The last of the survivors are telling the stories of their persistence, their tragedies, and sometimes their need to pass on what happened before they died.  Even I feel the need to relate what people long gone went through, responsible.  Last night I told my grandchildren how my parent escaped from Danzig just before the Nazis took over.  They are little children, and shouldn’t have to know the fact that they exist only because my parents managed to find a way out just in time.  And yet I told them, because if something happens to me before next year I have a duty to tell them.  I didn’t tell them that their great grandmother died in  Stuthoff, that most of my uncles and aunts and cousins disappeared in various concentration camps.  I didn’t tell them that my mother mourned the children she had to abort as much as she rejoiced in the children.  I don’t know if I will tell them when I am older.  I don’t know if I can continue to retell the histories of their fate.  I don’t know if I will ever find out all the histories at all.  The ones I know I have written in poems.