In ‘Shmuel’s Bridge,’ a St. Louis poet retraces his family’s Holocaust journey

In 2001, the St. Louis-based poet Jason Sommer and his father, Jay, took an unusual, and heavy, trip. They flew to Budapest and then traveled to Jay Sommer’s birthplace in Ukraine. From there, they slowly, painstakingly retraced the route traveled by many family members to Auschwitz.

Their goal was to find the spot where Jay Sommer’s brother, Shmuel, had made a desperate bid for freedom, leaping from the cattle car transporting him and other Hungarian Jews to the concentration camp. In less than two months in the spring of 1944, around 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary, many of them to Auschwitz; the majority were killed. Shmuel was seemingly on a path to be one of them. Then he escaped the train car as it rolled over a bridge — and jumped into the river below. He tried to swim to freedom but was shot and killed by guards before he reached its banks.

Growing up in New York City decades later, Jason Sommer idolized the uncle he never knew.

“He was a hero to me,” Sommer explained on Tuesday’s St. Louis on the Air. “Even though it wasn't a successful resistance and escape attempt … he managed to resist.”