[New political poem, from my visit to Oświęcim/Auschwitz in June. The parallels between early-stage Nazi concentration camps in Poland and what is happening in American right now are eerie and disturbing. Oświęcim is pronounced
something like Ósh-vye(n)-shim,
with an initial long O and a nasal „e”; transliterated into German as
Auschwitz. ]
1. Entry
Shh – all
those „sh” sounds –
You are on
holy ground,
But transformed
into something wholly evil.
The guide
says, take off your headphones
(You’ve
only just put them on),
So you can
hear the litany of the names
Of those
who died in this place.
You’re
familiar with many of these:
Jewish
names, recognizably, the family names
Of friends
and scholars you’ve learned from:
Strauss,
Novak, Fisher, Goldstein.
Auschwitz
is not the true or original name
Of this
place, but is instead the German version
Of the Polish
original,
Seemingly
impossible to pronounce,
But: Slow… it…
down: Ósh- vye(n)’- shim,
Now say it
again, twice:
Ósh-vye(n)’-shim,
Oświęcim.
The town was
named centuries ago,
Possibly
meaning, “sanctified place”.
Eventually,
the Polish army built a base here:
Solid
military buildings, built to last.
When Poland
fell it became
The first
of three concentration camps:
Followed by
Birkenau and Monowitz,
All part of
the nightmare Auschwitz system.
2. Descent
This human
hell was manufactured by people
Not so
different from you or me;
No
external, metaphysical demons need apply.
Overseen by
watch towers
And double
rows of barbed wire,
You learn
it now:
How the
Nazis graduated step by step
Through
successive rings of hell:
It started
in the usual way:
The
construction of enmities,
The
consolidation of unearned power.
The concentration
and internment
Of the
designated scapegoats,
Immigrants,
dreamers, asylum seekers:
We ourselves
in America have previously gone this far,
Putting our
Japanese-American neighbors
In the
internment camps of World War Two.
Ideology
following practice,
Do you see
how easy it was, step by step?
They
decided rebels, Jews and Roma people
Were
subhuman, not meriting empathy or humanity.
When they
found this insufficient
They
progressed to death by firing squad
Beginning
with the Polish elite,
But this
was too messy, too slow, too personal:
It
traumatized the soldiers.
After that,
the SS began to dream large,
Imagining powerful
possibilities for killing.
They practiced
murder, seeking perfection,
A final
solution, a seamless system,
A human
machine of brutal efficiency
And petty
profit.
At this
point, an insight came to them:
The
insecticide already used to kill
Lice and
like vermin, could also be used
To kill human
vermin: Just Increase the dose!
So they put
down the rebellious local Poles,
And moved
on to Jews and Roma people.
The Slavs,
seen as slightly less subhuman,
Were in the
interim to be saved to do the work,
But
eventually would be sterilized into extinction.
For hours you
walk among and through
The silent
buildings and imagine the prisoners,
Some crowded
immediately into the single
Gas
chamber, cleverly designed to use
Body heat to
free the poison gas.
Others had
their deaths delayed a month
Or two or
six, worked and eventually
Starved to
death or died from typhus
(One fifth
died every month);
Who can say
if they were lucky or unlucky?
You see the
rooms of abandoned suitcases:
Twenty-five
kilos each allowed;
To
concentrate the plunder;
A
heart-breaking collection of artificial limbs;
Dishes and
children’s toys; a room of eye glasses.
But most
ghastly is the vast store of women’s hair,
Seven tons,
ready to be woven into textiles.
Finally,
you learn that even with all
This
diabolic cleverness, the process failed:
It took too
long to incinerate the dead,
Too slow to
implement the Final Solution.
And so:
they decreed an even larger place
Of death: Auschwitz
2 aka Birkenau,
Meaning the
place of white birches,
Although no
trees, or flowers
Or even
grass, existed there, only bare earth.
Instead of OÅ›wiÄ™cim’s
20 barracks,
At Birkenau
they built 174
And would
have built more
If the war
had gone on.
3. The
Choice is Ours
On a cloudy
summer’s afternoon, you see
The
remaining gas chamber and crematorium.
Collapsing
in on itself, in the process
Of becoming
an ancient ruin, global warming
And climate
change acting here as executioner.
Maybe you
wish you could forget
What you’ve
seen here this afternoon;
You might
sleep better if you did.
You fear
you might forget what you’ve seen
Here in
your mind’s eye
Augmented
by empathy and imagination.
You fear
your own forgetfulness and denial
Could blind
you to the possibility
Of this
happening again,
Could blind
you to the fact
That it is
happening again,
In Gaza and
the West Bank,
And in
America to trans people
And
undocumented workers
And other
enemies and critics of the regime.
Maybe not
yet with firing squad or gas chamber,
But already
with starvation, deprivation, terror.
Remember:
When the people got off the train
And were
sorted, casually, with flick of a wrist,
All were
sentenced to die:
Some
immediately in the gas chambers,
But the
rest to be killed just as dead by
Starvation,
overwork, deprivation and terror.
The fact
that some survived of spite of all that,
Was not
part of the plan,
But just a
mischance of history.
So: Whenever
we (and I do mean we)
See
ourselves locked in Darwinian competition
With others
who differ from us,
Even in
tiny ways, real or invented;
Whenever we
throw out empathy and compassion
For those
who differ from us and make us uncomfortable;
Whenever we
dehumanize those we fear or distrust:
All these times,
places, and ways put us
On the road
from Oświęcim, a
sanctified place
Of white
birchtrees and rushing waters,
To
Auschwitz, a bleak place, where human ashes
Are in the
air we breathe, in the water we drink,
And beneath
our feet in the ground where we stand.
But we
don’t have to take those steps,
We don’t
have to walk that road,
To human
hell.
Are we wise
enough to learn from what
Happened
here in Auschwitz?
Is there a
road back to Oświęcim,
To the white
birches and the Vistula’s rushing waters,
To the
sanctity of all human lives?
This is the
choice in front of us.
But it
starts with remembering what happened here.
Let us
choose wisely.
-June-Aug 202
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