Archive
05/24/12 - (1)
Cordwood and Railroad Ties
Yesterday, after lunch, in fact precisely not one second after one, I met Saramina Berman, at her behest — A nonagenarian docent for the St. Louis Holocaust Museum, Who had asked, on a number of other occasions, If I'd follow her through its myriad soul-sobering, heart-barbing exhibits.
Why I acquiesced begged a better guess than I could muster, And yet, there I was, punctual, exactly on time, As if I'd been transported there by one of those tightly scheduled trains Delivering its load of cordwood and creosoted railroad ties, To an around-the-clock dock at any of the dread death-factories.
For the next six-million-missing-existences-in-an-hour-and-a-half, We meandered along the museum's labyrinthine path, Compelled back to, then up through, time's phantasmagoria, Beginning with the ancestral and historical origins of Europe's Jews, Their sporadic thousand-year heritage of acceptance and success,
And paused to muse, reflect, meditate, on each theme-oriented exhibit, All of them crying out for our attention, sensitivity, sympathy, Trying, with their highly detailed, scrupulously captioned artifacts And push-button audiovisual screens eager to disseminate reality Captured by accidental amateurs and staging professionals . . .
Trying, with their own best intentions, to reify the Nazi gospel Of race hatred, eugenics, murder, and millennial world domination, That we might depart surfeited with incredulity and utter disgust, For having seen, with nauseating immediacy, the specter of genocide, What mankind achieves when obsessed with finding perfect solutions.
Then, two-thirty threatened to speed past Saramina and me, Leaving us, amidst the sinister reminiscences yet whispering to us, Stranded, standing transfixed, aghast, before a ten-foot-wide photo Of Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton with hundreds of his troops, Staring, gazing with ageless dazed and fathomless abstraction . . .
Stranded with them, in a parched yard at just-liberated Buchenwald, Near thousands of naked, emaciated, decaying, scattered cadavers — Just so much cordwood and creosoted railroad ties Waiting to be cattle-carred to Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, To stoke the furnace fires, for incoming millions of fresh-cut trees.
05/24/12 - (1)
|
|||
|
|||
