Irene Butter

“Hello Ms. Butter, You recently gave my school…a presentation. I read the poem at the bottom of your website. It really had an effect on me. Before I read it I thought the best way to deal with something terrible was to have a sense of humor about it. I made jokes about the Holocaust, racism, sexism, et cetera, but I now realize that was wrong. I shouldn’t joke about things that have destroyed lives and traumatized others. I am at present working on changing the way I react to things like the Holocaust because of you. — Student, Rockville, MD, 2019”

“if you make anne frank jokes, you are not my friend.

you think a beautiful transcendent girl is
just a black and white photo of her smiling
that time you read her diary with your english class
she is a concept to you
not a person
don’t plaster her face on a poster
with her name listed under “famous jews”
don’t talk about Hitler like a joke.
how can you call the hatred of a people a joke
how can you utter laugher
at the fact that my grandfather had to pretend to be Christian to stay alive
how he lived each day with a name that wasn’t his
practicing a religion he knew he didn’t belong to
how can you laugh.
at a woman I know
Irene
who survived human destruction
in Bergen Belsen
Saw that beautiful transcendent girl
through barbed wire
tears streaming down her face
“thin and she had no clothes
only a grey blanket wrapped around her”
told Irene’s friend her parents were dead and her sister was sick
and Irene and her friend, they asked if there was anything they could do.
they brought her clothes, the only thing never taken away from them at Bergen Belsen
with everything they had
in darkness
they threw the bundle over the barbed wire
hoping the woman who caught it would give the bundle to the girl. and yes, she did.
Irene lost her father on a train. they took his body off.
but she kept going
while losing everything at the same time.
i try to speak
speak when my friend shows me a video of someone imitating Anne Frank
and he is laughing
and i am not laughing and he sees me not laughing.
and sometimes i don’t speak, because I just can’t.
I couldn’t when i saw Anne Frank’s face taped onto a poster board labeled “Judaism”
i couldn’t when my own friend, in 2017, had swastikas drawn on a photo of her
That woman who saw the beautiful transcendent girl through a fence,
she opens her mouth to only kind things
my grandfather’s list of the 10 things he needed to be happy
“a lovely wife
his grandkids
reasonably good health
a couple good friends”
it hangs on the wall beside my bed
i see him in every member of my family
i hold tightly onto every gold coin he gave me
i still feel his hugs.
i try to love and live like him.
i can still see the yellow star on his jacket
i think about if i would even exist
had my grandfather not gotten off the ground while crossing the Czech-Austria border
when all he wanted to do was not go on
he went on.
i think about all of the luck
like a flip of a coin, my mother says
so please
what happened to my people is nothing funny.
it is real and terrible
but it happened.
that friend who showed me the video
he said sorry.
i wonder how many more sorrys there will be.
i think about how my grandfather’s life was determined by a flip of a coin.
and how my grandfather is dead and how soon all who lived through that will be dead.
once they’re all gone
who will be left to apologize to?

Isabel Ratner
3/30/17”