Writing About the Holocaust–A poem by 8th grader, Greg Wong

About a month ago, I visited students at Temple Sinai in Worcester, MA, where I read from Escaping Into the Night and also facilitated a brief writing workshop, inviting students to write their own stories and responses to the Holocaust. The responses were amazing–sensitive, well-crafted, evocative, and I invited students to finish what they wrote and send their pieces to me.

What I would like to do with this section of my website is to post some children’s and teen’s writing about the Holocaust and invite responses to this as a way of open sharing about how the Holocaust still affects us, even though it happened 60 years ago. Some questions to think about:

What lessons does the Holocaust teach us? What can we do about similar atrocities motivated by racial hatred that are still going on in the world today?

As a start to this discussion, I am posting a poem by 8th grader Greg Wong. A sestina is a special form of poetry. There are six stanzas with six lines each. The same six words end all the stanzas (though not in the same order). The poem ends with three lines that again use all of the same six words.

Please feel free to respond to Greg’s amazing poem, and to send your own finished pieces.

SESTINA

Here they come, with their helmets

Here they come, with their boots

Every time they come, another forcibly leaves

And they know who to take for our people are in the ghettoes.

How have we wronged

The people that treat

 

us so? Do we deserve no treats?

Do they? With their proud helmets

and all the wrong

They have brought to the world via their shining black leather boots

They threw us in the ghetto

Prisons and made us leave

 

Our homes. How can they make us leave

What we have worked so hard for – the treats

We have earned. The crowded ghetto

Gets no shielding from the helmets,

And no way to be carried on by the boots.

Why has everything gone wrong?

 

All that has been wronged

Cannot be fixed, nor can the colored leaves

That fall free without hesitation. Now the boots

Are heard marching, treating

The dirt with a violent rage. I see the helmets

Of the men marching through the ghetto

 

They have no remorse for the people in the ghetto,

They care not how they have wronged

us. All these men care about is their own power, shown as a simple helmet

I hear children crying to stay and not leave,

The men see this as a treat,

And the children are silenced with a swing of the man’s boot.

 

He used an example of his power, through use of a boot.

The whole time, I watch through a window in my house in the ghetto

I see that the men do not have feeling for the treatment

Of people, of how they wrong

Us. I can’t stand to watch any longer as the family leaves

For the death camp. There, there are too many helmets.

 

They treat us, as if we have wronged,

Beating us with boots, as we starve in the ghettoes

For if we do not leave, we face death, without the protection of a helmet

 

Greg Wong