We're pleased to announce that poet and publisher Jeremy Robson will be speaking at our symposium Remaking the Promise of Never Again, on Sunday February 9th. He will be joining other panelists in the session Have the Arts Failed the Holocaust?

Jeremy's many poetry collections include his latest, Chagall's Moon. He has edited various landmark anthologies and been a key figure in the poetry reading scene for many years, initiating and participating in over 300 large-scale Poetry and Jazz in Concert events featuring many leading poets. He also went with Ted Hughes and Dannie Abse on a poetry reading of Israel. As a young editor he worked closely with David Ben-Gurion on a major history, before starting Robson Books with his wife Carole, publishing a very wide variety of authors who ranged from Elie Wiesel and Bud Schulberg, to Maureen Lipman, and Muhmmad Ali, from Spike Milligan, Jackie Mason and Wolf Mankowitz, to pianist Alfred Brendel. Biteback recently published his  anecdotal memoir, Under Cover: A Poet's Life in Publishing.

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day, and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we're including here his poem VIGIL, from his collection Blues in the Park (published by Smokestack Books).

VIGIL, by Jeremy Robson

I don't accuse,
am on my guard,
that's all.

I won't forget they tried
to wipe my broken
people
from the earth–no,
not them, of course, too
young, their fathers or their
fathers' fathers–not even
them, perhaps.
Be fair.

They might, who knows,
have been among those
righteous brave who
in reaching out their hands
sealed their own fate,
or simply those who turned
away, afraid. Perhaps.
Impossible to conceive
the fear, the shadows of
the night, the bootsteps
on the stair.

Now, a life-time later, alone
beneath the Frankfurt Bahnhoff's
amber lights, incessant
rain machine-gunning the
roof's grim glass, I tell
myself the hordes
I watch there, fighting
their way towards the waiting
trains–achtung–late for
work or hurrying home,
that they could not

themselves have heard
the shots, the muzzled
cries, the dogs, the
clank, clank, clank,
of the nightmare trucks
departing on cue for their
one-way journey to Hell
(from which of these platforms
I wonder–one, two?)

and that looking back
aghast, perhaps, at those black
Wagnerian scenes, history
to them, however obscene,
that they, contrite perhaps,
would wash their hands
in innocence at night–
not, like some demented Lady
Macbeth, scrub scrub
scrubbing
to expunge the dead, as
those accursed others should.
Sins of the fathers
heavy on their head.
Be fair.

And yet, and yet....
It may be many years since
that war began, but if
I, a Jew, scion
of that haunted race,
forget, who will remember,
and if none remembers, the
dead are truly dead.

I don't accuse
am on my guard,
that's all.