Tag Archives: Grief

My phonebook is thinning out- A poem of grief and consolation.

My phonebook is thinning out, not by design but by fate.
The numbers are still there yet calling them is meaningless, for there will be no answer.
You would give anything just to hear that voice one more time.
Sometimes you feel like just giving up, but you know it is disrespectful to those who never gave up and lived a full life.
Then you hear a story of a 10-year-old boy whose death could have been avoided, and in a bizarre way it gives you consolation.
Because you know that those you said goodbye to those weren’t robbed of their prime, and although their life was cut short they still had a life more fruitful than that of many who lived longer.

The denial of grieving- The forgotten crime.

gRIEF

When a loved one dies it is so important to grief because if you don’t, one day sooner or later it will come back to haunt you.

Dealing with grief can be difficult and it takes time ,for some people longer than for others but it is vital to get that time.In normal circumstances you will get that time even though the feeling of loss will never fully disappear and it shouldn’t because it is this sense of loss which generates the memories.

Something that is often overlooked in relation to the Holocaust is the grief of the survivors. They were not allowed to grief ,often they were too busy to survive.Straight after arrival in the death camps and after the selections those who lived didn’t  know the fate of their beloved, it was always after their beloved had been murdered they would find out, Some of the survivors even had to help carrying their child,parent or spouse out of the gas chambers to be cremated. If those survivors would show any sign of grief they would most likely be murdered themselves.The last memory they would have of their beloved would be a picture of horror.

 

This denial of grief had psychological effects long after the war was over. It is the crime that the survivors  had to endure often for the rest of their lives.

Nowadays I often hear we should leave the Holocaust in the past and move on, But for those few survivors who are still alive the Holocaust never left them and sometimes this grief which was denied to them is now been transferred to their children and grandchildren.

grieving