The Leeds Review - Issue #1In the module I chose to study this term:
Reading notions of the cultural other in Art,
They talked about the Holocaust today:
"The massacre of the Jews, the non-Christian ethnic",
But I almost burnt through my seat before
What about the Poles? I said,
"The Jews from Poland, yes."
But they weren't all Jews.
"Oh you mean the Arian race." But my
Mother was a blue-eyed blonde.
They had heard they were coming
And were preparing to leave
But they were known too late
And they came too soon.
A military man, my grandmother's father
Was taken and shot.
Papers burnt she was pushed on the cart,
Five years old and only then real
By remembering her name and her home.
They had heard they were coming
And too young to fight
He left with his brother.
But too many were looking
And they could never have stopped them
From breaking their homes and dragging their bodies,
To stunt and sicken them while they waited their time.
Her mother would cry and couldn't ever say why
And she could barely think why, who or how
And why every day she would see fewer
And fewer walking round.
And thought; do they go where my Papa will be
When they let us get out?
He'd been looking for days in desperate hope
And when that moment had come, though sick
And weak, with feeble feet he ran
As fast as fear could take him, reaching and stretching
And needing to cross the Siberian wasteland.
But it wasn't to be.
Not knowing what hope could ever return
He shook as they made him
Drop dust in the faces
Of his neighbours
And friends.
They came to some senses, but too late for so many,
And I can't help but wonder who else could be here,
Or that I so nearly only lived in the mind of another;
The way that my kindred live inside of me.
In time there were still some people to release.
In time for me they were given their choices:
To return to no name, no work and no home,
To talk with the ghosts of those they never can see,
Or to come to this land and restart to exist and be free.
A Brit I have grown
And to Britain I owe,
But they can never remove this half that is Pole
And these memories within me will never grow old.
Josephine Ivie Info