How do we remember the Day of Remembrance
Il 27st January Every year we celebrate the Day of Remembrance so as not to forget the Holocaust: here we present a collection, partial but significant, of poems, songs and passages from books, to never forget.
If this is a man
You who live safe
In your lukewarm homes,
you who find returning in the evening
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Working in the mud
Who knows no peace
What a struggle for half bread
Who dies for a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without a name
With no more strength to remember
Your eyes empty and your womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this was:
I command you these words.
Carve them into your heart
Staying at home walking away,
Lying down and getting up;
Repeat them to your children.
Or the house breaks down,
Illness prevent you,
Your births twist their faces from you.
(Primo Levi, If this is a man, 1947)
17 PHOTOSBooks to tell children about the Shoah
Many books that tell the Shoah. For all ages
Shoah
Difficult to recognize, but it was here.
Here they burned people.
A lot of people have been burned here.
Yes, this is the place.
Nobody ever left here.
Gas trucks used to get there ...
There were two huge ovens ...
and afterwards, they threw the bodies into those ovens,
and the flames rose up to heaven.
Up to the sky?
Yes
It was terrible.
This cannot be told.
Nobody can
imagine what happened here.
Impossible. And no one can understand it.
and me too, today ...
I can't believe I'm here.
No, I can't believe that.
Here it was always so peaceful. Always.
When 2000 Jews burned every day
it was just as quiet.
Nobody shouted. Everyone did their job.
It was silent. Calm.
As now.
based on 'SHOAH' by Claude Lanzmann
Read also: Remembrance day: how to explain it to childrenJudenrein
"Since then, without warning signs,
This slow agony continually returns:
And until the moment
My terrible story is not told
The heart imprisoned within me burns "
by Sandra Bianco
Defect of form
There were a hundred
There were a hundred men in arms.
When the sun rose in the sky,
Everyone took a step forward.
Hours passed, without sound:
Their lids didn't blink.
When the bells rang,
Everyone took a step forward.
So the day passed and it was evening,
But when the first star bloomed in the sky,
All together they took a step forward.
"Back, get out of here, filthy ghosts:
Go back to your old night ":
But no one answered, and instead.
all in a circle took a step forward. "
FIRST LEVI incipit of "Vizio di forma"
From the diary of Anne Frank
So wrote Anna a few days before the Germans broke into the secret lodging ... July 15, 1944
... Here is the difficulty of these times: the ideals, the dreams, the splendid hopes have not yet risen in us who are already struck and completely destroyed by the cruel reality. It is a great miracle that I have not given up all my hopes because they seem absurd and unworkable. I still keep them, despite everything, because I continue to believe in the innermost goodness of man. It is impossible for me to build everything on the basis of death, misery, confusion. I see the world slowly changing into a desert, I hear the roar ever louder as the roar approaching that will kill us too, I participate in the pain of millions of men, yet, when I look at the sky, I think that everything will turn to good again, that even this ruthless hardness will cease, order, peace and serenity will return. Meanwhile, I must keep my ideals intact; there will come a time when they may still be viable
your Anna
Blowin 'in the wind
How many roads must a man travel
before he was called a man?
And how many seas must a white dove cross
before he falls asleep on the beach?
And how long the cannonballs will have to fly
before they will be abolished forever?
The answer, my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind
How long must a man look up
before I can see the sky?
And how many ears a man must have
before you hear people cry
And how many deaths there must be for him to know
that too many people have died?
The answer, my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind
How many years can a mountain exist
before it is washed away by the sea?
And how many years can people exist
before being allowed to be free
And how long can a man turn his head
pretending not to see
The answer, my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind
Auschwitz
I died when I was a child
I died with a hundred others
passed through the chimney
and now I'm in the wind.
There was snow in Auschwitz
the smoke rose slowly
in the cold winter day
and now I'm in the wind.
Many people in Auschwitz
but one great silence
how strange I have not learned
to smile here in the wind.
I ask how can man
to kill his brother
yet we are in the millions
to dust here in the wind.
The cannon still thunders
she is still not happy
the human beast of blood
and still the wind brings us.
I ask when it will be
that man will be able to learn
to live without killing
and the wind will settle.
Terezin
Terezin is a village 60 km from Prague. It became infamous as it was turned into a ghetto where Jewish children were grouped before being sorted into various Extermination camps. In the Terezin ghetto, the largest number of child prisoners was concentrated, including infants. Terezin's children mostly wrote poetry. Of the 15.000 children who passed through the Terezin camp they were saved less than a hundred: most of them died in the course of 1944 in the gas chambers of Auschwitz
Barbed wire
On a bright red sunset,
under the flowering horse chestnuts,
on the yellow sandy square,
yesterday the days are all the same,
as beautiful as flowering trees.
It is the world that smiles
and I would like to fly. But where?
A barbed wire prevents
that flowers bloom in here.
I can not fly.
I don't want to die.
Peter, a Jewish child killed by the Nazis in the Terezin ghetto
Miserable childhood
Miserable childhood, chain
that binds you to the enemy and the gallows.
Miserable childhood, which inside the
its squalor
already distinguishes good and evil.
Over there where childhood sweetly
rests
in the small flower beds of a park
over there, in that house, something broke
when contempt fell upon me:
over there, in the gardens or in the flowers
or on the maternal womb, where I was born
to cry ...
In the light of a candle I fall asleep
maybe to understand one day
that I was a very small thing,
as small as the choir of 30.000,
like their sleeping life
over there in the fields,
who sleeps and wakes up,
will open your eyes
and not to see too much
he will allow himself to fall asleep ...
Zanus Zachenburg 19/07/1929 – Auschwitz 18/12/1943
Read also: Remembrance Day: how to explain it to childrenButterfly
The last one, the very last one,
of such an intense yellow, like this
absolutely yellow,
like a tear of the sun when it falls
over a white rock
so yellow, so yellow!
the last
flew lightly high,
hovered confidently
to kiss his last world.
In a few days
it will be my seventh week already
ghetto: my parents found me here
and here they call me the rue flowers
and the white chestnut candlestick
in the backyard.
But I haven't seen any butterflies here.
Last time was the last:
butterflies don't live in the ghetto.
Pavel Friedman (1921 - 1944)
Fear
Again the horror hit the ghetto,
a cruel evil that drives out any other.
Death, a mad demon, wields a cold scythe
who beheads his victims around.
The hearts of the fathers beat today with fear
and mothers hide their faces in the womb.
The typhus viper strangles children
and takes his tithes from the herd.
Today my blood still throbs,
but my companions die next to me.
Rather than see them die
I would like to find death myself.
But no, my God, we want to live!
We don't want gaps in our ranks.
The world is ours and we want it to be better.
We want to do something. It is forbidden to die!
Eva Picková - twelve years old - died 18/12/1943
Useful resources
- Comic: Esther's star
- Shoah: the memory against denial
