"My Thoughts Are Free"
Originally published on The Shabbat Drop by Miranda Lapides on April 25, 2025.
Hi there! I hope you had a wonderful Passover and you didn’t miss chametz too much.
My Passover was spent with the happiest baby on earth, my niece. I’m guessing she was so giggly and full of smiles because she knew it was her first Passover (she’s really smart). To celebrate, I read her the Rugrats Passover story, Let My Babies Go!, which was the Passover story from my own childhood. Talk about passing our history down to the next generation!
Around the table, the adults talked abundant acts of love (thanks Kabbalist Omer app, MyOmer!), Israel, and Passover traditions. Also, shoutout to this Brooklyn-based kosher caterer for being insanely delicious (still dreaming about those honey chipotle wings - he ships nationwide).
Speaking of the Omer, The Shabbat Drop Omer Circle begins this Sunday morning. For those interested in Jewish spirituality, deep discussions, and 2020 Zoom nostalgia, you won’t want to miss it! Register here.
As we count the Omer and reflect on our collective liberation, this week also held the weight of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s a different kind of sacred time in the Jewish calendar that asks us to pause, remember, and honor six million lives lost.
And because April is National Poetry Month, I went digging around for Holocaust-themed poetry. However, everything I found was unsurprisingly grim. Poems about gas chambers and the feeling of a knife to the heart of the Jewish people didn’t quite speak to me, which makes me sound so privileged! Or choosy! But I wanted something that had more… life in it?
I was about to give up the search when I came across Poetry in Hell, a collection of poems written by Polish Jews during the Holocaust.
Bravely collected by members of the Oneg Shabbat Society, a secret group of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, they were hidden in buried milk cans as part of a larger mission to document ghetto life for the future. And life is exactly what they contain: the poets wrote about everything from bagels to heartbreak, from anger to faith.
After the war, the poems were recovered, preserved, and translated into English thanks to the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
I wanted to include poetry that wasn’t solely focused on pain and suffering, but that still gives voice and life to those who endured it. And the fact that they had enough hope to intentionally bury their words for someone in the future to find feels like its own quiet act of resistance.
The poems are grouped into five deeply human themes:
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Nature
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Home, Love, Life
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Ghetto, Hunger, Struggle
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Death, Anger, Mourning
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Tradition, Faith, Protest
You can explore the collection yourself - it’s massive! But here’s a couple of poems that stuck out to me:
Source: poetryinhell.org
Girl With Bagel by Miriam Ulinover (1890-1944)
The bagels the bagels that we baked together each one darling daughter is made of two parts.
First we roll the tempting dough to make a twisted pole then put the ends together dear to make a rounded hole.
And with a warm and generous heart give to the hungry poor remember what your Bobe taught Don’t take another’s share
And soon enough there came a test of hunger for the girl Could she resist the tempting scent of warm and twisted dough?
“So Here” she called, “come and get it!” the dough that smells so fine And from the bagel that is last give me the hole-that’s mine!
Share this poem with a friend.
Source: poetryinhell.org
Thoughts Are Free Found in “Notebook for Grade 3,” which was buried in a milk can under the Ber Borokhov School, a Labor Zionist school in Warsaw
These are lyrics to a song of resistance against Nazism which was sung world wide in many languages during WWII.
My thoughts are free they cannot be captured! They just flutter by like quiet new dawns for no one can deface them deny or erase them You know it’s not new You know this is true. I think what I like What makes me feel pleasure My thoughts come and go They’re my quiet treasure. And no one can know them Imprison or own them No one can deny Di gedanken zint fray.
Shabbat Shalom,
