'I Would Break The Wall'

From 13-year-old Jordan Carlson of Fairport Harding School (Fairport Harbor, Ohio) comes this:

What is wrong with Jews?
They had to get discriminated?

For what reason?
They are all human beings
Just like the people who discriminated them.
If I was there and I had a hammer,
I would break the wall of discrimination.
That one man, Adolf Hitler,

Is one horrible person.

Think about it,
How many children that were killed
Could of became someone famous or
Come up with some new inventions?
It could have been a lot.
Instead of a lot of good things that could of happened,
There was one horrible person
That stopped it all.
One horrible event.
One horrible person.
Let’s hope it never happens again.

"If I was there and I had a hammer, I would break the wall of discrimination."  What a vivid image.  And Jordan's point about the lost potential of young people killed in the Holocaust--I think about that every time I look at the entries in my mother's poesiealbum created by her friends who didn't survive.

Note:  The opening line of Jordan's poem--"What is wrong with Jews?"--gave me pause at first.  I couldn't help but think of the recent controversy over the Albany, New York high school teacher who gave students a "persuasive writing" assignment to construct an essay supporting the argument that the Jews were the source of Germany's problems in the 1930s.  But here, obviously, Jordan's first line is a rhetorical device introducing the point that Jews are no more deserving of mistreatment than any other human beings.