Further to the previous post about Professor Helen Weinstein asking me to write poems for school students to work on as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. This one is for a narrated mime-dance sequence performed by secondary students. I wrote it a few days ago.
Helen will post up the links of me reading these pieces very soon.
My Father’s Cousin Michael
Family stories
come to us in bits and pieces.
They are told and retold.
Sometimes they are the same.
Sometimes they change.
Sometimes I remember.
Sometimes I forget.
I try to hold on to these stories.
I write them down.
I gather together copies of documents
letters, photos.
Sometimes the stories are in my head.
Sometimes they are in the bits of paper.
Sometimes they are in the things
I’ve seen or imagined I’ve seen.
It begins with a station
in Dąbrowa Gornicza.
There must have been a train ticket
or, some say, two.
There is a woman
she is my father’s aunt Stella.
There is a man, Stella’s husband Bernard.
There is a teenager, their son, Michael.
Michael gets on the train.
Does his mother go with him?
Michael is going to Lvov - some call it Lviv.
They think it’ll be safer for him there.
Why safer?
Because the Nazis
have ideas about what they want to do with
the Jews.
Some people are saying
that the Nazis want to deport the Jews.
Some people are saying
that the Nazis want to make them slave labourers.
Some people are saying
that the Nazis want to send them to prison camps.
Some people are saying
that the Nazis want to shoot them.
Everyone has stories.
Everyone has an opinion.
Michael goes to Lvov.
His mother and father
are in Dabrowa Gornicza
He is a teenager
without his parents.
Is he with relatives or friends?
His mum and dad write to him:
are you alright?
we are desperately worried about you.
please write back.
Write to your uncle in America
Uncle Max.
Maybe you can stay with him.
In this part of Poland
there are no Nazis.
There are Russians.
The Russians say that this is Russia now
and Michael must become Russian.
He refuses.
So they take him to a labour camp
in Russia,
where he must work all day
cutting trees and lugging timber.
Then the Nazis invade Poland
and then on into Russia.
The Russians talk to the Poles
and they agree there can be a
Polish Free Army
some call it Anders Army
because it is led by General Anders.
Michael joins the Polish Army.
The letters from home stop coming.
Now begins a long march
out of Russia, through Iran
through Palestine
sometimes fighting
sometimes just moving on and on.
Then on to boats
to Italy.
Up through Italy
to a place called Monte Cassino
Here there is a very famous battle
lasting many days.
The German troops are in a monastery
at the top of the mountain called
Monte Cassino.
The Polish army fights its way all the way
up the mountain to the monastery
and they win.
Many men die.
But Michael lives.
When the war ends
Michael travels by boat
with the Polish Army to England.
All the Poles are put into
special camps in England called
Polish Resettlement Camps.
Michael lives here for two years.
He doesn’t hear from his mother or father.
He hears that
there were ‘ghettos’ where parts of towns
were turned into prisons.
And there were camps
where people were put to death
or died of starvation, disease or overwork.
He hears that nearly all the Polish Jews
have been killed.
He can go back to Poland if he wants.
He decides to stay in England.
He has some addresses that he remembers:
his uncles in France
his uncle Max in America
his aunt in London.
He decides to go and see his aunt in London
and arrives at her house one day in 1948
8 years after that day
he said goodbye to his parents.
He stays for a while
he trains to be a London cabbie.
He marries.
He has two sons.
He lives for a long, long time.
One day Uncle Max’s grandson
in America
finds some old photos in a box in a cupboard.
One of them is of Michael
in Poland, as a teenager, walking down a street
with his mother and aunt.
When Michael sees it
he is amazed.
‘Mesmerised,’ his son says.
When he is very old
he begins to be forgetful.
He goes to live in a Jewish Care Home in London.
With him, he has a photo of his mother
he has the letters
in a little canvas bag with a flap
that tucks into a strip of canvas.
The letters are faded
and some of them are worn.
Maybe worn from his finger and thumbs
turning them over and over and over
again and again.
At the end of his life
sometimes he speaks with all the languages he knew:
Polish, Yiddish and English.
Michael died in 2021.
This was a time when there were Covid restrictions.
We couldn’t have the service inside.
The service was outside.
Some of us were cold.
We thought of Michael
and all that he’d been through.
I thought that even if I was cold
I was not as cold as Michael was
in the Russian labour camp in winter
wondering if he would ever see his parents again.
I wondered what it would be like
to live the whole of the rest of your life
only having those letters and the photo…
and not knowing exactly what happened
to your own mother and father
