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Churban ...

Whether in battle or prayer, they met their end,

futile struggle, Kiddush HaShem.

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.

For 'surrender' 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 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 decidedly 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?

Threatened with death should he adhere to his ways,

terrorized by chimneys' billowing haze.

Searchingly hopeful ... in whose starry gaze

reflected infernos' roaring blaze.

Why did none act to stop it once known?

Enough indifference haven't we sown?

Praying to the heavens as they did every day,

that soon they'd see planes flying their way,

so bombardment, please God, should take us

ere the chambers would,

but the Allies

denied they could ... destroy the railsleading 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.

The children, too, thrust into the pit,

enraged blood lust, into its infernal fit

that even the babes whose potential so great

should have 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, God forbid! they saw as naked as they,f

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

There are those who challenge what we have to say,

"Does such a retelling remain relevant today?"

"That, somehow, It's past, gone. Let it be!"

"Why do you make us suffer to see:

the killings, the children, the mountains of bone,

the chambers transformed so many to stone!

who dropped like logs when the doors were thrown wide,

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

mothers whose skirts offered refuge at least

little ones uncovered ...thrown to the beast.

"Of what use" it was queried,"could they possibly be"

in a stench wherein no one was happy or free?"

Ne'er a glimmer of hope would the murderers give

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

Mothers from children, families asunder,

might others have withstood this fury and thunder?

Slave labor was needed to further the 'cause',

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

or 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 expendable, a nuisance, a thorn

upon whom fate had abandoned its contemptuous scorn.

They made it to America these "tired and poor"

to discover Liberty's spark shone little more

that, for them, there was not room enough to remain,

what hopes they had cherished were all now in vain!

Dejectedly they limped back to the place

which had expelled them at first for the same lack of space.

Stripped naked and paraded for the world to see

what sickness had afflicted modern Germany?

Once active and vigorous this citizenry

wandered about aimlessly.

It didn't take long for the nazis to see

that the world cared less for these Jews to be free.

A 'final solution' would quicken the pace

that guarenteed 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 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,

but why even bother...so distant from then,

what more do we gain, what message we send?

For the sake of the children,

if not for our own ...

and for them whose lives ...

we

might

otherwise

have

known.



Alan D. Busch
revised 2008
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