By Sivan Plotkin
Maybe they were right.
But there were
34 years 5 months 11 days
or 413 months 11 days
or 1797 weeks 0 days
or 12579 calendar days
between the liberation of Auschwitz
and the publication of a New York Times article
about the rape of a girl named Annette.
A 19-year-old Jewish girl from Philadelphia
tortured and raped
by "Edwin L. Reynolds 4th, 23 years old, Millville, N.J., machinist
and John Duffy, 25, a security guard in Wilmington, Del."
Why name them? Why identify the perpetrators assailants Nazis?
Why was torture and rape their response to her actions?
Why does the article put her at fault?
There are so many questions.
We can only hope
that we have made the world
enough of a better place
to make sure that
one day,
rape is not a response
and Nazis do not walk among us.
When looking for an article, I was specifically interested in the sexual assault of Jewish women in the United States, especially considering the context of the Holocaust that existed for most of the 20th century. What I did not expect, however, was that every article that mentioned Jewish women being raped in the United States had some level of involvement with the Holocaust or Nazism. I thought this article was interesting because of its relation to Nazism in the United States, years after World War II was over. I decided to write a poem in response to the article, detailing what I had read and my reactions to its words, as I am a Jewish woman living in the United States.
Living in fear of anti-Jewish sentiment and/or anti-Jewish actions are constant, to this day.