Three Poems by Margaret Duda

 

40,000 pairs of shoes from the victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau 

Ask for Whom the Bell Tolls

                                   

After my father passed away

in a retirement home in Florida,

I notified his relatives left

in his village in Transylvania.

A cousin wrote back to say

they had the church bells rung

to announce my father’s death,

but for whom did the bells toll?

 

Hungarian Transylvania was given

to Romania after World War l

and Hungarians suddenly became

a minority on their own soil.

The village of Turterebes, where

Papa was born and raised amidst

rolling hills covered with vineyards,

was rapidly renamed Turulung

and became one of three villages

in a commune in Satu Mare county.

 

Through heavy taxation, Papa’s

family lost vineyards their father

died for in a steel mill in America,

their land to be shared equally

by all who lived in the commune.

Residents were forced to speak

Romanian until they forgot

Hungarian and native customs.

People claimed there was no one

poorer than a Hungarian in Romania.

 

Bad diets and worse health care

killed many in the commune,

including Papa’s fifty-year-old son.

When he died, Romanian coins

placed in his palms paid for his

forty-day passage to the afterlife

according to Romanian belief,

and the Hungarian tradition of

mourning portraits was no more.

In my heart, I still hear the bells

tolling for an ethnic minority whose

culture, language, and idyllic life

were wiped out in a single generation.

My Catholic Mother’s Jewish Sister

 

On a recent birthday visit, my daughter,

Laura, casually remarked: “Grandma told me

her Jewish sister died in a concentration camp.” 

I shook my head. “No, she was an only child,

Catholic for generations,” I insisted. “It’s not

possible.”  Laura was only ten when she

heard this, and asked no more as she did

not know what a concentration camp was.

 

Yet Mama, dead now for forty-two years,

said sister.  Not foster sister.  Jewish sister.

Why didn’t Mama tell me as well and why

didn’t Laura mention it for over forty years?

 

The answers must be in my family history.

My grandmother Mary could not marry

Mama’s father who neglected to tell her

he was already married and a father.

Mary had Mama baptized and left her

in a Catholic orphanage in Budapest. 

Escaping to America, Mary promised

to send for her child.  A Catholic family

from a village on the Great Hungarian Plain

fostered Mama until her mother sent for her

when she was seventeen, but Mary, very ill,

died before Mama’s ship reached New York

so she never met either one of her parents.

 

But none of this told me how Mama had

a Jewish sister.  The answer lay in a journal

Mama kept in Hungarian.  In 1969,

forty-five years after she left Hungary,

Mama returned to visit her foster sister.

After the visit, she allowed two days

to visit the orphanage where she was left

in Budapest.  Nuns searched and found

her mother’s name in their log.  Beside “father”

was his name and one word: zsido.  Jewish.

 

Slowly, the older nuns remembered facts

of value.  In 1944, Germans sent 424,000

Hungarian Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz

in the space of eight weeks.  Could Mama’s

father and his family have been among them?

 

The nuns told Mama to visit a synagogue

that kept records of what happened to Jews.

Mama found her father’s name and the fact

that he and his wife had died before the war,

but daughter Judit and her family were loaded

onto a cramped cattle car—intensely hot

hot in the summer, freezing in the winter,

without food or water, only a bucket latrine.

It took two days to reach the “Gate of Death”

at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they gassed

six thousand Jews and Roma every day

and killed over a million in five years.

 

Laura, who thought I knew, told me Mama

often cried at night during Laura’s sleepovers,

calling out “Judit” as she tossed and turned. 

 

I remembered visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau

years ago and standing in front of a glass wall

displaying forty thousand pairs of worn shoes

thrown into gigantic piles.  I felt tears stain

my cheeks, never dreaming some of the shoes

might have belonged to someone related to me.

 

Jewish friends told me many people who lost

relatives in the Holocaust often did not tell

others as it was too painful to even mention. 

I finally found the answer to my question.

For all the relatives that I never met over time—

both Catholic and Jewish, I offer this blessing:

“May they all rest easy in sleep eternal.”

Where Did It Come From?

 

Did you ever wonder

where it came from,

that spark that ignites

ideas into fiery poems?         

My immigrant mother,

allowed only six years

of schooling, read all

the time, and visited

a poet’s museum on

her return to Hungary

forty-five years later.

Did she hear his work

read aloud in school,

torching glowing embers?

Was the yearning there

for the rest of her life,

but extinguished by lack

of oxygen in opportunity?

Was the attraction for words

ingrained in genes from

a governess mother

or policeman father,

neither of whom she knew?

After reading my first poem,

she drove me to an auction

and bought me an antique

Underwood, giving me

the kindling to let words,

like flames, leap into the air. 

Did my mother recognize

that her passion for words

had set other minds ablaze

and realize that she had passed

her inner fire on to me?

Margaret Duda's book of poetry entitled "I Come from Immigrants" is published and will be available on Amazon, Kelsay Books, and from Margaret the beginning of July.  It will include 121 pages with 26 photos (some over 100 years old) and 38 narrative poems.  She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination.   Margaret has published numerous short stories, one of which made the distinctive list of Best American Short Stories, five books and numerous non-fiction articles, and is also working on a novel set in a steel mill town in the Mon Valley.