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# VIGIL: A Poem by Jeremy Robson
- URL: https://www.ourfight.uk/vigil-a-poem-by-jeremy-robson/
- Published: 2025-01-28T22:45:22.000Z
- Updated: 2025-05-30T17:16:11.000Z
- Description: "And if none remembers, the dead are truly dead". To commemorate HMD we are sharing the poem VIGIL by Jeremy Robson. Jeremy will be a panelist at our forthcoming symposium, Remaking the Promise of Never Again.
- Author: Our Fight
- Tags: Arts, Past Events

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?*

[Buy Tickets](https://buytickets.at/ourfight/1536818/r/ofjeremy?ref=ourfight.uk)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/b8/f0b8221b-04e2-44a1-80aa-6bee05ed1ed6/content/images/2025/02/2025-02-09-remaking-the-promise-ticket-tailor-banner-4.png)

Jeremy's many poetry collections include his latest, [*Chagall's Moon*](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chagalls-Moon-Jeremy-Robson/dp/173917304X?ref=ourfight.uk). 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*](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Under-Cover-Poets-Life-Publishing/dp/1785904094?ref=ourfight.uk).

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*](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blues-Park-Jeremy-Robson/dp/0992740940?ref=ourfight.uk) (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.