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;
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 Oświęcim’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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