POETRY

Hitler – to avenge the assassination

of Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Protector

of Bohemia and Moravia,

and one of the Holocaust’s chief architects

– ordered the isolated mining village

of Lidice (twenty miles from Prague)

to be razed, and males over fourteen shot.

The women and children were deported

to Chelmno and gassed. The barbarism

is still echoing around the world.

 

The Nazis en route to capture the oil fields

of Baku, besieged Stalingrad, blitzed it

with bombs and artillery then entered –

only to be shot at by snipers from each

windowless tenement and rubble-strewn

courtyard. Winter came, and the cannon-fodder

battalions of the Russian Army.

The Germans – outnumbered corpse for corpse,

surrounded, cold, starving – surrendered.

 

When the remaining Jews in the Warsaw ghetto

discovered the truth about the trains to the east,

about their destinations, and the purpose

of those destinations, those who were not yet

too traumatised by humiliation

and hunger felt able to resist.

Between them they mustered six revolvers

and built an arsenal of Molotov cocktails

and bits of masonry. They resisted

the Wehrmacht and the SS for four months,

and received no help from the Allies.

 

And, no, no parallels are being drawn

or analogies being made, only echoes

being heard. Lidice was a war crime,

Stalingrad a rout, The Warsaw Ghetto

Uprising nemesis. Lidice’s ruins

have been preserved as a memorial,

Stalingrad re-built then renamed again,

the razed ghetto’s borders marked in remembrance.

The Third Reich lasted for barely a hundredth

of its vaunted one thousand years, and never

reached the oil fields beside the Caspian.

 

Under the sea floor off the Gaza Strip,

and in Gaza itself, far, far below

the tunnels, and in the West Bank,

are oil and natural gas deposits,

enough to make all the peoples between

the river and the sea comfortably off –

unless or until the whole earth were

to become unliveable.