(AA) Canto 61: Buchenwald
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People had become dehumanised. They were like animals, urinating & defecating wherever they were. I somehow didn’t react to the bodies, I had seen carnage galore during the war. But to see human beings walking around without any sense of dignity, that was utterly appalling. And that smell has lived with me to this day
Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown
Glimpsing Hell
I am a waterfall in the desert.
A rain from a cloudless sky.
A well known but unborn child
Dimitris Varos
A journalist from New York passes thro’
Weimar, shrine of culture – Goethe, Schiller -,
A driver from the 80th, slow drew
Them closer to the camp where the killer
Nazis deduct
-ed innocence from breath,
Life-verve by slavework suck’d, ‘til all t’were left was death.
“So, what’s this place?” says Ted Murrow,
“Well, sir, it’s pure damnation,
A camp of horrible sorrow
Bent on extermination,
Flesh beaten until pulp’d hollow,
Tortures, slow starvation,
& every single day a twelve-hour shift…”
Lifting in sight, off to the right, roofs drift.
“Is this it?” “Yes, sir!” “Oh my word…”
Thoughts difficult to hold
Spurr’d undeterr’d, gripp’d tight & stirr’d
Excitements manifold,
Well, this was it, this whirl of sins, this legend Buchenwald.
Ettersberg Hill
15th April
1945
Meeting of Worlds
A white stone half-dug into the soil,
Said to me as I was passing by:
– God bless you, pray, I’m a tombstone
Azim Souyun
The long siege broken, justice runs amok,
Wick-with-fleeing-SS fields… corner’d… shot!
About the gates a rave of pale ghouls flock
Dearanging Teddy’s brain, who clear forgot
All that he’s learn’d;
As open’d, drab gates, wide
A rush of shabsteps churn’d, gurning undignified.
They crush’d him with a short, swift surge,
Evil-smelling was this crowd,
Which courted death all on the verge
Of oblivion; brows bow’d,
Shave-headed skeletals converge,
Like corpses from a shroud,
Or scalded lepers limping falterwise –
Then one drops dead, but smiling in his eyes.
In the midst of this commotion,
Voice rose distinct & clear,
At attention an Englishman
Stands, “Delighted, old dear,
& be a darling, tell me, please, when will our chaps get here?”
Buchenwald
15th April
1945
Blockhouse Triumph
I close my eyes:
ten thousand wasted people
Still piled in the flesh-pits
Phillip Whitfield
As, Virgil, Dante led, the ziggurat
Of Hell unfolding serpentine, into
A barracks with twelve hundred stuff’d, who sat
Or stood in dark, dark despair – into view
Slow strode Murrow,
Like lambkins to a teat
They crowd around & crow, kissing his hands & feet
On shoulder blades they tried to raise
Ted up, too weak to do it,
They star’d, instead, with zombie gaze,
On his passage thro’ it,
That mass who’d make us reappraise
Humanity – who knew it,
What Hitler did, this barb’d-wire fence behind,
Astonishing, admonishing the mind!
On passing by those happy rows,
People started clapping
In tame applause,like puppy paws
Of wee babies flapping,
Those of an age most int’rested in their Christmas wrapping.
Buchenwald
15th April
1945
Death’s Empire
And then he died –
And though inside we may have bled
We merely shrugged & sighed
Kennethy Lang
Imprison’d by racists & a slogan,
Humanity sups vomit from latrines,
A woman defecates in the open,
Another tilts her head, to one side leans,
Then drops down dead;
By her steps another,
Clutching some lifeless lead like she was its mother.
With swaddling balanc’d on a hip,
Its face all shrivel’d & grey,
“My babe needs milk, sir, just one sip…”
Not knowing what else to say,
A G.I. drops drips on its lip,
As she walks away
The woman thanks him, crooning with brief joy,
Then fell down dead, dead as her baby boy.
Ted stares a while, this awful scene
Some tawdry vaudeville,
Only yestreen his best canteen
With whiskey did he fill,
Sensing he’d see such sights… a lengthy glug to strength instill.
Buchenwald
15th April
1945
Pedocide
She has been abandoned
She has been betrayed
God has betrayed her
Mary Borden
As when Hell’s iron portal with a creak
& clang will open, so this barb’d wire gate
Scratching its bottom with a rotten shriek,
Will reveal’d, ‘these enemies of the state,’
Threatless each one,
Thirteen the eldest age,
Whose childhoods have all gone for the therapist wage.
A six-year child rolls up her sleeve;
Six, zero, three & zero –
Enough to give the heart a heave,
Even the toughest hero,
Will strive their hardest to believe
Such scenes, as from below,
Vile demons broke the surface, life defil’d –
Who’d think we’d ever ink a little child?
With tattoos on their tender skin,
To wear until they die,
“Are you coming?” Ted’s head aspin
To see some tall G.I.,
“Where too?” “The hospital…” “Don’t go!” the kids begin to cry
Buchenwald
15th April
1945
A Love of Leather
A dreadful solitude each mind insane,
Each its own place, its prison all alone,
And finds no sympathy to soften pain
J.A.Heraud
Ted stepp’d into this filthy hospital,
Whose doctor, noble, yet embarrass’d, shook
His hands, said, “every day’s a battle,
I try my best, but now I think just luck
Decides who stays
Alive, most lack desire
To live on anyway…” a man shouts out, “You liar!
I want to live, but look at me,
A-cling to my last tether,
Wait – what is that, please let me see…”
“What, this?” – “Yes, your leather,
I made those expertly, you see,
When, back in Vienna
I made the finest bags, please, may I feel
Its texture – just to test it, if it’s real?”
Ted took his wallet out & shares
His money all around
“That’s for your fares back home…” their stares
Were silent as no sound,
“Please, doctor, keep this wallet, American leather bound.”
Buchenwald
15th April
1945
The Surgeon
Need to belong has made me come
to help rebuild Jerusalem,
where everyone is family
Karen Gershon
As SS guard, from his ankles hanging,
Was beaten to a pulp, grew dead-still soon,
Teddy enters unto kitchen’s clanging,
Chefs whistling an intellectual tune
Stir stew that ‘tries’;
Brown bread a thumbs-width thick,
& butter sliced the size of a chewing-gum stick.
“Please let me introduce myself
I’m professor Charles Sarbonne,”
Who took a scalpel from a shelf
For a patient too far gone,
“All we possess here is our health,
But hardly anyone
Survives a year, so hard we’re forced to work…”
His patient spasms with a leg-kick jerk
Sends pungent puss asquirt thro’ air,
Teddys coat did splatter
The doctors stare, “You alright, there?”
“Yes, it doesn’t matter –
Have you a cloth?” out came a rag’s bloody, crudded tatter.
Buchenwald
15th April
1945
Broken Ovens
Truth is the voice of Nature & of Time –
Truth is the startling monitor within us –
Nought is without it, it comes from the stars
William Thomas Bacon
“Come see the crematoriums,” said Charles,
“Three days ago the camp ran out of coke,
In piles they heap’d up limbs like knotted gnarls
That rot away where once all flames & smoke
Twas deathly still
& cold & dark & stank,
To stay they took vast will with faces white & blank.
Life is the sum of what we know,
Meaningful experience
& bookish studies blend & flow –
Thro’ this Universe, immense,
We reap not what we do not sow,
& in our youths we sense
That youth, one day, will be forever gone,
To wise old age, as sets our mortal sun.
Ted stagger’d out, struck vertigo,
Upon the precipice
Of Inferno, where down below
The fallen, foul’d souls hiss
& spit at him, “you fucking cunt!”… oh! what a thing is this!
Buchenwald
15th April
1945
Moral Vertigo
In the great, empty square
The head of a cow bawled, after the slaughterer
& shapes sought the rounds of the serpent
Federico García Lorca
Teddy got back to town a diff’rent man
Records, that night, a radio broadcast,
“Dead men are plentiful in war,” began,
“But living dead are legion, faces pass’d
Me by, like home,
America’s fabric –
Vienna, Paris, Rome – mute, featherless & wick
With fleas & typhus, slow as snails
Rabbits gnawing at a hutch,
Did praise our Roosevelt in hails,
As a man they owe so much,
Who’d bent the weight of freedom’s scales
With such a common touch –
If there a better epitaph could be
None have I heard this whole of history,
If you would Buchenwald witness
Forever you’d be chang’d,
The stripy dress, the life regress,
From liberty estranged
& forced to work oneself to death by murderers deranged
Weimar
15th April
1945
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