In a few days the liberation of Auschwitz will be commemorated. For the 60th year running we shall contemplate the nature of genocide & we shall ask ourselves & each other where on that broad spectrum of actions that declares what human beings are by what they do we must place it. What immediately precedes it? What follows after it?
And we shall ask the final question too. Is there a point reached at which the evil of actions performed places them beyond the spectrum? When that question was pondered by newsreel audiences in 1945 watching the first film coming back from the opening up of Bergen-Belsen, there can have been little doubt in their minds that here was a transgression that went beyond even the furthest extremes of depravity. Now, 60 years on, in the full knowledge of Stalin’s murdered millions, Pol Pot’s social engineering in Cambodia, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans & tribal slaughter in Rwanda, we have to accept that the capacity for participation in genocide exists within us all.
Mauthausen concentration camp was liberated in May 1945 by American forces. One of the prisoners was Simon Wiesenthal, later to establish the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Vienna, whose purpose 60 years on remains to pursue relentlessly surviving Nazi participants in the Holocaust.
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 in their own fields, the burning stubble.
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 won’t 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.
“It will survive me. But I must walk in a straight line
for as long as the shadows fall”.
pic from: www.grunts.net/ army/11thamr.html
8:55:48 PM 
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