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.
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By David Selzer