We know what it means to disappear,

We’ve lived through it so often:

The threat of barbarians,

Empires falling.

We know what it means to have reigned supreme,

And then fade away in the immensity of time.

Each of our countries has known enlightenment and ruin.

But there is something else,

Darker still:

Man’s inhumanity to man.

Methodical killer,

Inventor of death at an industrial pace.

We know.

Here on this European land,

Optimism was killed

And that makes us

The inheritors of anguish.

 

When does it begin?

Horror penetrates in successive shifts.

First there are the speeches,

Electrified by the elation of hating out loud.

Speeches brandishing race as the only answer,

Gargling on the word,

“Race,”

To establish hierarchies.

They will found a concept of perfection,

And its corollary: the existence of an inferior category.

And so, overnight, there are Aryans, and the others.

The superior beings, and the others.

Lives that count for less, than the others.

 

When does it begin?

Is it when words become harsher?

When they start talking about “gangrene,”

“Vermin,”

“Parasites,”

And “cleansing?”

With eugenics?

Forced sterilization?

The race must be pure

And already their hands are learning to kill.

 

When does it begin?

With the vast crowds who come together and agree to forswear thought,

Who let themselves to be claimed by fervor,

By the pleasure of chanting a name in unison,

And of walking in step,

Always the same,

The step toward alienation.

 

When does it begin?

With the Kristallnacht?

That night when hatred is unleashed like a baited dog.

Shop windows fall,

Synagogues burn.

It must go faster, the emigration of German Jews,

Or their deportation.

They are dragged into the street,

Their beards set on fire,

They are forced to kneel

Then beaten black and blue.

These are hours when criminal mockery meets with applause,

When calls for murder and gunfire meet with applause.

Perhaps that’s what they’re testing during the Pogromnacht:

The Nazis want to know if Germany is ready,

And it is.

 

When does it begin?

When they move the Jews and herd them into ghettos.

In Vilnius, Warsaw, Minsk, Lublin, Łódź, Kraków,

First, they gather them,

Then they lock them away.

In one day, the Warsaw ghetto becomes a prison

And the men, women, and children inside begin to die.

On the other side of the wall, people go about their shopping.

On the other side of the wall, they wear coats and eat chicken.

 

It has begun.

Jews are murdered on the roads.

Genocide by bullets,

In the beginning.

Ditches, all over Eastern Europe,

Dug by the very people about to be killed.

The result of decades of pogroms

Always singling out the same enemy,

In Russia, Poland, in Ukraine,

Always the same:

“The Jews,”

To whom everything can be done since they are less than nothing.

 

Immense heaps of shoes left behind,

And as they arrive at the camp, the sound of soldiers opening train doors.

Heaps of shorn hair,

Heaps of clothes,

Of suitcases,

Shoes,

Gold teeth,

Heaps of little things, bowls, pewter goblets,

Heaps left behind,

The moment they enter death.

Heaps

That is the moral of the story.

Heaps of bodies

To be shoveled up,

Heaps

Six million men, women, and children

Become

Heaps

That is what it is,

That we can neither

Say

Nor think.

Heaps

There is nothing

Left

Sie haben uns

Heaps

Zu Haufen

Gemacht.

And we stop at the abyss

We know all we can do is stay silent.

 

Man’s inhumanity to man.

Infinite vertigo when confronted with obedience,

With the death wish.

Century of ashes,

Century suffocated by an unprecedented smell

That should never have existed,

A smell that burns the earth

And makes the fir trees weep.

Humans gassing other humans by endless shovelfuls.

Ashes.

That’s all that’s left.

Ashes

In huge mountains

How can we even believe it?

That this happened?

Ashes of

Lives

Scattered,

Then

Heaps

Of ashes

Heaps,

Von jetzt an

Nichts.

 

Trains came from all over Europe

Unloading at Auschwitz, Sobibór, Chełmno, Treblinka, Belsen.

Lives,

Stories,

Children.

Do you remember the railway?

The pride of the 19th century?

Do you remember The Rocket, from Manchester to Liverpool?

Railway tracks springing up everywhere,

Signs of progress,

Of modernity?

Those rails, all at once,

Have become the literal image of death.

The train, that was

Europe’s pride and glory,

Becomes the emblem of its destruction.

A rail network in Europe that subsumed entire populations and gassed them.

There will be nothing left

At all

Nothing,

Überhaupt

Nichts.

 

Humanity has been vanquished.

Black hole,

Subsuming us all.

“Ashes” is the word of the anti-century

Not the ashes of the Bible,

Not the ashes of the cycle of creation,

Of existential humility,

No, the ashes of hatred.

“Ashes” is the word that stands against everything the 19th century believed in:

Progress,

The virtuous rhythms of machinery,

Humanism.

Ashes

And there is nothing more to say,

In this place,

Nothing more

Heaps of impossible

Words,

Nichts

Mehr.

 

So what is there to say?

For a long time,

Nothing.

What is there to say

For a long time

Think about that

Nothing

All the space it must take up

Nothing

So vast

So terrifying

And the silence

Nothing

Which alone captures the immensity

Of what we cannot name.

Nothing

Only

Memory.

That is all there is:

Preserve

The memory.