Why Are the Lilacs Still Here When Everyone’s Gone? - Margo Perin

[Larry Robinson]

Why Are the Lilacs Still Here When Everyone’s Gone?

A writing class of grandmothers, Jewish Community Center
Winter wind rattling windows
Julia, pen in hand, hungry to tell her story

Auschwitz-Birkenau: one teenager in a long line of Jews
Julia’s mother and little sister kicked to one side 
She the other
It was Himmler you know, she says
Numbly watching her mother and sister vanish
The sound of marching boots

Julia huddled, nameless days by the barracks door
What are you doing there?
Asked a compatriot 
Waiting for my mother and sister
The woman pointed to smoke trailing into the sky 
What do you think that is?

A fellow villager forced raw potato into her mouth
Staunching the reverse flow of her life 
Day after day women toiling in stink and mud
Shovels and claws, endlessly moving stones
—the strength of labor matched only by the paucity of potato— 
Days, weeks, a month out on the sodden field
Julia a sack of bones and stones

One day a square of sunlight appeared in the mud
Against endless clanging of metal against stone
As long as I keep looking at that patch of light, thought Julia
I will survive

And she did

All we need:
One patch of sunlight
 
	- Margo Perin