My Grandfather's Story | Teen Ink

My Grandfather's Story

April 19, 2011
By AlexieG. GOLD, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
AlexieG. GOLD, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
17 articles 0 photos 8 comments

Favorite Quote:
"Do not hide behind the image of who you wish to be, or you will lose sight of who you once were."


Running down the winding streets,
Perpetually
 
Watching bodies fall around me
Watching them miserably
 
Terrified cries howl in my ears
Blood spatters my face
Tears dance in my eyes
A scream is ripping its way out of my chest
 
I suck it in, I hold my breath
But wasn't it silence, that allowed these deaths?
 
Pa runs by my side,
He has a limp in his stride.
 
Simon squeezes my arm, I pull him forward
I'm pulling and running, but what am I moving toward?
 
Dear G-d, my Elohim,
Listen to my prayer, and listen to them scream.
Wasn't it our freedom that Moses seeked to redeem?
 
Well look at us now, we are rats in a maze,
Simple rats dying in this bloody craze
While our neighbors sit idly by
While the Nazis pound their salutes into the sky
While the whole world watches us die
 
Dead bodies pile high
Row upon row,
On a bed of blood-stained snow.
 
Are we next? Will I be separated from the family that I hold so dear?
Should we give up? Freedom is no where near.
Who am I compared to millions of Jews' lives?
No, I will continue, my father's last words were: Maybe You Will Survive.

The author's comments:
This is one of my grandfather's stories during his time in the Holocaust. Before my grandfather, Aron, was sent to a concentration camp, his father Moshe, his sister Esther, his brother Simon, and himself were hauled out of their home by Nazis, along with the rest of the Jews in the city, and rounded up together. Chaos soon took over in the city, and Jews were running through streets and parks, hoping to escape the bite of bullets from machine guns that the Nazis wielded. This is what I describe in my poem, but what I did not include was that after what was left of the Jews were rounded together along a brick wall in the heart of the city, the Nazis ordered anyone who had identification papers to enter cattle cars. These papers indicated that they worked on the railroad and were capable of hard labor. Aron Goldfarb was one of these people. However, he was the only one in his family who had a paper. Aron's father was weak, his older sister was not a strong worker, and his younger brother was very little and would be unable to perform any had labor. Aron did not wish to leave his family behind, he was afraid that he would never see them again. But his father told him not to be afraid. Moshe also told his son "maybe you will survive". These were Moshe's last words to his son, and after the war, Aron wrote a book retelling his time during the Holocaust, he called it, Maybe You Will Survive. Aron never saw his family again, but he was told from a friend, who's job was to dig graves for dead Jews, that his family was taken on a Death March. Aron's family was then shot and buried in graves with hundreds of other Jews.

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