Only 13

"Only 13" is a poem about a Deaf Jewish young man and his hearing sister caught up in the Holocaust. This piece came out of an experience when Peter and I were housemates. Our landlords, Nathan and Sala Biron, were a Jewish couple who had survived the Holocaust. They told us their story the first night we moved into our apartment and then never spoke of the Holocaust again in the five years we lived in their apartment. We also read a dozen Holocaust memoirs to prepare for this piece, before molding it with Deaf Quebecois poets Serge Briere and Johanna Boulanger. Some of the ideas, we took directly from these books and from Sala and Nathan. This is a poem that seeks only to show the horrors of what happened in those death camps during World War II and convey them to the world. With each generation, the past is forgotten. We hope that this story keeps a little bit of that past alive. The rise of intolerance, white supremacy, and extreme nationalism in the current era is glaring. It makes this story more important.