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You'll find this short poem, from Moses Schulstein, at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. , and all over the net.

We are the shoes, We are the last witnesses
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers.
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh,
Each one of us avoided the Hellfire

Moses Schulstein


Part of its power stems from the personification of shoes - objects which possess a peculiar ability to draw empathy from humans. (Perhaps as children, we love them, in an animistic way, and as adults, simply move away from them -literally; but not emotionally?) The poet knows of our empathy, and so the poem carries the implicit recognition, via its very construction, that many people are only able to relate to the victims, via an intermediary: the personified shoe. The second part of its power lies in its abrupt, and ferocious ending in the word Hellfire. Beyond this word, with all its attendant meaning, nothing including poetry can pass, except, perhaps, for silence. One to memorise.