Rose
The poor rose,
Blooming on thorns,
Exposed to sun,
Winds,
Enveloped in tender
Pink/white petals,
A divine form,
King among flowers,
Pleasing everyone,
Humans, of course,
It does not know
It has a special
Internal fragrance
That scents our insides
And irrigates our soul!
Like
Good poetry,
Rose uplifts,
And adds beauty,
Colours,
To dull
Sterile lives
In urban ghettos,
And relieves
Smiling on a sad corner,
The pain and desolation
Of the many
Miserable Auschwitzes
Of the world brutal,
Then and now.
A
red rose left in tribute to victims is attached to a barbed wire fence
at the Auschwitz II Birkenau extermination camp in Poland. Christopher Furlong 
Auschwitz (Konzentrationslager Auschwitz, KZ Auschwitz) was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps at Oświęcim and its vicinity in German-occupied Poland during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II–Birkenau (a combination concentration/extermination camp), Auschwitz III–Monowitz (a labor camp to staff an IG Farben factory), and 45 satellite camps, including Zigeunerfamilienlager (Gypsy Family Camp) at Auschwitz II-Birkenau and 28 labor camps serving the armaments industry. Auschwitz was originally constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940, but the extermination of prisoners began in September 1941. Construction on Auschwitz II-Birkenau began in October to ease congestion at the main camp, but no latrines were installed there until 1943, contributing to the spread of disease among the inmates. From early 1942 until late 1944, daily transport trains delivered Jews to the camps from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed with the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon B or from starvation, forced labor, infectious disease, individual executions, and medical experiments. In the summer 1944 the capacity of the crematoria and outdoor incineration pits was 20,000 bodies per day. At least 1.1 million prisoners died there, around 90 percent of them Jewish (438,000 from Hungary, 300,000 from Poland, 69,000 from France, 60,000 from the Netherlands, and 55,000 from Greece), but the number also includes 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani and Sinti ("Gypsies"), 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovah's Witnesses, and tens of thousands of others, including homosexuals. The victims' glasses, artificial limbs, jewelry, and hair were removed, and any dental work was extracted so the gold could be melted down. The corpses were burned in the nearby incinerators, and the ashes were buried, thrown in the river, or used as fertilizer. Uniquely at Auschwitz, prisoners were tattooed with their prisoner number, on the chest for Soviet POWs and on the left arm for civilians. As Soviet troops approached in January 1945, Crematoria II, III, and IV were dismantled and Crematorium I was transformed into an air raid shelter; evidence of the killings, including the mass graves and written records, and many buildings, were destroyed, and 58,000 inmates were evacuated under orders that "not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy." Until 1947, some of the facilities were used as a prison camp of the Soviet NKVD. In the course of the war, the camp was staffed by 7,000 members of the German Schutzstaffel (SS),12 percent of whom were later convicted of war crimes. Poland prosecuted 673 of the 789 Auschwitz staff brought to trial.
ReplyDeleteAuschwitz Rose - by Michael Burch
ReplyDeleteThere is a Rose at Auschwitz, in the briar,
a rose like Sharon's, lovely as her name.
The world forgot her, and is not the same.
I love her and would not forget desire,
but keep her memory exalted flame
to justify the thistles and the nettles.
On Auschwitz now the reddening sunset settles;
they sleep alike—diminutive and tall,
the innocent, the 'surgeons.' Sleeping, all.
Red oxides of her blood, bright crimson petals,
if accidents of coloration, gall
my heart no less. Amid thick weeds and muck
there lies a rose man's crackling lightning struck:
the only Rose I ever longed to pluck.
Soon I'll bed there and bid the world 'Good Luck.'
Not old enough to have lived during Auschwitz, but old enough to have studied this horrible period in humankind, these two poems beautifully capture the horror & pain of said event. And your synopsis details the time with precision & detailed facts. Not always what one wants to remember early in the morning but certainly not something that should ever be forgotten. Thank you.
ReplyDeletePerhaps we only want to remember Auschwitz as a historical event but not as a propensity for evil that still esists within our gene pool.
ReplyDelete