Ingrid Silbermann was just a young girl
When storm troopers were
prowling the streets,
Pounding on doors in ghettos and shtetels,
Herding Jewish families and others
of non-Nordic blood at point
To rail stations where cattle cars were waiting,
Destinations unknown.
A week or longer without food, water, sleep,
The trains crawling across landscapes
Deceptively peaceful in spring and summer,
Desolate and hostile in winter.
Until they came to the end of the line,
To the terrible places:
Auschwitz, Dachau, Sobibor,Buchenwald,
Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen.
And there the families were torn apart,
Most of them never to meet again:
Wives from husbands, children from parents,
The young from the old, the strong from the weak,
Lovers from lovers.
Life for those who could work,
The gas ovens for those who could not.
In death, the gold was stolen from their teeth
To buy tanks and dive bombers
For the next blitzkrieg.
In the end, nothing was left
To mark their existence
But warehouses, floor to ceiling, with worn shoes,
Stacks of Bibles, Korans and Torahs,
Crosses, rosaries and menorahs.
And everywhere, mass graves dug by bulldozers.
The Nazis were efficient, first gas, then fire,
To reduce to ashes all who might conspire
Against Der Fuhrer
And the Thousand Year Reich.
But Ingrid Silbermann, now Kelsey,
Fled Germany and the Gestapo
At the eleventh hour,
And is safely here today in this class,
Not in a crematorium
As a scattering of ash.
Ingrid lives to remind us
Of the Holocaust then,
And of our determination
Never to let it happen again.
But it is happening again.
In Sudan, Cambodia, Rwanda,
Armenia, Croatia, Zaire.
Has the past taught us nothing?
Now, as then, we look away.
Ingrid Kelsey is a longtime resident of Malibu and a member of Professor William Robertson’s Emeritus Poetry Class, an adjunct of Santa Monica College, which meets Wednesday mornings at 10 at the Malibu Library.