Massacres and Atrocities of WW2

For the benefit of anyone who might have missed this poem last time round I give it below.

I read it not long before paying my first return visit to Germany earlier this year and, as you will see, it struck a strong chord in my psyche echoing ,as it does, my own feelings toward modern day Germany.

By sheer coincidence, only this morning I came across a haunting piece of poetry by Jeremy Robson entitled simply "Vigil" and it so it was so much an echo of my own thoughts on modern day Germany that I made a point of scanning it and reproducing it below.

You need to understand that later in the year my wife and I are making a pilgrimage to my brother's grave in Durnbach.

This will be the first time I have been back to Germany since 1945 and I also know that it has taken much courage from my wife to visit the country.

When I arrive at Munich airport I know I shall be thinking about this poem, set as it is, in a modern railway station

Vigil

By Jeremy Robson

I don't accuse,
Am on my guard,
that's all.

I won't forget they tried
To wipe my broken
people
from the earth- no,
not them, of course, too
young, their fathers or their
fathers' fathers-not even
them, perhaps.
Be fair.

They might who knows,
have been among those
righteous brave who
in reaching out their hands
sealed their own fate,
or simply those who turned
away, afraid. Perhaps.
Impossible to conceive
the fear, the shadows of
the night, the bootsteps
on the stair.

Now a lifetime later,
alone beneath the Bahnhoffs
amber lights, incessant
rain machine-gunning the
roofs grim glass, I tell
myself the hordes
I watch there, fighting
their way towards the waiting
trains-achtung-late for
work or hurrying home,
that they could not

themselves have heard
the shots, the muzzled
cries, the dogs, the
clank, clank, clank
of the nightrnare trucks
departing on cue for their
one way journey to Hell
(from which of these Platforms
I wonder-one ,two?)

and that looking back
aghast, perhaps, at those black
Wagnerian scenes, history
to them, however obscene,
that they, contrite perhaps,
would wash their hands
in innocence at night-
not like some demented Lady
Macbeth, scrub scrub
scrubbing
to expunge the dead, as
those accursed others should.
Sins of the fathers
heavy on their head.
Be fair.

And yet, and yet..
It's seventy years since
That war began, but if
I, a Jew, scion
Of that haunted race,
forget, who will remember,
and if none remembers, the
dead are truly dead.

I don't accuse,
Am on my guard,
that's all.

Original thread here: http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/veteran-accounts/42284-just-me-7.html

Ron