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DARKFLASHES
IRIT AMIEL70 years after the Holocaust
Dark Flashes is the first-ever English language collection of
poems by Irit Amiel, whose work is focused on experiences of the
Holocaust, both her own and those of many others.
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FOREWORD
Who better to build bridges of understanding between nations,
united and divided by so many issues, than those of us who write
– the people of the pen? Because everything, after all, begins with
words, words which can sometimes kill or else bring back into
being.
A human being is born into a country, any country.
They are then spoken to in a language, any language. A mother
sings lullabies, issues reprimands, a father telling jokes and fairy
tales. And so this imposed tongue becomes our crucial mode of
communication.
And me, I was born in Poland. I grew up being spoken
to in Polish. The whole spectrum of my earliest experiences – the
good and the bad – was set in it. Then came the event which we
now know about all too well. During the long, long years which
have passed since the “the age of the gas chambers”, a wide
river of words has poured forth on the subject of the Holocaust.
And so a certain erosion of language has occurred, words losing
their edge. It seems to me that today, when it is possible to know
almost every fact and figure about those times, one must write
about such dramatic events in the simplest, most ordinary terms,
awkwardly almost. So as to reach everyone, especially new
generations of readers.
Humility is key in not letting us forget that survival too is
a matter of chance, a million and a half to one sort of chance, and
that we are only tools for some greater purpose. Humility which
helps another randomly given gift, the ability to write, keep on
registering that which others keep silent about.
Irit Amiel
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DELAYED
I did not get to Treblinka on time
arriving some fifty years too late,
the trees standing bare in autumn.
I wanted to escape at once, because
the rusting relic of a train carriage
was still there waiting for me,
the forest around it whispering quietly.
It was beautiful, grey, calm, bare
and only the wind stroked the earth, trees,
stones and us,
extinguishing the candle we had lit
time and time again.
Then Dita said – you see, it is good you did not get here on time,
and have grown old, mother.
* Treblinka was a German Nazi extermination camp in German-occupied Poland during World War II
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EQUILIBRIUM
One lives
for fifty years
on the evergreen border
between the past
and the present
On the thin line
between madness
and mindfulness
to at night reach out
to memories as sharp
as razors
And waking at sweltering
damp dawns
is unable to comprehend
that equilibrium between
night-time horrors and merciful
mornings
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LESS DEAD
As long as I am still here you are less dead,
but soon enough you will die for the nth and last time.
My end will finally wipe you from the face of the earth.
For now, however, you are all still beating within me,
tattooed into memory, etched into my veins.
Soon enough, I will take you down to Hades,
into that final darkness, so you will rise from the dead no more.
I will take with me all those names and songs,
faces, smiles, miseries, worries and tears.
Every mask, memory, the missing of things,
each escape, debasement and late return.
I will take you all with me to the grave
and we will stay there
more dead. We, the victims and the saved
of that wormwood-bitter twentieth century.
And perhaps, finally, then we’ll make
our “escape from noise and from sadness,
we Jews of song, we Jews of madness.”
*The last line is taken from Julian Tuwim poem “Little Jew” [Words in blood, Warszawa 1926]
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* UNRRA - The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was founded in 1943, becoming part of the United Nations in 1945.
OUT OF EGYPT
He exiled himself from his own Egypt in autumn rains,
losing his shoes in black, sticky mud.
At the foot of the snow-covered, sky-high Alpine peaks
with a five kilo rucksack and a fifteen-year-old
heart compressed down to the size of a ping pong ball,
he jumped down from an UNRRA truck and, clutching
with his nails at frozen bushes, he smuggled
across the border his feeble, salvaged body.
Suspended from a narrow rope ladder,
between the navy blue water of the Mediterranean
and the star-spangled, springtime Italian sky,
he climbed from an unsteady boat onto a tall,
drunken ship which was meant to take him to the shores
of the Promised Land. But the waters did not part
and he once again ended up in a camp, behind barbed
wire, upon ruddy earth burnt out by the Cyprus
sun. And he stayed there in that tent,
choking with heat for two hundred nights and days,
feeding the dry sands with his longing and tears.
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TAKEOFFS
I love planes, the takeoffs and the departures.
I love to be torn free of the earth,
to sail across immaculate clouds
separating me like levees
from the world of the real.
To rise like Icarus
with his waxen wings,
like a cloud, a bird, like smoke.
Because that is when I feel closer to all of you
my charred ones.
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GENESIS
The earthquake left behind it desolation and chaos.
Darkness fell over the abyss and the Holy Spirit
no longer watched over the waters.
And then, here and there, they rose up,
from ruins, from ashes and from dusts,
a girl, a youngster, an elder and a child.
And, like fresh grass in springtime, their
their dry bones took root and light was born
beneath the heavens and they began to multiply
anew.
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VICIOUS CIRCLE
Your grandson was born in Hamburg
and that was to be the end of it.
The first word to reach his tiny ear
uttered by attending doctors was in the same language
as the one which had reached his forefather’s ear
at the crest of that inhuman agony.
And yet you bowed your head
when your grandson, unwittingly,
completed that vicious circle.
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A HOLOCAUST EXAM
We are the remaining few.
Our years have not eroded consciousness,
though in our place a great silence will descend.
And my granddaughter says –
I have a Holocaust exam tomorrow.
Our lives, our dark dreams,
our daily fears turning into dates.
And a young lawyer says – They are old now,
their testimony cannot be trusted.
We are the remaining few.
Slowly departing and disappearing,
taking down to the bottom
our silences, our screams.
We are the remaining few.
Only a handful of days left
in which to testify, in them the horror and bitter
scores to settle with men and with God.
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IRIT AMIEL
DARK FLASHES
Irit Amiel was born in Poland in 1931 as Irena Librowicz. She survived the Second World War in the Czestochowa ghetto, living under false Aryan papers. Via illegal routes (through displaced persons camps in Germany, Italy and Cyprus), she reached Palestine in 1947. She has lived in Israel ever since, where she works as a writer, translator and writes poetry in two languages (Polish and Hebrew). Her volume of short stories Osmaleni (published in English as Scorched by Vallentine Mitchell, The Library of Holocaust Testimonies, 2006), was nominated for various literary awards in Poland, including twice for the prestigious Nike Prize as well as the Biblioteka Raczynskich Prize. It has also been published in Hebrew and Hungarian. Volumes of her poetry include: Egzamin z Zagłady (Łódź 1994, 1998), Nie zdążyłam (Łódź 1998) and Wdychać głęboko (Warsaw 2002). She has translated several books by Polish authors into Hebrew and her translations of writers such as Leo Lipski, Marek Hłasko, Henryk Grynberg and Hanna Krall have appeared in various journals. She has also translated poems by Wisława Szymborska and several theatrical productions. Her own poems have appeared in numerous publications, in Poland and abroad. She is currently working on her autobiography. She has also translated poems by Wisława Szymborska and several theatrical productions. Her own poems have appeared in numerous publications, in Poland and abroad. She is currently working on completing her autobiography.
This is her first collection of poems to be published in English.
“To frame experiences ever so hard to express, you have found the only possible form: a totally raw kind of simplicity. Because of this, you can be sure your poems will always live on!”
W. Szymborska
Book Information:
Author: Irit AmielTranslator: Marek KazmierskiLanguage: EnglishGenre: PoetryPages: 114ISBN: 978-0-9572327-2-3Publication: 27/01/2013