Fleeing East, 1940-41

1.  Sugihara Transit Visa 

Steel wire binds my split

sole, as I tramp frozen tracks

from Łódź to Kaunas

frantic for a consul’s stamp

in kanji—like tangled limbs …

We, shivering near

the consulate. He, gazing,

windowed in gray light,

cherub-faced, expressionless—

his orders: to shut these gates …

A signet hovers

above my visa, its ink

as dark as the blood

his cachet could staunch—a dove

alights upon a charred field.

2.  Soviet Exit Visa 

This stamp a die-cast

hammer and scythe. How the worst

strut, mowing us down.

Sneers, Yid-taunts, serrated smirks—

he eyes me, a reed trembling;

but Mother Russia

seems to have too many Jews

to take on misfits:

his maul relents—a second

indelible impression.

3.  Papers

To Vladivostok

by rail, rings and overcoats

seized to wave us through.

Dockside a gangway takes us

downward to a deeper dusk,

cramped as a boxcar,

the hold reeking of old filth.

Deckside I vomit,

yet the sea glimmers in moonlit

domes, like Jerusalem’s …

Storms toss marine dice

to Tsuruga—gulls screaming

by the customs shed:

my transit visa unfolds

like an origami crane.

4.  Pebbles

Kobe’s Jews, exempt

during the war, arrange stones

in a Zen garden—

ripples of gravel washing

over distant ponds of ash—

so they welcome us,

a gesture to the victims

who have no passage

to known states—while we have none

to lands we have applied to …

Bruitings overheard,

a gate-clank through a shoji:

the Yanks have built walls,

bricks dense as Warsaw’s to dam

a flood of untermenschen—

our transit permits

true to the name, just papers

for wandering Jews;

a great wave high as Fuji

swamps me, flings me to Shanghai.

5.  Aftermaths

How many survived

Shen’s sweltering ghetto, typhus,

the allied bombing—

salvation’s whirlwind of ash,

its random, gray confetti?

Enough? Not Enough?

At sea again, embers doused,

western shore ahead,

the slap of each swell against

the hull now fluent psalm:

Come praise this ocean,

its partitioning expanse

and green upwellings—

spumed apparitions washing

over the old, deeply stamped …

Chiune’s offspring read

Anne Frank, hide with her, their eyes

rain-flecked blossoms long

after clouds have thinned above

Birkenau and Hiroshima

About the poet

Michael Sandler is the author of a poetry collection, The Lamps of History (FutureCycle Press 2021). His work has appeared in scores of journals, including recently in THINK, Literary Imagination, and Smartish Pace. Michael lives near Seattle; his website is www.sandlerpoetry.com.