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Great Artists: David
Pinski, Yiddish Playwright
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"Lamentations"
a prose poem
The American Mercury magazine, July 1943 |
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In the July
1943 edition of "The American Mercury" magazine, Pinski
delivers a striking yet poignant message about the Holocaust
that had befallen so many in Europe, at a time when it was
said that the United States had no knowledge of what was
happening to the Jews of Europe. |
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We lament the two million Jews who
have perished at the hand of the murderer, the two
million who were brutally torn out of our life. The two
million men and women, old and young, children, infants
at their mother's breast and babes yet unborn. The
thousands upon thousands who perished by water and fire,
by whip and bayonet, by hunger and thirst and the living
grave, by slow torture and sudden death. We lament the
thousands who gasped their last agonized breath in
close-packed trains filled with fumes of chloride of
lime, the thousands who were suffocated by the deadly
gases of the sulphur mines into which they were forced
and the lethal death chambers into which they were
herded. The thousands who were burned to death in
crematoriums reserved for the dead, the thousands who
died a slow agonizing death from air bubbles injected
into their veins. We lament the hundreds of sick
children who were slain in their hospital beds, together
with their nurses and teachers. We lament the two
million Jews who perished amid all the agonies of our
martyrs of ages past and amid new ones invented by
Hitler's fiends.
Woe to us! |
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We lament ourselves, who
live here in security and hide ourselves in towers of
ivory, who seek daily our pleasures and diversions and
lie snugly at night in our beds. Ourselves, who passed
by the death of these two million, and on the day of
mourning forgot to mourn, and let that day be as all
other days. Ourselves who forget the three million still
in the talons of our arch fiend, and close our ears to
their cries of agony. Ourselves, bickering, disunited,
without leadership or plan, without strength or will,
when three million more souls are to be wiped out.
Ourselves who were not aroused by this Jewish tragedy
and are doing nothing to arouse the world. Ourselves,
who do not even know our shame.
Woe to us!
"Lamentations" was translated from the Yiddish
by Anna K. Pinski.
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