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Literature and Poetry/
Holocaust Remembrance Day

Avramek Koppelovitz

Dream

When I grow up and am twenty

I will go out to see the wonderful world

I will sit in a bird with an engine

I will lift off and fly into space, high

I will fly, I will sail and rise

Above a distant and beautiful world

I will pass over rivers and seas

I will rise and fly to the heavens

A cloud will be a sister and the wind a brother

I will wonder at the Euphrates and the Nile

I will see the pyramids and the Sphinx

In ancient Egypt of the goddess Isis

I will pass over the Niagara Falls

I will bathe in the heat of the burning sun of the Sahara

I will float over the Tibetan cliffs covered with clouds

And above the enchanted and mysterious land

When I escape from the blazing and terrible heat wave

I will rise and fly to the icebergs of the north

In flight I will pass over the great Kangaroo Island

And above the ruins of Pompeii

Above the holy land of the Old Testament

And also above the land of the famous Homer

I will float slowly and glide easily

And thus the wonders of the world are scented

 

Avramek Koppelovitz was born in 1930. He wrote his eight poems when he was in the Lodz Ghetto. From the Lodz Ghetto Avramek arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp together with his parents. His mother was sent directly to the gas chambers and Avramek and his father were sent to the labour camps. One day his father, Mendel Koppelovitz, decided to hide Avramek in order to save him from suffering. In the evening he returned and found that his son was no more – Avramek died when he was 14.

After the war the father return to Lodz. There he found a picture and a book of poetry by his son Avramek.

Mendel married again to Chaya Greenfeld, the mother of Eliezer known as Lulek. In 1985, after the death of the couple, Lulek, Avramek’s step brother, found the poetry notebook. In 1993 Irit Amiel the translator finished the translation  of the notebook into Hebrew. The book of poetry was published by Yad Vashem.

In February 2004 Uri Meizelman found the book in a old book shop in Tel Aviv. Uri, together with his friends Ohad Kosky and Roey Hadas from the group Kerach 9, recorded Avramek Koppelovitz’s poems. On the eve of Memorial Day for the Holocaust and Heroism 5765 (2005) the Avramek disc became available in shops.

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