Auschwitz 80: Forget or forgive?

I have DNA in this game and I can’t forgive.

Many of you will too - but who’s left to forgive anyway?

Memorials always centre around the symbols; there’s no stronger symbolic representation of the holocaust than the train tracks leading to Auschwitz.

To be clear, that’s the train tracks to Auschwitz II (Birkenau). If you are fairly new to this or unsure, here’s an intro worth commiting to memory.

Auschwitz is

Auschwitz: Red brick camp of 4/5 story barracks you see in some reports, behind an open border-style gate.

Auschwitz II (Birkenau): Shockingly huge grid of fields and low huts behind the arched gatehouse at the end of iconic train tracks.

Auschwitz III (Monowitz): Nearby massive grid complex of slave labour industry.

‘Auschwitz’ is a collective of these and many disgracefull sub-camps that were part of the Nazi slave labour system.

Auschwitz was for both extermination and slave labour.

Auschwitz is not

The Polish town should never be refered to as Auschwitz. Auschwitz was a Nazi construct, it wasn’t Polish. Auschwitz: Former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp.

The Polish town is Oświęcim, pronounced Oz-why-cim.

Writing Auschwitz

I’ve done it but it’s not for now. For now some poetry, a reflection.

As for forgiving or forgetting, that’s up to you. Me…I’d like to forget, but I’m just not for forgiving.

Some dead sleep better than others

The guilt, lies

in a prison cell

miles back

over the broken back tracks

A lost one

a child

no loved ones

just longer numbers

A ditch in a forest

a twisted track

where nature remembers

and seeds the memories

Of a Blech Hammer

again the tracks…

along which you came

a father lost, I searched for him

in this numbers game

It wasn’t the orders

it was the choices

brothers across borders

children stealing food

laughing as the dead do

back at the unforgiven

Tate Ellis

for Mieczylaw and Stanislaw