Note to An Old Friend
For Susan Sugar
We left our shoes on the riverbank
two hundred years ago,
and now they’re gone.
The riverbank too is gone,
and the river in which we waded,
gone too, though no one knows where.
I cannot remember the name of the river,
but one day it will come to me.
For now, there’s nothing left to do
but go barefoot again,
go wading in any body of water
that will have us,
and be glad.
Nancy Lefenfeld has, over the past two decades, conducted research on the subject of humanitarian resistance in France during the Shoah and has spoken and written extensively on the subject. A French translation of her work on the smuggling of Jewish children from France into Switzerland was published under the title Le Sort des Autres: Le sauvetage des enfants juifs à la frontière franco-suisse (L’Harmattan, 2016). She authored a chapter in Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis, edited by Patrick Henry (The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), and her articles have appeared in The Hidden Child and Prism: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators.