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Yellow Star (Free verse) by Mr Pig

Yellow stars in a pit of faces, Staring transfixed from their tomb, At their possessions neatly stacked by ‘perfect mortals’ Suitcases aligned outside the shower room, Emblazoned in names or chalk epitaphs, That stands beside a leather mountain of heels. The drone of a single shaver, Removing the perfect hair, That will be used for textiles to seam more yellow stars, The sick irony of death bearing death, And the whooping cough of a typhoid stricken child, Walking with her mother mild, To the room of no return. In the shower room I sit half a century on, Thinking of the nameless gone, In this room I recall the Mothers, Who would try to help their babies breathe By making them suckle on desperate nipples, Both dying in the shape that they lived in the womb, Where screams turned to smoke that would bellow for hours, I break down in the shower room. I remain haunted by the corrugated corridors, The squeak and lingering echo of recycled boots on shiny floors, Where laughing Nazis would walk to block 11, To purify Jews by liquid suffocation, I see a name carved in to granite, Next to rows of seven stripes until the abrupt end, Continued on to a whole wall, These are horrors I can never comprehend, It leaves me sore, From my one single day in Sobibor.

Christof 22-Jul-03/4:49 AM
I have some sympathy with Horus's point. It seems that the struggle in the Middle East at the moment is the result of the Jewish people having single-mindedly failed to learn from their own history of the last 50-60 years. Yes the Holocaust was an absolutely foul, vile, depraved event in history - and let's not imagine that the Germans were alone in their views, there were plenty of proto-Nazis in Britain, France, Italy, Spain (and the US - the KKK) who also had blood on their hands. However, I think the point of history is not to labour one event, one people's history, for the purpose of eliciting merely pity or horror (or, for that matter, Academy Awards). The point is to learn from it, to move on, to try to make the world progress in some way. Both Horus and Mr Pig have talked with some pride of their backgrounds, have distinguished different strains of identity, different ethnic groups. Everybody needs to know where they come from, but an obsessive attention to ethnic detail, to the rights and wrongs of past members of particular groups generations ago, is where all the trouble starts. What does it matter if your great-great-grandfather was a black Scotsman from Wales? It matters because it affects how you live now, how you understand the world; it should not be used as some kind of badge of honour. I think a person deserves special treatment not because of who their parents were, but because of what they do with their lives. Racial division is the biggest problem the human race faces, because it threatens to destroy us.

A small historical fact to add to the German/Jew argument - a lot of right-wing aggression towards the Jews was centred around a book called 'The Protocols of the Zionist Elders', which purported to have been produced by rabbis and leading Jews and which spoke of a conspiracy to take over the world. It was a forgery produced by European anti-Semites in the late 19th century. I don't think Hitler's rise to power is quite so easily explicable by the ambitions of the Jews. Anti-Semitism has a far longer and ignobler history than that, and you have to remember that Germany had been shafted in the Treay of Versailles by the very unJewish (and also fairly anti-Semitic in places) British, US and French governments.




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