Questions ...

Whether in battle or prayer, they met their

end,

futile struggle, Kiddush Ha Shem.

Their foe, a Goliath, of thousands times size,

from whom they refused to accept the lies:

that they were weak and unworthy, unable to

rise.

Never before had there been such daring

from young women and men all of whom

caring

for the dignity of those for whom they fought.

such were the lessons history had taught ...

that the Jew stood alone, friendless, against

foe,

counting his days, tormented by woe.

His task to prove, though troubled by pain,

the courage of Masada had not been in vain.


For three months, the struggle did not cease,

neither side desiring peace.

'Surrender' to both was an unthinkable word,

from the sewers of Warsaw could still be heard:

the cries, the anguish, the torture within

ferreting out captives the nazis whose grin

was evidence they had acted with glee

when stifling the yearnings of people to be

free.

Cords of 'log-bodies', stacked just the same,

secular and religious, none to blame.

For there was NO such difference before the

Hun.

The Jews for him were indivisibly one.

Why a people whose destiny has been

to enlighten a world through darkness and

din,

whose numbers are as many as they are few,

why so despised has been the Jew?


Why did none stop it once it became known?

Enough indifference haven't we sown?

Praying to the heavens as they did each day,

that they’d soon see planes flying their way.


Send bombs, Please God, before zyklon would,

but the Allies "regretfully" denied they could 

destroy the rails leading straight into Hell

from which precious few reemerged to tell

of the horrors awaiting them, so hard to

believe,

that neither kindness nor life did the arrivals

receive.


They thrust too, the children, into the pit,

an infernally lustful, ravenous fit.

Even the babes whose potential so great

felt the steel of this magnificent hate.

Whose cries were heard, but listened to none,

whose heads fell limp with the snap of a gun,

whose parents they saw as naked as they,

for it was like this ... they suffered that day.


Still some question what we have to say,

"Does such a retelling remain relevant today?"

"Somehow it's past, gone. Let it be!"

"Why do you make us suffer to see:

the killings of children, the mountains of bone,

the chambers transforming so many to stone!

Collapsed heaps when the doors thrown wide,

there simply had been ... no place to hide.


Mothers whose skirts offered refuge at least

to little ones uncovered thrown to the beast.

"Of what use?" it was queried,

"could they possibly be"

wherein a stench no one was happy or free?"


Nary a glimmer of hope would the murderers

give

to those whose wish ... was only to live.

Mothers from children, families asunder,

who else could have withstood this fury and

thunder?


Slave labor was needed to further the 'cause',

to build V-2 rockets, to sharpen the claws.

For such, 'noble' men, doctors by fame,

were employed to brutalize, murder, and

maim;

so that 'Science' could learn when life was so

cheap,

discarded mankind onto the heap.


'Great' governments had met in order to be

as pious as possible, but deaf to the plea ...

of the wandering Jew whose torment to see

how unwelcome he was in the 'Land of the

Free'.


The ship onto which so many had stormed

could not find refuge for opinion had formed

that the Jew was a nuisance, an expendable

thorn

on whom fate had abandoned its

contemptuous scorn.


They made it to America these "tired and poor"

to discover Liberty's spark shone little more.

Space there was not for them to remain,

what hopes they had cherished were all now in

vain!


Dejectedly they limped back to the place

which had expelled them before for the same

lack of space.

Stripped naked and paraded for the world to

see,

what sickness had afflicted modern Germany?

It didn't take long for the nazis with glee,

how the world cared not for Jews to be free.

A 'final solution' would quicken the pace

that guaranteed mastery to the 'Aryan' race.

No longer at issue either sufferance or claim,

onto Jewry was placed the burden and blame.

To repair the world, there first must need be

a point at which we accept responsibility

for right against wrong, fiction from fact,

a basis upon which we can responsibly act.

So why even bother...

so distant from then,

what more do we gain,

what message we send?

For the sake of the children,

if not, then our own ...

and for them whose lives ...

we

might

otherwise

have

known.

Alan D. Busch

revised February 2008