"The nocturnal procession of children, of more children, and more child, so frightened, so quiet, so beautiful" - Elie Wiesel

I was never there to witness,
The outer limits of humanity's sickness,
Capacity to brutalize,
A machine to systematically dehumanize...

I cannot claim to understand
The essence of identity in man,
But for that delicate trail
Fragile, but not frail,
to a culture defined by oppression and genocide,
to a people with personhood denied,
to a time and a place
we were taken, no trace.
And I know the numbers, the lives claimed,
I know of the suffering, the bodies and psyches maimed,
But for all the tally-keeping,
It is the faces of the innocent that sets my heart a-weeping...

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A mere picture of the faces of the Holocaust has the capacity to bring me to uncontrollable tears. It does not matter where I am, or with who... For all the illusory and diaphanous nature of cultural identity, I cannot deny that I am connected at a deeper level than I can comprehend, to my ancestry. I wish I understood these things... I can only feel them, trickling down my face, leaving a saltine trace.