At 12 she’s become obsessed with the Holocaust,
with the thought of children her age
who in the soft evening did not
go to bed tucked in with pleasant dreams
and fluffy play animals at their feet.
She knows about the children
bathed in seething gas and
turned to ash and cinders.

Her dreaming eye sees Anne Frank:
stuffed into tight attics,
hiding under tables,
herded into cattle cars,
separated from her family,
reduced to skin and bones,
ravaged by typhus,
freezing to death,
her small body unceremoniously dumped
into a mass grave,
and an indelible yellow star
stitched through her heart.

“Joanna” seeks to relate the impact of the Holocaust through the generations, the repercussions and consequences of which are evolving to this day. Each April we honor those who have been killed and what has been lost, but we mustn’t stop there. Children are humanity’s legacy, through them the future must shine bright.

The void that the Holocaust and genocide opens up in the world must be filled or there is no aftermath and all is lost.

In 2014 “Joanna” appeared in “PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators,” edited by Dr. Karen Shawn and Dr. Charles Ades Fishman. “PRISM” is published with the generous help of its contributors and through the courtesy of leading educational organizations and institutions.

I read Joanna during the 2015 Holocaust Commemoration in NYC at the U.S. Court of International Trade, the only poem to be read.

The moving portrait of Anne Frank is by Dr. Francine Mayran, an artist, psychiatrist, and Expert at the Council of Europe on the Holocaust and genocide, whom I am honored to call my friend.

Stephen Cipot
Garden City Park