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A dear friend and I exchange poetry texts often. It is how we connect through the miles and the years and both of us have discovered the power of poetry to meet us in dark places and heal what we cannot. We don't comment on the poems we send to each other. We don't have much time, he even less than I. Today for Holocaust Remembrance Day, he sends me Anthony Hecht's Book of Yolek. My friend writes "For Holocaust Remembrance Day, this is one of the most haunting poems you’ll ever read, made all the more so by the fact that, as a GI in WWII, Hecht was part of a unit that liberated a concentration camp. It’s a sestina—one of the hardest poetic forms to pull off." For the keepers of memories and friends that make you remember. May their memory be a blessing. The Book of Yolek Anthony Hecht Wir Haben ein Gesetz, Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben.* The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk Down the fern trail. It doesn't matter where to, Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home, And among midsummer hills have set up camp In the deep bronze glories of declining day. You remember, peacefully, an earlier day In childhood, remember a quite specific meal: A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp. That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk; More than you dared admit, you thought of home: No one else knows where the mind wanders to. The fifth of August, 1942. It was the morning and very hot. It was the day They came at dawn with rifles to The Home For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk In close formation off to a special camp. How often you have thought about that camp, As though in some strange way you were driven to, And about the children, and how they were made to walk, Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn't a day Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal And shamble between armed guards to his long home. We're approaching August again. It will drive home The regulation torments of that camp Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal, The electric fences, the numeral tattoo, The quite extraordinary heat of the day They all were forced to take that terrible walk. Whether on a silent, solitary walk Or among crowds, far off or safe at home, You will remember, helplessly, that day, And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp. Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too. His unuttered name will interrupt your meal. Prepare to receive him in your home some day. Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to, He will walk in as you're sitting down to a meal. * We have a law, and according to the law he must die.