606
PARTISAN REVIEW
You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home:
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.
The fifth of August,
1942.
It
was the morning and very hot.
It
was the day
They came at dawn with rifles
to
The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.
How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven
to,
And about the children, and how they were made
to
walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn't a day
Over five years old, commanded
to
leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.
We're approaching August again.
It
will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They all were forced to take that terrible walk.
Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.
Prepare
to
receive him in your home some day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you're sitting down
to
a meal.
The poem is a sestina, and Hecht's use of a classical form
to
treat his
subject is striking. I say this because the very notion of form has been
suspect among many poets who have dealt with the Holocaust, partic–
ularly those from Eastern Europe. In their attempt to confront the hor-
