Menachem Rozensaft, whose parents survived the Holocaust and became an international lawyer specializing in genocide, has spent much of his life trying to reconcile the horrors of the past with his Jewish faith.
He was born in 1948 in a barracks that housed displaced persons, including survivors of the nearby Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp, like his mother, Reuters writes.
Rosensaft's father survived five camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
About 50.000 prisoners died in Bergen-Belsen, including Anne Frank.
When British forces liberated the camp in 1945, they found about 60.000 survivors, but nearly 14.000 died over the next two months from disease and starvation. Reuters writes that Rosensaft, an American, "turned to poetry to express his position in verse not only on the Holocaust but also on recent attempts at genocide, such as those in Bosnia and Rwanda, while also opposing racism and intolerance."
"We know there are neo-Nazi forces, there are white supremacists in all parts of the world who, if allowed, will commit horrific acts, crimes against humanity, genocide against others," Rosensaft said in a video interview with Reuters from his home in New Jersey.
"And those 'others' can be Jews, Roma, Muslims, it can be the immigrant or LGBT community, and we all have to be vigilant."
His book of poetry "Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen" will be published by "Kelsey Books" in April.
Yom Hashoah, the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, is celebrated on April 9, and the anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen on April 15.
Rozensaft, who visited Bergen-Belsen more than 25 times, in some of his 82 poems fights against, as he puts it, "the ghosts of those who will not leave" the places where they were killed.
"I'm trying to figure out in my head what happened to them, what they're doing, what's happening to the areas they still inhabit because they don't have a cemetery. Their cemetery is the sky," he told Reuters.
He writes about freshly shaven guards who, humming Mozart's tunes, chose who would live and who would die.
Children are present in many of his songs, and he was inspired to do so by his half-brother Benjamin, who, when he was five and a half years old, was killed together with his father, grandmother and grandfather upon arrival at Auschwitz in 1943. When the guards forced them into the gas chamber , Benjamin asked his mother if she was going to die.
She didn't answer. Benjamin would have been 83 years old today.
When Rosensaft's mother died in 1997, he realized that Benjamin lived only inside him.
"I see his face, I try to imagine his voice, the pain, the fear, the agony, and the only thing I know is that if I didn't remember him, he would be gone," Rosensaft said.
Rosensaft, a devout Jew, has a troubled relationship with God, Reuters points out.
One poem, "Psalm 13, Post-Auschwitz", begins with a message to God:
"You hid your face,
ignored his world,
while the smoke of burnt flesh tore the sky"
and finally tells him: "it's too late".
Bonus video:
