Six Million Not in Vain

Six million Jews
were killed
in the Holocaust.

My Grandparents all survived
being targets
of the putrid
Nazi regime.
They survived
and so I live.

Today
it is said that
thirty wars
rage all over the world.

Answers, in midst
of lost answers,
in mysteries that will never be solved,
with atrocities unspoken,
leave me only to imagine
the fates of those six million Jews;
of those 1.5 million children.

60 years ago
I would either be dead
or in a concentration camp,
and still today there are children
locked up in sweat shops,
wrongfully imprisoned,
in cells, in cages.

Nazis with different faces,
different skin colours,
but all of their minds
are the same:
infected with lies,
protected by guns and money,
shadowed and driven by hate.

The walls are bloody
and closing in.
The ceiling is weak
and soon will fall.

I drift
and remember what my grandparents
told me about the concentration camps.

Somewhere in 1942
Jews were forced to build
giant crematoriums
where their families’ and friends’
bodies would be burned.

When my Zaidy Ziggy
was in his third concentration camp,
he was given the inhuman task
of loading rotting
dead bodies
into the giant ovens.

My Zaidy John
had the horrendous job
of sweeping away the ashes.
The Nazi tyrants
told him to be careful
not to sweep away any
gold teeth.

“Lest we forget,”
people say,
“what happened in the Holocaust,”
but by saying that alone
we do not truly remember.

We do not remember
each of those unlived lives;
each of the horrible atrocities
that befell the Jewish people.

Lest we forget
that six million Jews
did not die in vain.

Lest we forget
that if not for the tremendous amount
of Germany’s war resources
being used to build gas ovens
and concentration camps,
if not for the Nazi “final solution” of genocide
to wipe out all fifteen million
Jews in Europe,
if not for all his racism,
malice and hate,
Hitler may have won the war.