Interior Monologue: Shavuot and to the Man that I love

artbox and photos by marguerita

You will mock me,call me drama queen and whatever.

Mark, you were all my family. I lost my father and mother . We were also lost,being the remnants that survived the Holocaust.

You and most American Jews cannot get it. It is a unique sentiment, a detached sensation,in search of a port, of a shell to hide.

I was born in 1950, unexpectedly, a surprise, to two wonderful individuals, uprooted,who could never adapt themselves to the

world after losing all.

Both belonged to the European Jewish elite.

I watched them since I was small, I was always alone, because both of them, as much as they loved me, were lost themselves, living in their minds, with the values and beliefs of their ancestors. A kind of purity that could not be exercised anymore.

And so I was taught.

I had to fend for myself and for them. I loved them as much as I at times would revolt.

But I had compassion. I understood their beings.

What they endured.

The real life, reality at its most.

Nothing more horrible then being in a concentration camp,or in a gulag.

Of being butchered alive, witnessing murder and Death daily.

Innocently.

The numbers tattoed on their arms.

The irony of Evil. Uncontrolled and exercised.

Music being played as the ones that tried to escape hanged when caught.

I do not have to read bout.

I watched my two parents.

They survived .

They were there like cattle running on luck

to make it alive.

They learned about Humanity.

They saw the variety of human character .

The homo sapiens.

Hollywood made a travesty of how humans can be evil.

Today, the unrest,the terrorism is only the consequences of Hitler's designs.

The unattainable Peace is a result of the millions of murdered souls, innocently removed from their homes, families and lives.

The Middle East fire is the result of a forced displacement and arrangements of convenience by greedy parties who ransacked and

played with human Rights and Nature.

Who more than I ,could be a voice of the innocent dead.

I carry in me the shadows and truth of the people that are buried within me.

My ancestors. i cannot remain silent and indifferent.

How can you, Mark understand me? Or even react to my life.

It is not a made up story.

I am a portrait of Hitler's and Co as my mother would tell me,when she saw and heard the Fuhrer's commands at his public speeches :The Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany on January 30, 1933, ..... and they started banging houses: "Raus, raus, raus, Juden raus."radieren … ...

The Jews Must Be

Erased"!

How can anyone if not another Child of Holocaust, be able to convey the vision we carry?

It goes beyond compassion.

We look for the impossible,intangible

love.A Love that goes beyond the horizon,beyond the skies and Universe.

I took you and our sons to Poland, to Krakow, to maybe you all grasp my world.

To walk in Auschwitz, to find the traces and walk around the place that my mother lived and was taken away from and thrown into hell.

You, Mark never absorbed my reality.

I had seizures in Krakow.

It was an emotional reaction.

I imagined my mother, wondered what and how she would feel,had she been alive, to see her home, the building, where I was not allowed to enter.

Someone, strangers living there.

My mother never returning to the soil she was born..

IHow can you understand me?

My cries are not about things.

I wanted you to hold me in your arms.

You never were able to open the arms for me.

Marguerita

Purim and My Past,Toledo,Akiva Eiger Krakow , Yehuda AmichaiZyg and Mea

yehuda Amichai
http://atireugram.blogspot.com/2007/07/krakow-on-mymind.html

com/2008/01/krakow-on-my-mind-singing-frog.html

http://atireugram.blogspot.com/2007/02/krakow.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/23/us/yehuda-amichai-poet-who-turned-israel-s-experience-into-verse-dies-at-76.html?pagewanted=all

“When I asked a rabbi, ‘Why do I feel this way?’ he replied, ‘The sleeping souls of your ancestors are calling out to you.’ ”

Purim in 2010 will start on Sunday, the 28th of February and will

continue for 2 days until Monday, the 1st of March.

Note that in the Jewish calendar, a holiday begins on the sunset of the

previous day, so observing Jews will celebrate Purim on the sunset of

Saturday, the 27th of February.

The events commemorated by Purim took place in the ancient Persian Empire, in the fifth century BCE, under the reign of King Achashverosh. Mordechai, a Jew, refused to bow down and prostrate himself before Haman, the vizier to the King. Haman immediately set out "to destroy all the Jews that were throughout the whole kingdom of Achashverosh" (Esther 3,6). In order to effect his vicious racist plan, Haman decided to enlist the aid of the unsuspecting King Achashverosh. Since Haman was a very superstitious person, he had lots cast to determine on which day he should carry out his design. The word for lots is "Purim", and from it we get the name for the holiday. The chosen date was the thirteenth of Adar. The king, who trusted Haman, agreed to his plan to murder the Jews. For Haman had told him that the Jews were "scattered abroad in all the provinces," and that "their laws are different from those of every people" (Esther 3,8). Letters, written by Haman and signed by the king, were sent out throughout all the provinces, commanding all persons "to destroy, to slay, and to cause to perish all the Jews" (Esther 3,13). The Jews would have been massacred, had it not been for Esther, Mordechai's cousin, who had been chosen queen a few years earlier. Queen Esther was able to intercede and save the Jewish community from genocide. Haman was hanged on the gallows which he himself had prepared for Mordechai. The Jews of Persia were spared and judgments were executed on their enemies. Mordechai thereupon sent letters to all the Jews,calling upon them to observe the fourteenth and the fifteenth of Adar, "the days wherein the Jews had rest from their enemies, and the month which was turned for them from sorrow to gladness, and from mourning into a good day; that they should make them days of feasting and gladness, and of sending portions (mishloach manot) one to another and gifts to the poor (matanot la'evyonim)" (Esther 9,22). Some of the nicest traditions of Purim are matanot laevyonim, the giving of gifts to the poor , and mishloach manot, the giving of gifts of food to friends and family.

Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted.

Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews “our elder brothers,” had finally entered the public consciousness.

Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered.

“Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, ‘I am a Jew,’ ” Rabbi Schudrich said. “But two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn’t correspond to the Poland of 2010.”

The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II.

In the past five years, Warsaw’s Jewish community had grown to 600 families from 250. The cafes and bars of the old Jewish quarter in Krakow brim with young Jewish converts listening to Israeli hip hop music.

http://atireugram.blogspot.com/2008/01/krakow-on-my-mind-singing-frog.html