Holocaust Day - A Tribute

History Lesson

This poem was written a few years ago after a visit to Auschwitz.  We were both very moved by what we saw - it's difficult not to be. And yet it was possible to be even more upset by the poor behaviour of the visiting school-children. It seems that the lessons this place should teach us are still not being learned.

As the first oven door is opened,

She has to go outside

To recover herself and 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 the 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,

The production-line of murder

Its branch-line running right inside the camp,

Its guard-houses, towers, miles of wire,

Its block-houses, machine guns, dogs.

She sees the selection process,

A matter of seconds,

Watches them shamble over to the showers,

Undressing, stripping, leaving everything behind

To be collected later, or so 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 overwhelmingly 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.

Copyright Andy Fawthrop 2015