Annemasse, France, 18/08/1944: a group of children who survived thanks to Marianne Cohn and Myla Racine
By S. J. Litherland
For Ray and Alec Waterman
Open the door on the past, the breakfasts, lunches, and called
down for soup and black bread and evening meal with Yiddish
jokes, and passing visitors from the world’s oppressed, among
them a French Jewish communist formerly in the Resistance,
her story, carrying leaflets on an underground train, the Metro
halted and queues to be searched by Gestapo and gendarmes.
She murmured, Do you want to see another Jewess taken
to the camps? to the implacable policeman who waved her on.
She was blue-eyed and fair-haired, the hair now fading,
the moment transcending her everyday bravery, how could she?
She was quiet and unimposing, mouse-like, a fighter distilled,
a heroine, the war and the torture in balance, and she was here
because a gendarme was not the kind to kill and let pass
the one who called on him to turn down the empty glass.
Referencing the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
