Philip Terman: Holocaust Memorial Lecture, 2016

When the Syrian human rights worker

Spoke of his prison experience,

A girl sitting beside me

Was consulting her cell phone, when

He began his story about his arrest,

I couldn’t help notice her scrolling

Facebook, when he described how, one

By one, his nails were tweezered out,

She was composing a text,

When he developed the part about the quivering

of his body from electric shocks,

I tried not to look down

At the smiling face emoticon

She included before pressing send,

When, his eyes shut as if reliving the moment—
they hanged me by my hands and legs

and tried to split me in half—
a showtune sounded from my jacket pocket.

—

Copyright 2016 Philip Terman

The U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.