When I penned “I Tripped on A Wound Today”* about being a third-generation Holocaust survivor, I didn’t know the poem would take on new meaning as the world plummeted into a modern wave of antisemitism.
Although I heard the alarm bells as reflected in my message to my grandmother, Toby Kimelman Gornstein (1912-2021), a Romanian Holocaust survivor, and in memory of Anne Frank, nothing could have prepared me for how the poem would gain relevance when the pogrom erupted in Amsterdam.
Originally, I wrote the poem in response to the Holocaust revisionism that crept into life during the pandemic when an appalling first-person essay by Canadian writer Debra Dolan compared the inconveniences of the pandemic to the way Jews must have felt when hiding for their lives in the Holocaust.
I wrote, “The story’s title read Channeling my Inner Anne Frank in a Pandemic followed by a correction from the PR Twitter feed of the SS in Germany aka The Globe and Mail who then said they were making a “Clarification” — not an “apology” but a correction, that the story should have read Lessons in Living from Anne Frank.”
The article was so controversial that The Globe and Mail issued an apology and a new title before ever even deleting the piece from the internet.
That inspired me to write directly to Anne Frank in the poem, saying “I am sorry time plays tricks on us so that the most wretched parts of history seem like fiction.”
This is exactly what I strive to fight against in my new collection Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues which is about finding glimmers and hope instead of tripping on triggers, and boy was I triggered during the pandemic when reading that essay.
That’s when I poured my heart out to Anne: “I am so sorry Anne. I am so sorry that people suck. I walked through the attic where you hid when I toured Amsterdam, and I reveled at your small statue in the square. I know it’s still there, Anne. Anne, if you’re listening, it’s okay. But it isn’t okay. It’s not okay. I am not okay. We are not okay. I tripped on a wound today.”
Still, it wasn’t just Dolan who distastefully wrote about Holocaust revisionism, a form of Holocaust denial due to minimizing the systematic oppression and murder of Jews.
During the pandemic, it was common for people to compare being trapped in their homes to how Jews must have felt in ghettoes and concentration camps.
Fast forward from 2021 to 2024 when life post-October 7th meant that Anne Frank, a symbol of Jewish Life, would be appropriated and desecrated on the regular.
Anti-Israel activists, vandalized and spray painted the words Gaza across the Anne Frank monument in Amsterdam in July 2024.
It hurt so much to realize that nothing was sacred: not even a little girl who was murdered by Nazis, leaving the gift of her diaries behind–a legacy of Jewish Dutch life.
It hurt to know that the first story I ever read about the Holocaust at the tender age of 9 had lost meaning to this generation. That here we were–far removed from history.
As the granddaughter of Romanian Holocaust survivors, I always felt as though becoming a Holocaust Educator was my calling: a calling my grandmother nurtured when she inspired me to get a good education and become somebody.
Today, I am that somebody: a Canadian high school teacher who was honored to earn a scholarship to Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel in the summer of 2023 before the world changed forever for Jews post-10-7 (the fateful day Hamas terrorists murdered the most Jews since the Holocaust).
Suddenly it felt so long ago since I first laid eyes on Anne’s small statue in the square in Amsterdam while backpacking across Europe in the summer of 2001, just before the world changed due to the terrorist attack of 9-11 in New York.
I wanted to hug Anne. I wanted to hug my Bubby Toby. I wanted to hug myself.
Then last month, chaos erupted in the streets of Amsterdam, when a violent pogrom swept the streets and Israelis were hunted and beaten. To make matters worse, rather than speak out against this new wave of antisemitism, the mayor of Amsterdam said she regrets using the word ‘pogrom’ to describe the attacks on Israeli football fans in the Dutch capital following the match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and AFC Ajax.
In 2024, the poem I penned during the pandemic on Holocaust denial and revisionism, has taken on new meaning and come to be a beacon of light and moral clarity, a sort of anthem on the fight against modern-day Jew-hatred and a love poem to my Bubby Toby and Anne Frank for their strength, resilience and humanity.
* Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues: Poems for Healing (Prolific Pulse Press, 2024)
