International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is also the anniversary of the day that the concentration camp Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army.  I remember a high school history class where we talked about the shock that those soldiers felt as they tried to understand what they had discovered.

I remember the first time I saw a photo in a book of those bodies stacked like cordwood.  I know it's hard to believe that one could get to one's teenage years without seeing such a picture, but in the pre-Internet days of my youth, it happened.  I had read about the Holocaust, of course.  But that first picture that I saw hit me in a visceral way.  Was I seeing human bodies or something else?

When I was in high school in the early 80's, I thought that the Holocaust was the only genocide of the 20th century, but sadly we know that's not true.  It becomes increasingly easy to wipe out whole populations, and whole populations increasingly do not care about basic human rights, which makes it increasingly easy to wipe out whole populations.

Today some people will light candles, some will write letters, some will pray, and some of us may not remember at all.  I'm thinking of a poem that I wrote in August of 2016, as the campaign season ramped into high gear. I couldn't get the Sylvia Plath quote out of my head. Did I read Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" before I wrote it? I think I was writing it, and the title came to me, and I looked it up and proceeded to read it; Ray Bradbury was such an expert storyteller.  Later, the literary journal Adanna published it.

History’s Chalkboards


“Every woman adores a Fascist,  
The boot in the face, the brute  
Brute heart of a brute like you.”
                            “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath


Every woman adores a Fascist.
Turns out men do too.
But we imagine the boot
on someone else’s face,
a face that doesn’t look
like ours, the face that arrives
to take our jobs and steal
our factories, while laughing
at us in a foreign language.

No God but capitalism,
the new religion, fascism disguised
as businessman, always male,
always taking what is not his.

Brute heart, not enough stakes
to keep you dead. 
We thought we had vanquished
your kind permanently last century
or was it the hundred years before?

As our attics crash into our basements,
what soft rains will come now?
The fire next time,
the ashes of incinerated bodies,
the seas rising on a tide
of melted glaciers.

And so we return to history’s chalkboard,
the dust of other lessons in our hair.
We make our calculations.