Archive 06/06/12 - (2)

 

   

Hadamar

                                                                  

Wouldn't it have been adequate, satisfactory, enough — dayenu

To have eliminated just all the "detestable" Jews,

As well as Communists, Gypsies, syphilitics, Seventh-Day Adventists,

Political dissidents, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses,

Anyone, Nazis included, who disagreed with Hitler's policies

For cleansing the "vermin" from German society —

Those "inestimably disgusting threats" to Aryan purity and superiority?

 

And wouldn't the mass ghettoizations, starvations, social deprivations,

Deportations, by cattle car, to the round-the-clock death factories,

The mass shootings and gassings and burnings,

Have been sufficient — dayenu — to satisfy the Teutonic blood-lust,

Sate the Third Reich's obsessive-compulsive hunger and thirst for order,

Its inordinate need to wipe the stained slate clean,

Achieve perfection, the ideal degree of racially pristine citizenry?

 

Why couldn't they at least have shown an iota of human decency

Toward the physically and psychologically traumatized, the enfeebled,

The disabled forced-laborers and their children,

The disoriented elderly people from bombed-out areas,

The shell-shocked German soldiers from the front lines,

The retarded (morons, idiots, mongoloids), the hydrocephalics,

The mentally ill (schizophrenics, neurotics) — "incurables," "undesirables"? 

 

And why weren't any of us told that the respectable sanitarium at Hadamar

Had been converted into the highly clandestine T-4 Euthanasia Center,

Where the "doctors" and "nurses" conducted mass sterilizations,

Followed by asphyxiations in gas chambers flooded with carbon monoxide,

And, later, as a matter of tidying-up appearances,

Injected the "patients" with lethal drugs or showed them "merciful" neglect,

Finally removing their brains, for research, and extracting their gold teeth?

"Why are you asking all these questions?" you might be asking me.

I'll tell you; the questions have been survivors, for maybe six decades.

My thirteen-year-old daughter, my only child, Sarai,

Having been raped bloody, on Kristallnacht,

By a gang of out-of-uniform Gestapo or SS hooligan agents,

Lost her voice, then lay on the floor, all day, every day, rigid, wouldn't eat.

My doctor recommended I send her to Hadamar, to be cured.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                    

 

06/06/12 - (2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
       

 

 

 
   
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