International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January commemorates the tragedy of the deaths of six million Jews as a result of genocide by the Nazi regime during the Second World War.
The three women in this poem, Therese Steiner, Auguste Spitz and Marianne Grunfeld, were deported from Guernsey in 1942 during the Occupation.
THREE
What are three lives beside six million?
Teardrops in torrential rain: but still three lives
extinguished early,
snuffed out
in misery and pain.
Therese, Auguste and Marianne,
dispatched from Guernsey by decree,
all died at Auschwitz, among many,
three Jewish girls,
the Guernsey Three.
At Holocaust commemorations
their names lie like a stain
on our collective conscience: we
remember them with shame.
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