November Rain
"Survivor" by Elly Simmons
November Rain
Hans Jorg Stahlschmidt
Dedicated to Patricia
Today I am grateful for the rain - heavy like
milky sheets thrown down from heaven - the rain
that didn't come when the Wannsee-conference met
and the boxcars left for Bergen-Belsen.
These are the tears my parents never cried,
nor their neighbors, nor their uncles and co-workers,
nor the students when their classmates could not return
to school, when their neighbors were picked up in
midnight fog, when books disappeared from libraries
and stores closed for ever while storm-troopers
marched proudly up and down clean streets.
These are the tears I cried with you, German and Jewish
tears washing down together the dust from the Hebrew
letters on the gravestones in Prague, stones stacked on
top of each other as if even in death there was no room
to be, these tears falling onto the deaf tunnel walls in
Theresienstadt and on the Appellplatz in Dachau.
These are the tears that mourn absence, the life
that could have been, the richness of friendships never
made, the Jewish quarters which vanished, the German-
Jewish thoughts never thought, the sound of Yiddish
which could have warmed the long Prussian winters.
This is a grief which does not have a grave
nor a monument nor a museum; a grief without
a name, a photograph or a song. It is the grief of
murdered possibilities, of a strangled unborn,
of books not written, of a painting burnt to ashes,
of orchards which never bloomed, it is the loss
of a brother and a sister I never had.