Yellow star girl

My question for the day

The question

Observing myself sitting in a coal shoot

Quite certain of my purpose

Nazi hunter extraordinaire

Escape artist

Protector

Behind the lines

How a nine year old contented herself with gas chambers

With the mechanization of death by the train load

With row upon neat row of statistics

Glaring when the boy from 319 shouted out from across the street that the next stop was the ovens

 

Are yellow stars a visible manifestation?

As if sewn on a coat means sewn on one’s heart

Every pulse

Every throb of the blood a comingling of little yellow star shaped leukocytes and hemoglobin cells that tattoos the soul as so many yellow star shaped numbers on one’s forearm

 

My daughter

A yellow starred half of me

Which makes her a yellow starred quarter of my mother and one sixteenth of my father

What is she?

Is she 5/16ths yellow star genes?

Or is the old adage—

The “you never know who the father is”

So that it isn’t so much blood

Isn’t so much what her DNA picture looks like

But the perception of the yellow stars on her forearm that invites a boy—any boy—

To shout out that it is her turn to march towards the ovens

To glean in an instant her 5/16ths

Her yellow star portion of the DNA pie

But maybe only Bergen/Belson for her and the cold, perpetually winterish shops of slave labor

Her facial features measured

Her blue eyes with yellow and grey undertones classified against an eye chart

The hmmm, not pure tsk that screams out yellow star, yellow star

Her dark blond hair shorn and thrown haphazardly into a pile

Her smile banished to another dimension

Her sadness gripping and overwhelming and yet tempered by a day-to-day life that might bring a simple kindness to remind her of what could be if only she perseveres

 

Yes, yes, little yellow starred one or green crescent one because, after all we are here now

Yes, yes little Yazidi girl with Christian blue eyes that tattoo her as fodder for the market—

No cooler to shelter her

No retreat anywhere

No other side of the street where she can stand menacingly tall with an “I dare you to cross” scowl that would frighten the boy shouting this way to the ovens enough to only dare bully her from afar

With no gun to embolden

No shiny SS bars or Caliphate’s black and white banner from which he could cross that street

No

When it would come to that one on one

Little yellow star girl and green crescent girl and Roma girl and Yazidi girl can stand tall and proud

And have super powers

And be brave

And stand her ground on her side of the street

Her dukes at the ready as it should be, but never is.

– Malissa Smith (c) 2015