Archive
05/18/12
The Smell
To be certain, I was born long enough ago That I could have been exterminated in the Nazi scourge of the 1940s; Only, I came into being in St. Louis, Missouri's Jewish Hospital,
Not in Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Munich, Dresden, Berlin — The first child of a second-generation Sephardic mother and father, Who, though thoroughly insulated from the Third Reich's talons,
For being safely gathered in, under the American eagle's wings, Couldn't help but smell the stench of Hitler's unmentionable atrocities, Those undisclosed desecrations being perpetrated in his death camps,
The unspoken abominations going up in chimney smoke, Barely, if ever, suggested in our newspapers and radio reports, During my toddler years, from 1941 through the war's end, in 1945.
And to this day, more than six and a half decades later, I'm certain that the curse which compels me to compose Shoah poems Has everything to do with that smell Saul and Charlotte breathed in,
No matter that they resided a continent away, heard no door-knocks From spit-shined Brownshirts, the SS, or the Gestapo, No matter that they lost no known family member to the flames.
Why, otherwise, would my seventy-one-year-old olfactory system Catch such acrid whiffs of that smell, lifting, drifting, yet, From those odoriferous stacks at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor?
05/18/12
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