We are coming back.
Not for revenge.
Not for your sake.
Not even to prove something to God.
But because life demands it.
We do it reluctantly.
Yet we know our resistance
Will have to yield.
Our children already want to know
Why we fled our homeland,
And now try to extract justice
From Arabs who weren’t even there.
They want to know
Where we lost
This God we speak of.
We want honest children,
And must admit
We have a hole in our hearts.
Back then we had to flee or die.
But now?
Excuse us, we want to pray here,
On German soil,
Where the souls of our loved ones
Still can’t find any rest in the ground.
We know that your sleep
Is just as disturbed as ours,
And that you flee your own homeland
To healing spas around the globe,
That you aren’t sure if foreigners
Are welcome in your country,
Perhaps because you suspect
You might no longer be welcome yourself,
That you can’t answer
Your children’s questions either.
Tell us, was it out of jealousy
That our loved ones were murdered?
Was the Thousand-Year Reich
And its One People
Jealous references to us,
Since Germany struggled for mere decades
To hang together,
While we did it for millennia
Using only books?
Did you gas us because
You yourselves were gassed in trenches
And then couldn’t fight back?
Your thinkers now debate whether
Only European culture has come of age,
Ours about whether God still chooses us.
But are any of us talking to each other?
Our rabbis have tried for a whole generation
Never to forget,
But what stuck in memory
Was death
Which we still stare at without breathing.
To really breathe again will require living pain.
It will require that we no longer
Die witnessing,
But live fully and long.
That is what it says in our book: choose life.
In your book it says:
Love your neighbor as yourself.
We are still your neighbors.
Imagine: after a long absence,
We, your neighbors, begin to return.
Soon we’ll move in next door,
And we’ll stand around making noise in the streets.
Soon we’ll be joking with German officials.
We’ll sit at the tables for regular guests
And marry your children.
German houses and land
Will come back into our hands.
We’ll be citizens again!
The empty memorial synagogues will begin to fill.
Is this a nightmare? No.
The whole world fears a recurrence,
But it is the fear that repeats itself.
The times are new.
We Jews will return to Germany.
No, not suddenly tomorrow all of us at the border.
Not next year either.
It will happen more gradually,
Here and there at first,
And then with gathering strength,
Like everything that grows.
You’ll see.
by Erik Bendix
This poem was written in 1989, originally in German, and then translated by the author into this version in English. It was published in German as a frontispiece in Bert Hellinger’s Rachel Weint Um Ihre Kinder: Familien-Stellen mit Opfern des Holocaust in Israel (Verlag Herder Freiburg im Breisgau 2004), and again in translation in Rachel Weeping for Her Children: Family Constellations in Israel(2003, Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag Heidelberg/Phoenix AZ).
