SIMON WIESENTHAL LEAVES MAUTHAUSEN
Simon Wiesenthal leaves Mauthausen
Is it spring or autumn? Birds are singing
rising from the wire in the long dawn rain.
Wiesenthal carries the bag the GIs gave him.
Smoking, they lounge in groups by their jeeps.
Maidens of war, they see all, know nothing.
Scorched earth, still warm. Maybe the victors
fired the villages, or the vanquished in retreat.
Ah, the villages, where they knew nothing,
where they toiled with their heads down
in the black wind. Now they group like cattle
lost amongst their cottages, their hayricks burning.
Wiesenthal walks in a straight line, one foot
placed with calculated care before the other.
Something like rejoicing trips his heart
as he approaches, step by step, a horizon
owned by no one. He wonít look back.
The wire will bind his dreams until death
and towers will stand four-square at the corners
of everywhere he goes and voices will crack sleep
in countless rooms, strange and familiar.
Israel will be raised on a raft of bones.
ìIt will survive me. But I must walk in a straight line
for as long as shadows fallî.
After the War, in reaction to the Allies' pragmatic ambivalence towards ex-Nazis & their atrocities, Simon Wiesenthal founded the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Vienna. He was instrumental in tracking down Adolf Eichman & many other war criminals. The Centre's work of monitoring fascism in all its forms continues.
In & around Israel today the rage of those actually dispossessed & those terrified of the return of dispossession continues unchecked. Its constant manifestation is the savage & senseless killing of those innocent of commitment to violence - babies, children, the old, workers, shoppers. Here, as all over the world, the concepts of race, nation, statehood underwrite the ceaseless killing.
1:39:16 AM 
|
