Douglas Barbour wrote:
> Whew, Ken.
>
> I was traveling in the now, I admit. Could have thought about those
> trains back then, especially as I approached Lublin I guess. And the
> last time I was there I did go to Auschwitz, which is still a
> terrifying place.
>
> Dream? More nightmare, but caught there.
When I lived in North Jersey, I knew a guy who was in "the camps" as a
young teenager. In fact I knew several people who passed through
Auschwitz/Birkenau. It seems that if you survived the "first cut," you
could be moved around the "archipelago" to factories or other camps.
This man went back to Poland (we asked "WHY????") and said he also had a
far more horrible total recall of standing knee-deep in watery mud as
people were forced into the boxcars to take them from their village to a
still-unknown destination.
A woman who spoke to my Hebrew School class had been deported from
Hungary in 1944, sent to Auschwitz, was saved by the order of Dr.
Mengele ("Go to the right, stupid!"), went from there to Leipzig to work
in an airplane factory, and ended her year in Hell in the remains of
Theresienstadt, where the Russian army liberated the last captives by
raping the women.
I can understand the rage Armenians go into over the Turkish
still-unadmitted genocide. The Germans at least had the decency to
acknowledge that they'd done. I met a woman in an Armenian church in my
area and when I told her about Nazim Hikmet, she was flabbergasted that
a Turk would own what his countrymen had done. Poets perhaps belong to
their own race?
Ken-
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
W.H. Auden
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