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‘Shemot’—A Poem for Yom HaShoah

Today on Jewcy: Recalling the names of those who are gone from Germany

by
Julia Knobloch
April 12, 2018

I wrote this poem when we started reading the book of Shemot this year, but its core feelings have been with me since my non-Jewish childhood in Germany: grief, and the longing to find and get to know what was lost. I do think there is shared trauma among the post-war generations— at the same time, it is often also a dividing line between those whose relatives survived the Holocaust, and those who live with a feeling of secondhand communal guilt.

Julia Knobloch’s poetry has appeared in Moment magazine, Rascal, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. She works for the Union for Reform Judaism and lives in Brooklyn.