| Joseph Friedlander, comp. The Standard Book of Jewish Verse. 1917. | | | | Twenty-one Years of Rescue Work | | By Alice Lucas |
| | | SHAMED and degraded you call them—they! | |
| Flung in the nameless abysses, whose anguish defiles, | |
| Where grief is forbidden to weep, and agony forced into smiles. | |
| Shamed and degraded, you say! | |
| O for a tongue of fire, for words like to scourging flame, | 5 |
| Telling that theirs is the anguish, and ours, ours only, the shame. | |
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| Ours, or we shudder and turn aside, | |
| Holding our whiteness aloof from the stench and the stain, | |
| While t’wards those pestilent depths there passes a pitiful train, | |
| Hunger and evil their guide, | 10 |
| Innocent, ignorant, starving, thrust forth on the fatal track— | |
| Ours is the shame, for they perish, and we could have held them back! | |
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| Could—nay, we can, for behold the throng, | |
| Sad souls ready to perish, still passing the self-same way, | |
| Men and women of Israel, come to their aid this day, | 15 |
| Rise, let your hands be made strong! | |
| Souls, in God’s image created, maimed, prisoned and tortured see. | |
| God do so to us and more also, if we do not set them free! | | | | |
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