History Lesson
As the first oven door is opened,
Inside this small crematorium,
She has to go outside
To recover herself, to fight back the tears,
As if the enormity of the crime,
The wickedness of it, the evil itself, still lives here,
And the smell somehow lingers
Within this charnel house,
Where the bodies baked,
In those early days before the numbers grew too many.
She comes back in again, re-joins the tour,
To visit bloody Birkenau,
An industrial murder-factory
With its special branch-line right into the camp,
Its guard-house, towers, miles of wire,
Its block-houses, machine guns, dogs.
She can see the selection process, over in seconds,
Watches them shamble over to the showers,
Undressing, stripping, leaving everything behind
To be collected later, as they think,
Herded together, the door slamming shut,
The screams, the panic, the fear,
A roof-top trap-door opening,
And the casual dropping of the Zyklon,
Waiting for silence, removing the bodies,
To the massive fire-pits.
She thinks she will faint,
Standing inside the blackened walls,
Imagines where it happened.
Sees where history was made,
In pursuit of a eugenic final solution,
To wipe undesirables
From the face of the Earth
To Canada then, to bear witness,
To the residues of countless victims,
Suitcases of personal papers,
Glass cases full of shoes, of clothing, of toys,
Of teeth, of hair and of bones,
And every re-useable, recoverable substance.
Exhibitions, reconstructions, documents,
Photographs, testimonies, memories.
The deniers over-whelmingly denied.
Yet these school-children rush past her,
Shouting at each other, and into their phones,
Crisp packets rustling, coke cans drained,
Laughing and joking, cat-calling,
Oblivious to euthanasia,
Ignorant of this inhumanity,
And for whom the holocaust has little meaning.
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