i wish
they were herded
Gleis Siebzehn (Platform 17). Here is where ten thousand Jewish Berliners were herded onto trains. Only very latterly (1991) was a memorial opened. It is very simple and harrowing. No names, just numbers all the way down the platform: 29.10.1942/100 Jews/Berlin-Theresienstadt. 30.10.1942/100 Jews/Berlin-Theresienstadt. The second place name refers to the ghetto or death camp from which human beings never returned. The numbers are staggeringly ambitious: 938 people in one day; a thousand. Towards the end of the war they grow pitifully small: 32. 27. 26. 24. One of the panels has a yellow rose cast on it and on the ground behind it, among the birch trees now growing up through the tracks, last week’s yellow rose lies discarded in the snow; beheaded by its fall, in fact.
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The picture reminds me of a waking nightmare I endured over and over as a child: the large empty space, death-knell music closing in. The words you write bring tears. Unexpected. “Last week’s yellow rose…”
Seventy years, it seems incredible. Your waking nightmare fills me with horror. I am consoled, as ever, from the horror by such sensitivity and generous kindliness. Thank you, Alison. Vale they.
Must have been heart-breaking to see.
I don’t see how, do you? The heartbrake is real and still with us.
Thought of Said’s Psalm
3 (9)
lord
let us accept conversation again
after the long enforced silence
in which you denatured your creatures
in auschwitz
in hiroshima
in halabja
in srebrenica
do you crawl now on your knees before the sacrifice?
and before the offenders too?
and do you believe
that we can survive the temptation of an even more
radical love
without your word?