SingingFrogPress

Here it is again (“Keys for freedom in the pockets of the dead”*)

     “If you ask a 10-year old boy where he is from, he will tell you the name of their village, its history, their land,….  The majority of refugees in Gaza still have the keys, and the papers, to their old homes. And there is an expectation that one day we will go back.”**
 
Decades ago as a storyteller in many high school
social studies classes, repeating the words
of a Ukrainian doctor about the Nazi mass murders
at Babi Yar, I commented on the wonder
 
that so many of the murdered Jews had the keys
to their houses in their pockets.
“They think,” the doctor said.
they are going back….”*
 
And here it is again today, reading news
of the widening slaughter in Gaza by my people
mad with grievous pain and rage as they work
to erase the horrors of the Hamas attack, and yes,
the Shoah, too, that older European slaughter,
by committing horrors of their own.
 
“If you ask a 10-year old boy
where he is from, he will tell you the name
of their village, its history, their land,” said
Mr. Keshawi,** a Gaza researcher with Crisis
Group, devoted to “preventing war
and shaping peace.”***
 
Yes.  Here it is again.  And when
will we ever be able to face it?
Our common bond.  And this simple
 
truth: There is no way for any of us
to ever erase our yearning
to go back
home.
                                                          11/6/23
*Vitaly Korotich, poet, documentary film maker, and physician living in Kiev, Ukraine.” from Studs Terkel interview in The Good War: An Oral History of WWII, Pantheon, 1984, p.434.
 
**“For a Grandmother in Gaza, History Is Scarier Than Airstrikes,” Declan Walsh, NYTimes, 10/25/23 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/world/middleeast/gaza-diaspora-families.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIf%20you%20ask%20a%2010,papers%2C%20to%20their%20old%20homes.’
 
*** https://www.crisisgroup.org/who-we-are

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