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IRIT AMIELPROMOTIONAL BOOKLET

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DARKFLASHES

IRIT AMIEL70 years after the Holocaust

Dark Flashes is the first-ever English language collection of

poems by Irit Amiel, whose work is focused on experiences of the

Holocaust, both her own and those of many others.

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FOREWORD

Who better to build bridges of understanding between nations,

united and divided by so many issues, than those of us who write

– the people of the pen? Because everything, after all, begins with

words, words which can sometimes kill or else bring back into

being.

A human being is born into a country, any country.

They are then spoken to in a language, any language. A mother

sings lullabies, issues reprimands, a father telling jokes and fairy

tales. And so this imposed tongue becomes our crucial mode of

communication.

And me, I was born in Poland. I grew up being spoken

to in Polish. The whole spectrum of my earliest experiences – the

good and the bad – was set in it. Then came the event which we

now know about all too well. During the long, long years which

have passed since the “the age of the gas chambers”, a wide

river of words has poured forth on the subject of the Holocaust.

And so a certain erosion of language has occurred, words losing

their edge. It seems to me that today, when it is possible to know

almost every fact and figure about those times, one must write

about such dramatic events in the simplest, most ordinary terms,

awkwardly almost. So as to reach everyone, especially new

generations of readers.

Humility is key in not letting us forget that survival too is

a matter of chance, a million and a half to one sort of chance, and

that we are only tools for some greater purpose. Humility which

helps another randomly given gift, the ability to write, keep on

registering that which others keep silent about.

Irit Amiel

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DELAYED

I did not get to Treblinka on time

arriving some fifty years too late,

the trees standing bare in autumn.

I wanted to escape at once, because

the rusting relic of a train carriage

was still there waiting for me,

the forest around it whispering quietly.

It was beautiful, grey, calm, bare

and only the wind stroked the earth, trees,

stones and us,

extinguishing the candle we had lit

time and time again.

Then Dita said – you see, it is good you did not get here on time,

and have grown old, mother.

* Treblinka was a German Nazi extermination camp in German-occupied Poland during World War II

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EQUILIBRIUM

One lives

for fifty years

on the evergreen border

between the past

and the present

On the thin line

between madness

and mindfulness

to at night reach out

to memories as sharp

as razors

And waking at sweltering

damp dawns

is unable to comprehend

that equilibrium between

night-time horrors and merciful

mornings

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LESS DEAD

As long as I am still here you are less dead,

but soon enough you will die for the nth and last time.

My end will finally wipe you from the face of the earth.

For now, however, you are all still beating within me,

tattooed into memory, etched into my veins.

Soon enough, I will take you down to Hades,

into that final darkness, so you will rise from the dead no more.

I will take with me all those names and songs,

faces, smiles, miseries, worries and tears.

Every mask, memory, the missing of things,

each escape, debasement and late return.

I will take you all with me to the grave

and we will stay there

more dead. We, the victims and the saved

of that wormwood-bitter twentieth century.

And perhaps, finally, then we’ll make

our “escape from noise and from sadness,

we Jews of song, we Jews of madness.”

*The last line is taken from Julian Tuwim poem “Little Jew” [Words in blood, Warszawa 1926]

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* UNRRA - The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was founded in 1943, becoming part of the United Nations in 1945.

OUT OF EGYPT

He exiled himself from his own Egypt in autumn rains,

losing his shoes in black, sticky mud.

At the foot of the snow-covered, sky-high Alpine peaks

with a five kilo rucksack and a fifteen-year-old

heart compressed down to the size of a ping pong ball,

he jumped down from an UNRRA truck and, clutching

with his nails at frozen bushes, he smuggled

across the border his feeble, salvaged body.

Suspended from a narrow rope ladder,

between the navy blue water of the Mediterranean

and the star-spangled, springtime Italian sky,

he climbed from an unsteady boat onto a tall,

drunken ship which was meant to take him to the shores

of the Promised Land. But the waters did not part

and he once again ended up in a camp, behind barbed

wire, upon ruddy earth burnt out by the Cyprus

sun. And he stayed there in that tent,

choking with heat for two hundred nights and days,

feeding the dry sands with his longing and tears.

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TAKEOFFS

I love planes, the takeoffs and the departures.

I love to be torn free of the earth,

to sail across immaculate clouds

separating me like levees

from the world of the real.

To rise like Icarus

with his waxen wings,

like a cloud, a bird, like smoke.

Because that is when I feel closer to all of you

my charred ones.

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GENESIS

The earthquake left behind it desolation and chaos.

Darkness fell over the abyss and the Holy Spirit

no longer watched over the waters.

And then, here and there, they rose up,

from ruins, from ashes and from dusts,

a girl, a youngster, an elder and a child.

And, like fresh grass in springtime, their

their dry bones took root and light was born

beneath the heavens and they began to multiply

anew.

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VICIOUS CIRCLE

Your grandson was born in Hamburg

and that was to be the end of it.

The first word to reach his tiny ear

uttered by attending doctors was in the same language

as the one which had reached his forefather’s ear

at the crest of that inhuman agony.

And yet you bowed your head

when your grandson, unwittingly,

completed that vicious circle.

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A HOLOCAUST EXAM

We are the remaining few.

Our years have not eroded consciousness,

though in our place a great silence will descend.

And my granddaughter says –

I have a Holocaust exam tomorrow.

Our lives, our dark dreams,

our daily fears turning into dates.

And a young lawyer says – They are old now,

their testimony cannot be trusted.

We are the remaining few.

Slowly departing and disappearing,

taking down to the bottom

our silences, our screams.

We are the remaining few.

Only a handful of days left

in which to testify, in them the horror and bitter

scores to settle with men and with God.

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IRIT AMIEL

DARK FLASHES

Irit Amiel was born in Poland in 1931 as Irena Librowicz. She survived the Second World War in the Czestochowa ghetto, living under false Aryan papers. Via illegal routes (through displaced persons camps in Germany, Italy and Cyprus), she reached Palestine in 1947. She has lived in Israel ever since, where she works as a writer, translator and writes poetry in two languages (Polish and Hebrew). Her volume of short stories Osmaleni (published in English as Scorched by Vallentine Mitchell, The Library of Holocaust Testimonies, 2006), was nominated for various literary awards in Poland, including twice for the prestigious Nike Prize as well as the Biblioteka Raczynskich Prize. It has also been published in Hebrew and Hungarian. Volumes of her poetry include: Egzamin z Zagłady (Łódź 1994, 1998), Nie zdążyłam (Łódź 1998) and Wdychać głęboko (Warsaw 2002). She has translated several books by Polish authors into Hebrew and her translations of writers such as Leo Lipski, Marek Hłasko, Henryk Grynberg and Hanna Krall have appeared in various journals. She has also translated poems by Wisława Szymborska and several theatrical productions. Her own poems have appeared in numerous publications, in Poland and abroad. She is currently working on her autobiography. She has also translated poems by Wisława Szymborska and several theatrical productions. Her own poems have appeared in numerous publications, in Poland and abroad. She is currently working on completing her autobiography.

This is her first collection of poems to be published in English.

“To frame experiences ever so hard to express, you have found the only possible form: a totally raw kind of simplicity. Because of this, you can be sure your poems will always live on!”

W. Szymborska

Book Information:

Author: Irit AmielTranslator: Marek KazmierskiLanguage: EnglishGenre: PoetryPages: 114ISBN: 978-0-9572327-2-3Publication: 27/01/2013