I was clicking around the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum website on Tuesday, March 31, working on an idea for June, when the museum will mark 20 years of its Memory Project.

The project preserves the writing of local Holocaust survivors. Essays. Reflections. Poems.

I started clicking on the names of those who participated.

That’s how I found Hilda Lebedun.

Lebedun survived Auschwitz and later built her life in St. Louis. She spent years speaking in schools and community programs about what she experienced and why remembering matters. She died in 2020.

I clicked on one of her poems.

It was called “April.”

The timing caught me first. I was reading it on March 31. April was about to start the next day.

I started reading.

“It is a Wednesday afternoon
in April.
and I am sitting
in the sunshine
in the ‘righteous people’s
memorial garden’
surrounded by beautiful
spring flowers,
tulips and pansies.”

It felt strangely current. Like she was describing tomorrow.

Then the poem turns.

“Memories are flooding
my brain.
It is April 1942,
the month of my tragedy,
when I was captured
by the Nazis,
when my life and
the lives of many others
turned upside down at
Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

That’s where I stopped for a minute.

I later learned the garden she mentioned is at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. I had just been in Israel earlier this year but didn’t make it there because of scheduling. Reading her words, it struck me that sometimes you understand a place best through someone who needed it.

She writes about surviving. About coming out of the ashes of the Holocaust.

And then the poem returns to nature.

“I smile through my tears
and enjoy again
sunshine, rain, wind and snow,
flowers and
the greening of the land.”

“Remember and honor
all my loved ones
and all the others who
were lost,
murdered in their prime.”

The entire poem “April” affected me.

Maybe it was the coincidence of reading it on the last day of March. Maybe it was the way April was about to begin. Maybe it was the reminder that this season of renewal sits not far from Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’Atzmaut on the Jewish calendar.

Or maybe it was just a reminder that sometimes we notice things exactly when we’re supposed to.

It was 3:02 Tuesday afternoon when I finished reading it.

Tomorrow will be a Wednesday afternoon in April – April 1.

I’ll probably be sitting in the sunshine in my backyard, surrounded by grass my dog has mostly destroyed and a few hopeful signs of new mulch.

Maybe even thinking about planting something.

Tulips. Maybe pansies.