He called his older sister Mama
but the photo in his hallway
was the same as on my grandma’s shelf
of their mother, killed in Birkenau.
He wouldn’t say how he survived the camp,
because Nazis favored blonds
because he was only 20 and fit to work
because he cleaned a capo’s room each day
for an extra piece of bread.
My cousins gleaned it was because
he dug graves outside the crematorium
and didn’t pry gold teeth from gassed bodies,
marched the Auschwitz death march
from Poland to central Germany
and didn’t die
of hunger or exhaustion or from cold.
He marched when war was over,
home to Romania,
joined the underground, smuggling Jews
on boats from Transylvania to Palestine.
He saw his family, the last time, getting off
the train. Next day, a Nazi pointed,
See the smoke coming from that oven?
That’s your mother.
SHELLEY SAVREN’S book, The Common Fire, was published by Red Hen Press in 2004. Her book, The Wild Shine of Oranges will be released by Tebot Bach Press in fall 2012. She holds an M.F.A. from Antioch University Los Angeles, and her work is widely published in literary magazines, including Solo, Rattle, and Prairie Schooner. Her awards include nine California Arts Council Artist in Residence grants, three National Endowment for the Arts regional grants, five artist fellowships from the City of Ventura, first place in the 1994 John David Johnson Memorial Poetry Award and a nomination for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Ventura, California and is a full-time English Professor at Oxnard College.
