In honor of Ilona Karmel & Henia Karmel-Wolfe

A few weeks ago I attended a Passover seder on the theme of social justice. We sat around the table talking about Malcolm X, Gandhi, Moses, and eventually Anielewicz. We read his last letter and spoke about “Jewish resistance.” We contemplated the age-old question of “what in the world would you, in this day and age, be willing to rise up against?” The conversation orbited around political action and reform, about dedicating one’s life to fighting back, about emulating Anielewicz’s ghetto uprising in the fight to combat institutional racism in the American education system through protest and organizing. It was all very wonderful and it was all very unsettling.

As I listened I couldn’t help but think about my great aunt Ilona Karmel, the novelist, teacher, and poet. She was born in Krakow before the war and survived with her sister, my grandmother, despite being run over by a tank during a death march in the twilight of German’s rule over Poland. I thought about how she and my grandmother wrote poems in the concentration camp and hid them by sewing them into the hems of their skirts. I thought about how when the tank crushed their legs and killed their mother in front of them they tore open their skirts and gave the poems to a cousin who left them for dead. I thought about how they survived. I thought about my grandfather being handed the poems in the days after liberation and what he must have felt clutching the body of their work, the art of their suffering.

Years ago, when my great aunt was still alive my father told me that my great Aunt was part of the Krakow ghetto resistance. I was young and steeped in the tales of Anielewicz. Hearing that she was part of that tradition was like hearing that she was a super hero. I wanted to ask her, to hear more but my dad said she didn’t like to talk about it, that he had asked her once and her reply had been, “oh that was just girlscout crap.” My father explained to me that she had worked in the offices sending illegal messages around the ghetto and organizing the troops and that she had been ashamed for not being allowed to actually fight.

Recently I’ve been thinking that she meant something else. Recently I’ve been thinking that political resistance is important, that change is fundamental for our survival, and that rising up against the evils of alienation, corruption, and degradation a necessity. But at the seder I couldn’t help but feel that Anielewicz’s fight is only one way.

As we poured the next cup of wine and dedicated it to resistance, I raised my hand. I told everyone that I wanted to add to our picture of resistance: that writing poetry in a camp while people die around you is a revolutionary act. Painting images of things that no one should ever have to see is a revolutionary act. Writing novels, telling stories, forming a community of souls bound by a narrative is a revolutionary act. It may not force change and it may not destroy enemies, but it strives to explain and understand and it strives to preserve and illuminate. And, in its striving, it diminishes the evil, alienation and degradation in the world. This striving is why I’ve joined “The Unspeakable” team. This striving is why I write and create. This striving is what I think about when it’s Yom HaShoah 71 years after the uprising in Warsaw and 71 years since my aunt Ilona and my grandmother Henia wrote poetry and began sewing.

GET ILONA KARMEL & HENIA-KARMEL WOLFE'S BOOK OF POETRY HERE

In honor of Irving & Lisa Kamrat

Torn, yanked and pulled from the nest without warning
Sent walking in circles without a direction or future in sight
Bare of feet until the bottoms begin to burn, scrape and bleed
Yet I live

Seven months of age my only son, my baby boy
Pulled from his mother’s arms as together we watch him thrown to the fires!
Yet I live

Thrown on a train to nowhere, so I think
Crushed by the piles of living human bodies lying atop me
Adele my darling, where are you?
Yet I live

Unaware of the amnesia about to
set in from the weight of these men
atop my head. Adele I said, “Where is the boy?”
Yet I Live

Weeks go by I know not where I am, nor who I am
Nevertheless, these people dressed in gray, with hats odd of shape, they are out to get me. This I know for sure!
Yet I  live

One day I awaken: Again, I am Itzhak. The Itzhak I have known for a lifetime
How I wish I would freeze with this thing called amnesia.
Sadly, I am not frozen and again these men in gray, they are coming to take me away.
Yet I live

Against the wall says the gray man!
“One hundred slashes to the back of the man named Itzhak.”
 For what I shout, I need and want to know? “Because, says the man in gray   “do you know Itzhak that you are a Jew?!” Yes, gray man I know    
 I am jew. The rifle smashing down across my mouth as all of my teeth spew forth
Yet I Live

They tell me Delirium set in once I was back in the cubicle.
Lying there with wretched blood dripping down my back onto the decayed
miniscule mattress….
Infection sure to set in soon, along with the stench of deterioration.
Yet I live

Left alone too recover, “For what gray man shall I live , I do not know!”
but for the gray men, it is all about the torture!
This I know for sure! I want to die. I want to die a jew!
Yet I Live

The door swings open and crashes against the wall
Up Itzhak, Up they say……………”Mach Schnell” say the gray men
Weak …so very,very weak but I stand….
the weight of the world and all the dead on my narrow shoulders
Yet I Live

It is time for you to go
To the end I say
To the end they say
One less jew
Put the Jew named Itzhak into the gas chamber says one gray man to the other.
The door slams shut. The gray men leave.
The air fills swiftly with fumes of gas and the smell of death.   
Yes, oh yes sweet death is finally here!
Schma Israel adonai elohanou adonai achod …
Hear O Israel, The Lord is our God, The Lord is One
Yet I Live....

In honor of all of the survivors and their families

In a recent interview, my grandfather and I looked through his paintings that tell a story he often found too difficult to put into words. These paintings are the inspiration behind UNSPEAKABLE: AN ANIMATED HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARY— a tribute to my own familial legacy, and to the legacy of all those affected by the Holocaust. It is our responsibility to remember the 12 million people who perished and to honor those who miraculously survived. It is our responsibility to share their stories. It is our responsibility to preserve their legacy.