Benjamin Goluboff
Emmy Andriesse Photographs the Hunger Winter, Amsterdam, 1944-1945

This elderly couple
in brilliant sunlight
sifting coal
from the dust
of a vacant lot.
The kid in the cap
with a hunk of bread
in his jaws,
a rent in the pit
of his sweater’s
stomach.
About the writer:
Benjamin Goluboff teaches English at Lake Forest College. In addition to some scholarly publications, he has placed imaginative work — poetry, fiction, and essays — in many small-press journals, recently Unbroken, Bird’s Thumb, and War Literature and the Arts. He is the author of Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse, and Other Poems (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2017).
Image: Reaching Out by Dzeni. No medium specified. No size specified. 2012. By free license. This image contains the names of 2,000 victims of the Shoah. These names were found on the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims. The number on the left arm belonged to well known song writer, Fritz Löhner-Beda.