Saul Bennett
A Jewish Child is Poured Cocoa, 1944
In the War. say in '44, when I was seven or eight,
I told my mother
after school one day 1 was going to play over
that Saturday at William Zellner's,
a boy in my class, to trade stamps with him. Please,
she said, don't go.
And she told me the Zellners were German,
from there, his mother and father.
I understood, in a way, and when he came home
from work my father
took my mother's side. Finally, anyway, I went.
William's mother
And his father, even, were so nice. They gave us plenty
of attention and smiled
and joked, or seemed to, more than other parents,
maybe because, who knows,
I was this Jew. As William and I swapped stamps
on the rug
In their living room William's mother brought us
piping cocoa, then refills.
I had stamps in my skinny collection from Germany
with Hitler's head on them.
Or maybe Austria. My parents didn't know.
I can't recall swapping
Any of them with William but maybe I did. When it all
came out after I wondered
what William's parents' relatives were doing then,
and how, and where, where especially,
and what William's mother and father would have done
at a different address.