Holocaust and Courage
Jan. 9th, 2006 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dangermousieWhen we were in Jerusalem, we went to Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. It was a horrifying couple of hours. Walking through the Children's Memorial, with its infinity of candles in the sheer darkness and a voice intoning the name, age and nationality of the child is truly awful (Apparently, to hear the same name of the murdered child again you'd have to come back in over three years).
I don't think I'll ever forget one particular photo (taken by an anonymous German soldier) of three or four Jewish men digging their own grave, minutes away from being shot. Most are middle-aged and weary and bent over their shovels. But one person, a boy in his late teens, stares with desperate intensity at the camera, right at you. He is movie-star-gorgeous but you don't even think about it because you can't think about anything but the look in those eyes. I keep thinking about that picture at random parts of the day ever since.
But the thing I remember most vividly was a grainy black-and-white video. I found after it ended that it's a clip from the Eichmann trial. But at first all I saw was a slight man in his late 30s, with the face of a poet and intensity to match reading something out loud. People in the audience (at the trial) were weeping. The intensity of not just his words, but of his whole person pulled me to watch even though I was going to walk past (you couldn't look at everything, you'd have had to spend days). I sat down to watch and found out the man was Abba Kovner, the leader of the uprising in the Vilna ghetto. He was reading a call to resistance he'd written years ago, to get the resistance in Vilna started, which was the first call to arms for the Jews to fight.
I wanted to know more about him and found it, both in the museum and on-line. After the ghetto was liquidated, he became a partisan leader. After the war, he was a leader of the organization to smuggle Jews out of Europe into Israel and was briefly jailed for his activities by the British. He fought in the Israeli War of Independence and ended up living on a kibbutz with his wife who was a fellow partisan. And, oddly enough, my first impression was correct. He was a poet.
Here's a web page that describes this in more detail. Abba Kovner. I post so often about men whose claim to fame is acting and nice looks, or heroes that are fictional, that I wanted to post about someone who is a real life hero, and someone I admire greatly. I've just bought "The Avengers" by Rich Cohen that deals with Kovner and other Vilna partisans.
Like A Seal
1.
How little we need
to be happy:
a half-kilo increase in weight,
two circuits of the corridors
at Sloan-Kettering
in bedroom slippers
a morning without aspirin
silence gentle as a pit,
a distant
sand dune
behind the green bridge
a patch of lawn
and you beside me beginning
to knit a new sweater.
2.
The rhythmic movement
of the needles between your fingers
has something of the beat--ai-li
lu-lu-li--
sounds that live within a man
with all the other unrealities
not wiped out
in the massacres.
Poems link
I don't think I'll ever forget one particular photo (taken by an anonymous German soldier) of three or four Jewish men digging their own grave, minutes away from being shot. Most are middle-aged and weary and bent over their shovels. But one person, a boy in his late teens, stares with desperate intensity at the camera, right at you. He is movie-star-gorgeous but you don't even think about it because you can't think about anything but the look in those eyes. I keep thinking about that picture at random parts of the day ever since.
But the thing I remember most vividly was a grainy black-and-white video. I found after it ended that it's a clip from the Eichmann trial. But at first all I saw was a slight man in his late 30s, with the face of a poet and intensity to match reading something out loud. People in the audience (at the trial) were weeping. The intensity of not just his words, but of his whole person pulled me to watch even though I was going to walk past (you couldn't look at everything, you'd have had to spend days). I sat down to watch and found out the man was Abba Kovner, the leader of the uprising in the Vilna ghetto. He was reading a call to resistance he'd written years ago, to get the resistance in Vilna started, which was the first call to arms for the Jews to fight.
I wanted to know more about him and found it, both in the museum and on-line. After the ghetto was liquidated, he became a partisan leader. After the war, he was a leader of the organization to smuggle Jews out of Europe into Israel and was briefly jailed for his activities by the British. He fought in the Israeli War of Independence and ended up living on a kibbutz with his wife who was a fellow partisan. And, oddly enough, my first impression was correct. He was a poet.
Here's a web page that describes this in more detail. Abba Kovner. I post so often about men whose claim to fame is acting and nice looks, or heroes that are fictional, that I wanted to post about someone who is a real life hero, and someone I admire greatly. I've just bought "The Avengers" by Rich Cohen that deals with Kovner and other Vilna partisans.
Like A Seal
1.
How little we need
to be happy:
a half-kilo increase in weight,
two circuits of the corridors
at Sloan-Kettering
in bedroom slippers
a morning without aspirin
silence gentle as a pit,
a distant
sand dune
behind the green bridge
a patch of lawn
and you beside me beginning
to knit a new sweater.
2.
The rhythmic movement
of the needles between your fingers
has something of the beat--ai-li
lu-lu-li--
sounds that live within a man
with all the other unrealities
not wiped out
in the massacres.
Poems link
