HAZKARA

The cannons are still; the rifles are stacked.
The aeroplanes overhead wing their way with peaceful cargoes; the bomb-racks off.
Brothers, comrades, resting in many lands, this is called peace.
The mighty of the earth decreed it so.
But brothers resting in many lands, there is no peace and your battle is not done.
The last prisoners of Theresilenstadt still stand behind barbed wire, the uniform of their captors only changed.
Over the blood-soaked plains of Poland, the sound of firing still is heard
And the dazed survivors of your people flee before the same pursuing mob.
On the coast and in the valleys of our promised land battle-girt intruders bar the way to wanderweary brothers seeking to come home.
Even in this western land of liberty, the voices of the Nazi foe still echo and repeat the ancient
vicious lies.
Only in a brief moment of council, we pause to consider a fitting monument and to tell our losses.
The familiar faces missing from our ranks, the gaps that never can be filled, cry for memorial.
The record of the graves, the roll call of the resting places from continent to continent,
The distant isles and seas engulf us with the magnitude of our loss,
The hundreds upon thousands upon millions, yet calls afresh each loved one gone.
From ghetto and from concentration camp, from Warsaw, Bialystok, Lublin, Majdanek, Auschwitz and Stryj,
From every forest haunt and cave where desperate guerilla bands struck at the foe,
From beachheads and from far Pacific Isles with strange exotic names like Iwo Jima,
Where in the same wide war fell our sons defending Kfar Giladi,
From the bitter hedgerow battles of Normandy,
From the Rhineland plains and woods, the hardcontested hills of Italy, even from the waters of the seas, the roster of our dead commands memorial.
Brothers resting in the distant lands, the battle, for the remnant of the exile does not stop;
And what avail soon crumbling stone carved in our sacred script to puzzle future archaeologists.
Shall your memorial be the silence of forgotten history,
The records of an extinct folk,
The mounds and graves of the ending of our seed
We pause as on a mountain top and see; behind, a line of valiant battles dearly won;
Ahead, still further struggle;
And in the valley, strewn before our feet, the weary, shrunken, shivering limbs of the wasted few who somehow did not die.
Brothers, from your graves look out!
Look out upon your people!
Look into the ghetto, to the camp, into the ship that bears illegal freight out of the graveyard of Europe,
Look and say, oh brothers, will they live?
Will this your people, these dried bones yet live?
With loving hands and humbled spirits, let us dedicate the memorial to our dead scattered through many lands.
Lying in flelds throughout the earth, in graves of honor and in lime pits of shame.
And the monument we dedicate is their own people,
Worn and weary but imbued with the flame which kindled them at the foot of Sinai's peak.
Rest, O Brothers, for we dedicate to you a monument eternal
We are your memorial.

D.E.G.