Thanks for your comments, island time. Yes, this is one of the great Holocaust poems, which I used in my class this morning.

The author, Anthony Hecht, was 22 years old when his army division liberated a death camp. The memories stayed with him and caused him to have a mental breakdown at one point.

In this poem, the narrator (“you”) begins the poem while he is camping as an older adult. In the second stanza, he remembers his own childhood at summer camp.

That memory causes him, in the third and fourth stanzas, to imagine a Jewish Orphanage on August 5, 1942, when the Nazis came to round up the children and take them to a death camp. (This description is based on a real orphanage.)

The adult camper, in the rest of the poem, still remembers Yolek’s death after all these years, whether solitary or in crowds, even as he is sitting down to enjoy a meal.

The poem is a sestina, consisting of six six-line stanzas and one three-line envoi (or “send-off”). The six end-words are repeated in a prescribed order, as end words in each of the subsequent stanzas. The concluding tercet brings together all six of the end words.

It's heartbreaking to see how the end words "camp and "meal," for example, change context from stanza to stanza.

The envoi of this particular poem seems to be in the tradition of the Jewish admonition to remember the dead. But I’m not sure how the epigraph works in this poem and hope someone can add something.