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There were many moving poems about
silence. The following student expressed her
thoughts about the camps today:
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Silence of the Camps
A Reflection on the Holocaust
The old gates creak with history,
the grounds echo pain
of brutality,
killing,
and loneliness.
This place has a voice
and to the yearning it will speak.
The walls will tell a traveler
of how children grasped for them
clinging,
scratching,
pulling,
hoping to escape,
but they never did.
Just ask the grounds about the visitors
whom the Angels of Death led with a smile.
There was no turning back for them,
nowhere to run.
Their patches had marked their destiny.
The gates speak of emptiness
how it’s so lonely here and
how in the end,
all that remains,
is the silence of the past...
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My students also discovered a gold mine of images when
listening to Alex Gross, a Czechoslovakian survivor who was
liberated from Buchenwald at age 16 and later came to live
in Atlanta. Mr. Gross came to our school and addressed the
eighth graders. As soon as we returned to our classroom,
we brainstormed all of the images that we had identified in
his story. Images such as his raw and bleeding hands from
throwing heavy, rough bricks, the loss of his blonde hair, his
ride in the cattle car, his last vision of his mother and father,
and the black American soldier who brought him back to
consciousness at Buchenwald and whom he thought was an angel
By this time, I knew that the poem patterns had done the
job that I hoped for, and the students were able to tackle
poems about Mr. Gross without using a pattern. In the first
example below, the student used the image of the painful
wounds caused by the bricks that were thrown and caught
to relate to the pain that Mr. Gross has suffered since the
Holocaust as well. He had told them about the tragic death
of his only son in a farming accident and the rape and
murder of his wife in Atlanta. The student expresses in her
poem that his strength in surviving all of that, and his
willingness to educate and make a difference, strengthens
those whom he touches.
A Destined Gift
You were thrown a brick.
It was caught with your bare hands.
They were worn,
But the wounds healed.
Life tossed you a load of bricks
And yet you caught them, too.
You carried them on your back
Until your time was up.
You healed.
You were strong
And held on.
The scars are there
And the pain remains,
And so it shall,
But for a purpose.
You try to educate others
To make a difference,
And you have.
Your strength spreads,
As a spilt bucket of water
Dampens the thirsty earth.