Yom HaShoa

I did not come to number the dead.

To bask in the glow of faces reconstructed from a memory within a memory

Of a destroyed world.

The faces of my own children are enough for me.

I came on behalf of the living.

I came to ask,

How?

How did you do it?

Live, learn, write the Torah of grief?

The Torah of hell.

I can hardly bear to pick up the books.

And my parents. My grandparents.

They made sure I would not speak the language in which they are written.

To protect me from what you knew.

But now I need to know. And my children look to me to tell them.

If you wrote it in Yiddish, I will find it.

If you wrote it in Hebrew, I will find it.

But what if you wrote it in letters of black fire on white fire?

The transmutation of fire; turning something into nothing

until you finally understood what it meant to serve God with all your might.

A human library burned to ashes when they liquidated the ghetto.