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Forever Let This Place Here Be

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Forever let this place here be
A warning to humanity,
A cry of despair, suffering;
Death in total, unrelenting.
Forever let its soil be bare,
For life shall grow not anywhere,
This place, a scar upon the face
Of mans wickedness, mans disgrace.

Forever let this place here stand
As evidence of evil planned,
A barren wasteland, void of hope,
Where many left in clouds of smoke.
Forever let its fences loom,
Its unmanned towers, pending doom.
Do not erase its vacant skies,
Beneath which fell so many lives.

Forever let this place here sound
A silence without any bounds,
Where millions let out a cry
Then vanished into ashen sky.
Forever let its pits be dug
And let them keep their endless blood,
Let not the present hide the past,
Beneath these ashes, horror lasts.

Forever let this place here show
How deep the darkest monsters go,
An industry that born of death,
Annihilation without breath.
Forever let its gates be wide
And let the living pour inside,
For witnesses will herein see
The debris of humanity.

 

AuschwitzDeathHistoryHolocaustHumanityPoemTreblinka

◄ Purpose

Retribution (From My Beautiful Lie) ►

Comments

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Cynthia Buell Thomas

Thu 24th Oct 2013 12:08

A very good poem, Simon, and timely. As a symbol, Auschwitz now embodies so many current areas in our world.

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Isobel

Sun 20th Oct 2013 19:05

I'd say that genocide and persecution live on because of inherent weaknesses within man - that and certain kinds of cultures where absolutism is tolerated. I'm not sure that man will ever totally learn from the past. All it takes is for demand to outstrip supply and one day I think we all might be back there - with a different victim maybe.

I've just read a fictional book about witches in Medieval times, which was based on true life facts. The thought occurs to me that evil behaviour doesn't jut disappear. That capacity to look for scape goats, to vent anger through barbaric cruelty - it can't just evaporate -it just gets repressed.

This IS a powerful poem. Long may we remember just how low we can be rendered.

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Dave Bradley

Sun 20th Oct 2013 15:18

Good poem with very strong sentiments with which I wholeheartedly agree. I've just visited Berlin and found the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe very compelling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_Murdered_Jews_of_Europe

The German authorities have to be given credit for putting such a very large memorial right in the middle of their city, which makes it impossible to forget the past. While governments are prepared to be that courageous, perhaps there is hope.

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Simon Austin

Sun 20th Oct 2013 09:17

Thank you John, and yes, very true.

I feel the biggest mistake that any society can make is to forget the past, to forget just how far evil can go if left to its own device. I visited Auschwitz a few years ago, and whilst the place was exceptionally sombre and upsetting, it is somewhere that everyone must visit, to try to understand the horrors that happened there, so that they may never happened again.

Unfortunately the past is often all too quickly forgotten, which is why peresecution and geneocide lives on.

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John Coopey

Sun 20th Oct 2013 00:24

Very powerful, Simon.
Someone said that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
How very close we came to that recently - and indeed may still yet.

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