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.
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