soiling lace socks her mother stretched
over each foot that morning.
As the train pulls into Drancy,
futures are lost.

We must retrieve from anonymous ash
the masses of daughters and sons,
lost identities which wore the fatal yellow star.
One by one they were destroyed: Jeannie Stickgold,
Berte Pozanski, Michael Benicar.

Irene and Ginette Cukier hold hands
with their mother in a faded photograph.
Lillian Segal just turned ten.
Nicole Frisch, Jeanine Ojalvo, Georges Halpern,
a few of the 44 children deported from Izieu.

Jean Pierre Guckenheimer,
born November 30, 1935.
Seven years later
he was arrested in Nice.

Henri Gilburt lived
12 short years
at 15 Rue La ieuvulle, Paris
before he left August 21, 1942
on Convoy 22, for death camp.

The three Block sisters: Huguette,
Liliane, and Arlette, watched
their only brother Siegfried, killed
as he ran for the Swiss border.

Helene Rajchszald did not tell
little sister Emile, the train
was taking them to Auchswitz
or, that it was her third birthday.

Mr. Zonendlich, the father
of Joseph and Lucie, survived
his children and wife. Others,
like George Andre Kohn, and the twins,
Bernard and Simon Zajdner, died
from medical experiments.

I asked G-d if he noticed the vacant streets
where Jewish children once played.
If he saw smoke cloud the sky
or smelled the pungent odor of flesh among ashes.
Could he hear the prayers of parents, laments
for children tortured in death
while neighbors and friends
shut their eyes, turned their heads
and said nothing to defend the innocent ones.