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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2011 : Laurie Lee Didesch
HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARY OR NEVER AGAIN
The man was a boy in the Ukraine whose family escaped the ghetto before the henchman went door to door making the Jews march to a ditch where they were told to strip naked and face forward before being shot at close range and then kicked into the gaping hole. Moaning, they were pummeled by rocks. The effect was a pillow over the mouth. They had gone down like
earth under the plow—row by row. Clothes flapped on the lines in the rolling countryside.
The family hid in an abandoned barn. The father gathered potatoes and rutabagas after dark. But the neighbors torched the building. The boy did not notice when his mother stopped screaming.
She hissed like a lobster in boiling water. The father, son and daughter hid in a nearby forest.
But the Gestapo caught the father and beat him until he resembled carrion. Then, one stuck
a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The boy and girl ran until they could run no more.
Hansel and Gretel is indeed a fairytale. Up the road, a farmer and his wife took in the children. They were never far from the sights of carnage. They attended a school where they recited
Christian prayers. The boy who is now a man stands at the farm; a camera focuses on his face,
waiting for it to bloom into a flower that is jubilant in color not black. He shakes his head and holds a photo of the children whose eyes are not gelatinous but like marbles. An interviewer says: You must have been okay all these years because you lived such a normal childhood here.
This poem won an Honorable Mention in the 2011 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Author Laurie Lee Didesch received a $100 award. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Laurie Lee Didesch
My poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Comstock Review, The MacGuffin, Karamu, White Pelican Review, Third Wednesday, California Quarterly, Artword Quarterly, Artisan: A Journal of Craft, The Awakenings Review, Arts Alive! Literary Review, Blood and Thunder, Poetry Cram, Voices on the Wind, Jewish Women's Literary Annual, and Julien's Journal, and the anthologies Shadow and Light: A Literary Anthology on Memory (Monadnock Writers' Group, 2011), Feast of Fools: Poems, Stories, and Essays on Sacred Fools and Tricksters (Sacred Fools Press, 2011), and Child of my Child: Poems and Stories for Grandparents (Gelles-Cole Literary Enterprises, 2010). I have also won several awards, including First Place in the Sinipee Writers' Annual Poetry Contest.
I live in a suburb of Chicago with my husband, Alan, and our two cats, Honey Pie and Bobbie Socks. I am a freelance writer and editor. Currently, I am writing a book for a clock museum on the history of American clocks.
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