​The First Wedding at the Heidenheim Displaced Persons Camp 1946, by Karen Javits

DPs celebrate the marriage of Chaim and Sonia Nishnillevich, the first wedding to take place in the Heidenheim displaced persons camp. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives Photograph Number 25837. Accession Number: 2006.211. Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Copyright United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Click image to visit site.

​“The First Wedding at the Heidenheim Displaced Persons Camp 1946”                  
United States Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC
 
My daughter peers into the photo and asks why 
no one is smiling. A wedding 
 
with strangers. The table set lovely. 
White cloths, crystal candle sticks,
 
stemmed glasses filled with water, 
bottles of wine, lumps of gefilte fish, 
 
and trays of cookies. Guests dressed 
in suits and ties and my grandparents
 
married and almost free. Sonia, nineteen, 
almost a still life seated in a surreal landscape, 
 
her fingers reaching for her bosom, 
what aches in her chest. Her parents and brother 
 
gone. She wears a dark dress and lipstick, pearls 
and a white wedding shroud. Jet-black
 
curls emerge out of the jagged bonnet.
I wonder where she got them from,
 
what was taken. Chaim, Life, his first 
wife and children murdered. Older, 
 
sliver of white above his raven widow’s 
peak and waves wrinkle above his 
 
brow. He touches the shroud on Sonia’s 
shoulder. Her name means Wisdom. Both 
 
bodies starting over. Bride and groom, 
my grandparents, broken in the middle 
 
of this room, this photograph, broken 
halves of a heart. They sit so tightly together.
 
Karen Javits
 
Karen Javits is an MFA candidate in Poetry and Creative Writing instructor at Georgia State University. She is an assistant editor at Five Points: A Journal of Literature & Art. She has taught all levels of writers and has most recently worked in the refugee and immigrant communities in Clarkston,GA.  Karen won an International Merit Award for her poem from the Atlanta Review and attended the Sewanee Writers Conference as a Tennessee Williams scholar. She enjoys spending time with her family in Decatur, GA, and visiting the mountains or the sea.