Encounters (read by the author)

The ground is singing under our feet:
who were cast aside like stones have sprung up as harvest,
life rekindled by community.
The past ploughed under whispers as we meet:
you are my neighbour whose roots nourish me.

Encounters

The children in the Street (read by the author)

None of the children here ever walk on their own:
the scenes around them hand them through the streets,
their senses buckled into the armour of home.
Life kneels to its reﬂection in their faces.
None of the children are ever still, in response
to the sap of the city rising in their spring.

The Children in the Street

Naomi in Jerusalem (read by the author)

i
One generation past the holocaust
my golden daughter matches Jerusalem:
all she expends herself on contributes to make her.

ii
People, noises and events
are my daughter’s elements
and the honey-coloured stones
dance about her in response.

Naomi in Jerusalem

In the New Liberal Synagogue (read by the author)

i
How could Cain know what he had done the rabbi said
when he had never before seen this change
death came into the world with Abel dead

The listeners are exiled German Jews
sitting side by side each in his isolation
as a child I watched an angel choose
six million victims from this congregation
not to have died to have survived is strange

Let no one hesitate to mention to us
the killing of one human by another
the way to understanding passes through us

Cain did not know what he was doing to his brother

ii
My neutral daughter is aware
that sheltered by my family
in God I am less close to her
than in the world's hostility

But can she see the mark we bear?

iii
My daughter feels exempt and slightly bored
I have not taught her how to celebrate
now the traditions which I have ignored
challenge their echo in her to relate
her sturdy lifetime to the salvaged word

I think of children dying of starvation
six months I would have lived the records show
my feelings make a fence of all I know
between my daughter and this congregation

iv
I imagine my mother in any middle-aged woman
dressed in black warm and fat as she was when I was a child
my mind which can be compassionate to a German
has no pity for me and shows her about to be killed

 v
The exiled choir sings its praise
in German Jewish melodies
we do not question God who made
men vulnerable and afraid
and others suffer more than us
nor in our father’s house refuse
to rejoice that we are Jews

vi
Nothing this evening is for me what it seems
this synagogue is the symbol of another
my daughter is myself I am my mother
those around us have died in concentration camps
beyond this hall are other holy rooms
in which all the survivors worship together

In the New Liberal Synagogue

Monologue (read by the author)

Now I am glad to be alone
what is unspoken is my own
I do not want to be consoled
because this grief is all I hold
I will not let my parents rest
and I will not be reconciled
l mourn them and I mourn this child
I have returned and I am lost

I have returned and am alone
if life is neutral what has made
the fearful pattern of my own
and are not all who pray afraid
I submit to no deity
the myth is not defendable
I know I am expendable
my master is society

I have returned but not to curse
where if not here am I at home
I care for neither pride nor blame
I search the past for my true source
I want to face my parents’ fate
I must know that I may forgive
and I will make it matter that
I alone am left alive

Monologue

The Town (read by the author)

I did not want to feel at home
of what importance was the town
my family were driven from
how could I still have thought it mine
I have four children why should I
expend my love on stones and trees
of what signiﬁcance were these
to have such power over me

As stones and trees absorb the weather
so these had stored my childhood days
and from a million surfaces
gave back my father and my mother
my presence there was dialogue
how could I have refused to answer
when my own crippled childhood broke
from streets and hillsides like a dancer

The Town

In a Tram (read by the author)

I felt most alone when I was surrounded by Germans
who would have sent me to Riga twenty-ﬁve years ago
I knew of no means by which I might have determined
their real present reaction to meeting a Jew

What distinguishes these who tolerated the slaughter
from people elsewhere whom they seem to resemble so much
did they recognise in me a murdered couple's daughter
does their instinct no longer respond to a Jew within reach

People in trams have decided their destination
they would not have broken the threads of their lives for a Jew
had they turned upon me I would have felt less forsaken
I meant nothing to them and they mattered so much to me

In a Tram

Race (read by the author)

When I returned to my home town
believing that no one would care
who I was and what I thought
it was if the people caught
an echo of me everywhere
they knew my story by my face
and I who am always alone
became a symbol of my race

Like every living Jew I have
in imagination seen
the gas-chamber the mass-grave
the unknown body which was mine
and found in every German face
behind the mask the mark of Cain
I will not make their thoughts my own
by hating people for their race

Race

I Was Not There (read by the author)

The morning they set out from home
I was not there to comfort them
the dawn was innocent with snow
in mockery – it is not true
the dawn was neutral was immune
their shadows threaded it too soon
they were relieved that it had come
I was not there to comfort them

One told me that my father spent
a day in prison long ago
he did not tell me that he went
what difference does it make now
when he set out when he came home
I was not there to comfort him
and now I have no means to know
of what I was kept ignorant

Both my parents died in camps
I was not there to comfort them
I was not there they were alone
my mind refuses to conceive
the life the death they must have known
I must atone because I live
I could not have saved them from death
the ground is neutral underneath

Every child must leave its home
time gathers life impartially
I could have spared them nothing since
I was too young – it is not true
they might have lived to succour me
and none shall say in my defence
had I been there to comfort them
it would have made no difference

I Was Not There

Kaddish (read by the author)

i
Simple must be the words I use
to commemorate all these
Jews and those who died like Jews
consider when you label them
sick of sad Jewish memories
making emotional demands
‘natural victims of strong hands’
that those who killed them did the same

ii
It is not just to think them weak
because they stood in line to die
these people were defeated by
a refusal of the mind
to contemplate what men can do
Christ persecuted was a Jew
and when confronted he was meek
and he had left all hope behind

iii
It was the greatest wrong of all
to make their dying bestial
so that it is incongruous
to think of them as glorious
I mourn my parents without pride
I see them as their killers did
who by degrading me as well
are beyond death victorious

iv
I will remember truthfully
who they were and how they died
that is the least I must live through
and by it I can serve them still
in memory of them I will
disburden every enemy
only one hurt through them can show
the mercy which they were denied

v
I will endeavour not to hate
the men who tortured and who killed
each of them has been a child
and was at birth immaculate
I will not curse mankind because
men have made concentration camps
a grief like mine is only stilled
by the inborn need to celebrate

vi
Between their ordinary lives 
and their endings must have lain
an enviable state of grace
experience does not explain
why people should prefer to face
all agony with every breath
rather than find an easy death
the knowledge of their choice survives

vii
I think of their illusions and
wonder what thoughts they had of God
if they prayed to him as a friend
they could have had no enemy
if suffering of flesh and blood
assures the soul eternal life
why is their death a cause for grief
a reproach to Christianity

viii
They all kept their identities
I would have known my parents there
as ordinary people who
responded to catastrophes
not as saints and martyrs do
but with surprise that they should bear
their persecution and not cease
till death from being what they were

ix
There is a drawing of a hand
all evolution in its shape
stretching through a wire fence
to a flower growing beyond
out of the play of centuries
in celebration of life grows
this gesture of such innocence
it can almost be called escape

Kaddish

Born Kaethe Loewenthal in Bielefeld, Germany in 1923, Karen Gershon adopted a new name, a new country (England), and the English language to become the author of 7 poetry collections, 3 works of non-fiction and 3 novels, all published in the UK. Some of these volumes were also published in the USA and some in Germany. 
In 1967 Karen Gershon won the Arts Council Poetry Award for SELECTED POEMS as well as the Jewish Chronicle Book of the Year Award for WE CAME AS CHILDREN - her pioneering collective autobiography, documenting the experiences of the young refugees who came to the UK on the Kindertransport, as she did. Both these books were published by Gollancz in 1966. 
In 1989 (the year a documentary about Karen's life - Stranger in a Strange Land - was shown on UK Channel 4 TV) Macmillan republished We Came As Children along with Collected Poems - a selection from four earlier collections with some later unpublished poems. 
A small selection from her final collection of poems was published as GRACE NOTES in 2002 - a hand printed limited edition book with drawings by her daughter (and literary executor) Stella Tripp. The full collection remains unpublished, and previous collections are all currently out of print, though some individual poems are in print, in anthologies and Holocaust Memorial Day resources. 
Karen Gershon died in 1993 at the age of 69. A LESSER CHILD, the first volume of her autobiography was published that same year by Peter Owen. The second volume, A TEMPERED WIND, was published in the USA by Northwestern University Press in 2009.

Poems by Karen Gershon

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