Samuel Gottesman, A Survivor

This is the first of three poems to commemorate the survivors and victims of the Holocaust and Jew-Hatred. The episodes recounted in the poem are true.

Samuel remembers the command 
To hand over all property.
First, it was merely the store.
The products that they sold.

They had to itemize their own
Impoverishment. They took inventory:
Samuel carefully organized all the cruelties
In his head, in his cellared mind,
As his father shuffled a set of papers
And disorganized his entire life. 

II.
His father—a learned man—was sent
To a labor camp. There he chopped wood.
One day a Nazi guard came up to him,
As he crouched under a hornbeam—10 time amputee—
Whose wounds were cauterized by deeper wounds.
A leafless, grey-bark, tortured tree. . . .

“This,” he said, “is the tree of Knowledge.
Jewish Knowledge. Knowledge of Jewish
Good and Evil. Chop it down or I will shoot you.”

His father chopped down the tree.
“Now”, said the guard, “you do not know
What is good and evil do you, Jew?”
His father shook his learned head.

The guard took out his pistol and shot
A Jew. “This is good”, he said.
“Are you slow to acquire knowledge?
I can give you another example.”

Samuel’s father said he understood.
“Good” said the guard. “Then chop more wood.”