In honor of National Poetry Month, as well as Genocide Awareness Month, we would like to drawn attention to our beloved local Holocaust survivor and poet, Solange Lebovitz, whose evocative and passionate writing inspires artful reflection and honors the victims.
Solange Lebovitz was born in Paris, France, the youngest of six children. Her parents, Rosa and Eizik Dratler, born in Sighet, Transylvania, immigrated to Paris with their four children in the mid-twenties.During World War II, Solange was separated from her family and lived with an older Catholic couple in Couterne, Normandy. She was reunited with her family at the end of December 1944.She came to the United States in 1952 after marrying Larry Lebovitz, a Holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia. At the age of 42, while raising their two children, Michele and Marvin, she decided to resume her education and graduated cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh with a double major in English and French literature. She wrote the story of her family, soon to be published, and poetry.
What are the forces at work
In the universe?
Are they all good
Like the light breeze in the Spring
That caresses your face,
Or contradictory
Like the fierce winds
That cause violent tempests
And utter destruction.
What is the force
That promotes life,
The need to grow, to expand
Its potentialities
And then, lets it wither.
What are the forces
That unite men and beasts
Into common cruel traits
While allowing them
Parental care.
What are the forces
That distinguish the sublimity
In some people
While revealing the base instincts
In others,
Why such a divergence in nature.
Why can’t the wolf play with the lamb
And humanity live in peace.
January, 1984
In souvenir of the children of Izieu, of the Rafle du Vel D’Hiv, and also of my cousins
Joseph and Bella Hershkovitz, Michel Gleizer and his parents Ida and Isaac Gleizer, Rosalia Dratler, her husband Philipe Roiter, and my grand-father Shimshon Hershkovitz, all deported. Also in gratitude for having been spared their fate.
To use poetry to immortalize
Names of Death camps
Seems incongruous.
Poetry evokes images
Of the beauty of spirit,
Intellectual imagination
Depicting feelings, observations,
Freedom of the mind soaring
To elevate the humblest subject.
Poetry lives in the hearts
Of people who resort to it
In their desperate attempt
To cry out their anguish,
Hoping to be heard,
Useless verses of faith
Offering thanks for being alive
Under the constant threat
Of annihilation,
Turning to G-d whose silence
Protects the monsters.
How ironic, the perpetrators of crime
Feeling safe and justified
For having eluded punishment.
Where do you work , Justice?
Have you been asleep, corrupted?
Can we wait for the Messiah
To repair the wrongs?
Work is to be done,
Justice is here now!
Men, women with a sense of integrity,
Fairness and humanity
Must commit themselves
To seek Evil, to eradicate it,
To annihilate it,
At the foot of the innocent victims
Martyrized in the Dantesque pits
Of Naziism,
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, Sobibor,
And the others….
Infamous remnants of inhuman madness
Of one group of people
Immortalized til the end of Time
For its abject role in the heinous
Crimes against the Jews, against Mankind.
Poetry, freedom of the mind
Must live a new chapter
Echoing the feelings
Of every single soul
That infused each name
In the Book of the Dead,
Decrying heartless group anonymity,
To remember the helpless children,
Each man, woman
Whose fatal destiny
Could have been avoided.
Poetry, sing the praises of Goodness
Raise the spirit of the Just,
Confound the aims of Evil,
Do not fear the heights of utopia
Reach for it and present it
As a solace and a salvation
To an imperfect world.
Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh 