Holocaust

[Biggus]

HOLOCAUST

Since the cooling of the Nazi’s oven fires
And the fading glow of the funeral pyres
The world has had to endure the mutterings
Of those who deny the holocausts sufferings
The inane ramblings of conspiracy theorists
The bigoted bile of Islamic fundamentalists
The holocaust now stricken from the syllabus
We must not speak of it lest we cause a fuss
We must appease the liberal sentiments
For God forbid we might cause offence
But the holocaust happened, SHOUT it aloud
Shout it in the face of the apathetic crowd
For if we do not condemn the holocaust deniers
Somewhere, one day they will relight the fires

[Pendragon]

Avery good point with a touchy subject. Bravo! One day, if we don't learn from the past, they will come to get you and me to fuel their flesh fires...

[PrinceMyshkin]

For if we do not condemn the holocaust deniers
Somewhere, one day they will relight the fires

These last lines exactly represent my sense of what Holocaust denial is about. Planning at one point to attempt a response to this phenomenon, I came up with two leimotifs:


1) Died-again Jews
meaning that those of us who believed or knew they had been martyred were being challenged to put them to death again by 'proving' they had died, and


2) They know what they know and they do what they do

meaning, in my assertion that they do know, very well, that the Holocaust (as applied to the Jews) did take place but by denying it and, hopefully, convincing the world that not only did it not take place but was a gigantic calumny against the Nazi regime, they might create the climate in which those lying Jews could be put to death - for "real" this time.

[Biggus]

Thank you both

[deryk]

I agree that the denial is a put-on aimed at attracting attention. In my travels, I've found that it's best to ignore these people and deny them the forums to communicate. Let them fade away rather than give them inadvertent credence by challenging them vocally.

I didn't agree with every subject you've undertaken with this, but I felt the occasion of the poem was well placed.

[Biggus]

Thanks Miriam
I read your poem with great interest and you have drawn great parralells.
Myth, mistrust and rumpour fueled the first one.
God forbid it should happen again.
Paul

[Biggus]

Thanks Deryk

[Bar22do]

This is moving, so important to shout aloud, because of our fathers, of our children' future, but also, as I believe, for the sake of human kind tout court. Thanks Biggus. Bar

[Biggus]

Thanks Bar

[G L Wilson]

Thanks Miriam
I read your poem with great interest and you have drawn great parralells.
Myth, mistrust and rumpour fueled the first one.
God forbid it should happen again.
Paul

God died in the camps.

[hallaig]

"God forbid it should happen again".



It has. Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia. Or were you meaning God forbid it happen again to just one particular group of people?

[hallaig]

I wasn't implying any sort of racism. I go to Auschwitz with schoolkids every other year and it is always a heartbreaking experience but I can't help feel that history is being compartmentalised there somehow. I feel the Holocaust should be taught as an appalling example of man's ongoing inhumanity to man. Ongoing. I wrote a poem about it, in fact.



Auschwitz


Children off the trains
stirred gravel with their shoes, went
hand in hand to the gas chambers.
We must remember.
Off the trains now, they wait
to be told to go to the toilet
or join the queue to buy some crisps,
and march in files through dust,
earphones glued to sweaty hair.
If you think this is bad
says the guide just remember……
Later we light candles
that die in the breeze as the sun
seeps through pine,
and birds, unaware of things
the guide books say, sing.
In Krakow we eat ice cream
below a banner hung from the first floor:
that Arab girl shot last week by a sniper.
Museums draw lines in time, remember,
and people cross, just like before.

[G L Wilson]

Auschwitz


Children off the trains
stirred gravel with their shoes, went
hand in hand to the gas chambers.
We must remember.
Off the trains now, they wait
to be told to go to the toilet
or join the queue to buy some crisps,
and march in files through dust,
earphones glued to sweaty hair.
If you think this is bad
says the guide just remember……
Later we light candles
that die in the breeze as the sun
seeps through pine,
and birds, unaware of things
the guide books say, sing.
In Krakow we eat ice cream
below a banner hung from the first floor:
that Arab girl shot last week by a sniper.
Museums draw lines in time, remember,
and people cross, just like before.

Very beautiful, especially the last two lines.

[Biggus]

It has. Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia. Or were you meaning God forbid it happen again to just one particular group of people?

Never on such an industrial scale.
Never so cold and calculated.
Auschwitz was a processing plant or perhaps more accurately a recycling plant, recycling lower forms of life, stripping the resaleable parts and burning whats left.
it has never happened like that either before or since.

[G L Wilson]

Never on such an industrial scale.
Never so cold and calculated.
Auschwitz was a processing plant or perhaps more accurately a recycling plant, recycling lower forms of life, stripping the resaleable parts and burning whats left.
it has never happened like that either before or since.

How evil do you have to be to butcher somebody with a machete? The means don't matter when the end is always the same.

[Hawkman]

Whilst I can't fault the theme or sentiments expressed in this piece I do have quite marked reservations about its execution. Rhyming couplets inevitably have comic connotations and I feel the subject far too serious a matter to warrant their use.

The poem's structure seems to be a parody of a Shakespearian sonnet, traditionally a vehicle for love poems (although not exclusively). But in couplet form, with uncertain metre and some end rhymes which would have been worthy of William McGonagall, the overall effect sets up an uncomfortable conflict which rather detracts from the poem's message.

I can't help feeling that this one might have been better in free verse.

[G L Wilson]

Form and content, Hawkman, form and content.

Hypocrisy comes naturally to some people. The Japanese are a case in point. The Japanese always cry over Hiroshima and Nagaski, however I don't see them crying over the Chinese killed in their foul experiments in Manchuria during World War II. Some people I have no time for.

[Doralace]

I was moved and posted my own, with a dedication.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Hallaig: My profound respect for the addition of your poem to this thread.

For those who might like a more detailed account of the Shoah, I recommend The Destruction of European Jewry by Raul Hilberg.

[Alexander III]

I very much liked the poem as a political statement. Before reading it I had no idea that there were people who actually denied the holocaust, after some web searching some of the stuff is really appalling to me; how could you deny something like that.

However a problem I do have is with the over-attention give to the holocaust, let me explain. The holocaust was most likely the worst genocide of the 20th century. But the 20th century has been full of genocide yet most people only know of the holocaust. This means that most people think that once the nazis were defeated the horror of genocide was defeated to, people think genocide is something esoteric to nazism. But it is not, as someone before me pointed out several genocides have occurred after the holocaust. it is something ongoing.

My gripe is that people see the Nazi's as something inhuman and the holocaust as a unique (it was a unique in terms of modern technology and planning used to apply it) but the SENTIMENTS which lead to it are not of inhuman nazi's, but very human nazi's - we should see that what happened was not alien but historically speaking very human- we should see that it can happen any time and anywhere, not that it is a historical unique case. I don't want to be offensive and I hope I was able to convey my point.

[Doralace]

No one seems to have read my words in connection with this thread. It's a poem I wrote after visits in Birkenau, were my family was killed. The poem might not be good, as I said, but is an expression of what one feels in front of what had happened there (as in so many other places in Europe during WWII) - as you say, Biggus - "never on such an industrial scale".... The little red house and The little white house are what gas chambers were called in Birkenau;
so here it's again, now within your thread, Biggus:

The Little Red House, The Little White House
for Biggus

Brick cottages on a site where dry wind blew across the fields
in Birkenau on the way to gas; pale phantom woods
within the confines of the camp, the grass, green like spring.

I’d never venture here in the winter; granny is an icicle
hanging from the roof of a barrack hut,
melting fast in eager fire, and icicle anew, returning and returning
each winter, persisting to my time.
I wake up at night and press my naked back against
the cold wall of my room in Krakow; can’t forgive myself
I wasn’t there to soothe your fright with my hand's touch or a word.
Can’t bear helpless screams, never answered or avenged,
I blame the birch for hiding what nothing and no one should have,
but I fear what I'll do when I’m 28, Tadeusz, Tadeusz, I cry,
calling Borowski, where did your bare feet walk about in Auschwitz?
Had they ever crossed my granny’s?

Two little houses, red and white, sounds like a fairy tale, till you know
it's beyond all horror, Grimm’s witches in the forest, multiplied
by all the shooting stars ever fallen that no power had stopped.
Furnaces ate, grinding, farting, Gargantua and Pantagruel
fell silent beyond scorn or provocation - greater giants were ingesting
what for them would have been abomination.

'Tantalus cut his son Pelops up, boiled him
and served him up in a banquet for the gods.
The gods became aware of the gruesome nature
of the menu, so they didn't touch the offering.'

Birds come back here shy, don’t really have an audience for their chirps
and birch trees today host only ghosts. I sense the dead as I breathe,
they’re queuing by the little red and white house, by the stakes; hell’s way.
And earth’s hundreds of years won’t manage to distill
the numbers awaiting no heaven.

Errant granny, does a thunder lend you its rumbling noise at times?
Which cloud are you adrift in? Hear me, I am your only god, my naked back
at night, my shame and my defenselessness, every time I think…
live in me... but you won’t, I know, you are scorch and icicle,
forever damned to haunt.

[PrinceMyshkin]

The icicle metaphor is haunting! - and the whole of this poem reminded me somewhat of Paul Celan's "Deathfugue," which you probably know or if not should look up.

[Biggus]

Thank you all for your varied comments.
and great to hear from you again Myshkin