Rajko Djuric's Poem 'The Terror Years'

Hello and welcome to the poetry segment on the ABC. I am Rajko Djuric the poet of ‘The Terror Years’. I wrote this poem to make people see the terror that the Roma people faced during the Holocaust. My poem is about a Rom sent to Auschwitz, a German concentration camp. I wanted to show how my people suffered during the Holocaust. As I was a part of the International Organisation of Roma and a Roma myself, I concentrated my writing on the culture and history of the Roma people (http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Rajko-Djuric/7983134, zoominfo). During the holocaust people who were ‘inferior’ were sent to concentration camps were either murdered or was used for forced labor for the Germans. Many types of people were sent to these places. The main people

Listen, Simon!
Eve and Mary, too!
The twenty-five thousand shadows
That watch and follow me:
These terror years are our path;
Their names are the way-station.
The punctuation in the first two lines was very deliberate. I have used exclamation marks to make the character seem as if they were pleading. In the lines
The twenty-five thousand shadows
That watch and follow me:
The shadows is a symbol for the people trapped in the concentration camps. A point I made apparent in the ‘That watch and follow me’. A shadow cannot watch someone, so it becomes clear that it is representing people. Additionally, I have used imagery in the line ‘This is where they turned us to ashes’. What does this line make you think of? People that were relentlessly murdered then disposed of. This is exactly what happened to my people. These innocent people lost their lives. Consequently, this lists all the terrible effects the Germans had on the Roma people during the Holocaust.
To conclude, I have used poetic devices and textual features to convey the terrible conditions of the concentration camps and the loss of life in these terrible places during the Holocaust. Thank you for watching and I hope you have enjoyed my online seminar. Good bye