My Unknown Family

For one of my classes I have to write a 15 page paper so I decided to write about the struggles Jews faced in escaping the Nazis in pre-WWII period. This is important to me because my grandmother and uncle were both lucky enough to have gotten out of Germany before the war broke out.

Unfortunately, both are dead so I can't ask them the questions I now have but my Uncle wrote about this time period before he died and about the history of my family. While doing research I wound up on the Yad Vashem website, Israel's Holocaust Museum/Memorial and saw their was an online, searchable database of names of Jews killed.

I decided to for fun to search my Grandmother's maiden name, country and home town and lo and behold, up came some matches. And it struck me that these were the family members I will never know. No one will know what their hopes and dreams were. No one will know their personalities, their hobbies and who they were.

The only thing I knew was their date of birth and date they were sent to Auschwitz.

So this poem, written while bored at BJ's, is in memory of the family I will never know and to let them know that they have not been forgotten.