History Lesson
As the first oven
door opens 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,
Sees the bloody
Birkenau production-line of murder
Its branch-line running
right inside the camp,
Past guard-houses,
towers, miles of razor-wire,
Its empty block-houses
bearing silent witness
She can see the selection
process,
A mere 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,
Then the screams,
the panic, the fear,
A roof-top trap-door
opening,
And the casual
dropping of the Zyklon,
The guards waiting
for silence,
Before dragging
out the bodies to the fire-pits.
Her legs are
shaky, she thinks she will faint,
Standing inside
the blackened walls,
Imagines how it
happened, smells the vapour,
Sees where
history was made,
In desperate pursuit
of a final solution,
To wipe undesirables
from the face of the Earth.
To Canada then, to
bear witness,
To the residues
of countless victims,
Cardboard cartons
of personal papers,
Glass boxes full of
shoes, of clothing, of toys,
Of teeth, of hair
and human bones,
Recoverable
substances for the Reich.
Exhibitions, reconstructions,
documents,
Photographs,
testimonies, memories,
The deniers overwhelmingly
denied.
Feels 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 this
living lesson
Unaware of
eugenics and euthanasia,
Ignorant of this
inhumanity,
And for whom the holocaust
has little meaning.
Copyright Andy Fawthrop 2016
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