January 27th marks Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In observance of this day, instead of lecturing about it, I have decided to write a poem. If you would like to learn more about Holocaust Remembrance Day, please click Here to go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website.
The poem is titled "Never Forget" and was written to urge readers to never forget the atrocities of the Holocaust and to prevent something like it from ever happening again.
Never will we forget The first of September, 1939.
The day it all started.
When the Nazis marched into Poland,
And soon began six years of terror.
Never will we forget the Ghettos.
Cramped, dirty, and disease-ridden.
Multiple families cramped into a small home.
People living on a starved diet.
People, children, animals lying dead in the streets.
There are children with swollen bellies begging for just a ration of bread,
and people dying of typhus.
But the terror still is not over.
Never will we forget the camps.
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno,
Death camps so close to civilization.
Never will we forget the gas chambers where so many perished.
Never will we forget the crematoriums, where bodies were turned to ash.
Never will we forget the millions of pairs of shoes without an owner.
The bags of luggage abandoned.
The millions of numbers,
Prisoner's names,
It is a list of those we have lost.
Those whose stories will be carried on for years
We must never forget.
Forgetting the tragedies that happened,
Lead way to it repeating again.
Never forget what we saw.
The unspeakable things the Nazis did,
it is our job now to keep the facts alive.
Make sure history will not repeat itself.
Make it so people cannot and will not deny what happened,
and make it so generation after generation will
Never Forget.
