My mother speaks:

"In Budapest your great uncle Max,
my father's brother who very 
successfully built a business selling 
printing machines, an amateur
opera singer with a lovely tenor voice
arrested in his business place, 
and with hundreds of others
lined up at the banks of the Danube.  
Groups were driven toward trains 
waiting to deport them East, 
Treblinka some, but mainly Auschwitz 
and the death center at Birkenau,
others gunned down where they stood.  

Max, then in his sixties or early seventies
hurled himself down rocky banks
through roots and brush, a thin, old Jew 
bleeding in torn overcoat, rolled
into the icy river rather than embrace 
bullets and bodies, hid under an ice float, 
given up as dead"
mother witnessing old thick veined 
hands flutter, circle and punctuate
how her uncle floated frostbite waters, 
swam dragging soggy clothing, 
climbed out frozen, unforgotten and alive

	  "While the Nazis were carrying out their 
	  'Final Solution' to the Jewish problem, about 
	  18,000 Jewish refugees found a haven in the only 
	  place in the world whose doors were open without 
	  a visa: the International Settlement of Shanghai."

	  David Kranzler, 
	  The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai


I was born in Shanghai, nineteen forty nine 
and people always say "Funny, you don't look 
Chinese," or "So were your parents missionaries then?"  

My mother caught the measles working as a nurse 
and my birth was hard, six weeks premature,
Catholic hospital for infectious disease.  
Two days in labor, Sisters comforting, "Poor, poor 
dear, all this pain and still the child born dead."  

But my Jewish gypsy mother, my Auschwitz mother 
returned from the dead, through Hell's barbed wire gate—
on which the words read not Abandon Hope All Ye Who 
Enter Here but Arbeit Macht Frei-- traced the lifeline 
on my right palm.  "Look how long," she told my father 
who requested a birth certificate and whose hair 
had turned white. "We've never issued one,"
they said. "We only have certificates of death." 

For three days, the doctor shook off questions,
waved away hope, but the little three-pound piss-ant 
wouldn't die.  "So, he'll live," the doctor spat, 
"but he'll be slow to walk and talk, be small and slow 
and sickly all his life.  Good news is he'll never 
get the measles," which I got in second grade.

"I knew if I got you away from that place, you'd be fine," 
my mother told me, long after she took 
me home to the flat with paper walls in Hong Kew, 
fed all three pounds on Shanghai tiger milk. 
"Zerisse es gesund," she said,
"tear your clothes in health, grow strong and live!"