We disembarked from the bus
The trees towered so immensely in front of us
Green and swaying with a vibrancy
As if transported to a summer camp of childhood
But what a horrible difference
The trees encircled a mass murder, mass graves
My eyes gazed upon the emptiness
Of what would have been reception
Of cattle cars, with its estranged, frightened martyrs
The Jews forsaken
One more decoy, a ruse, used
Here we sat upon symbolic rail lines
That stood in solemnity
For a platform where they were culled into death lines
Where death trains came, emptied and went
The birds sung that day and the warmth of the sun settled upon my prickly skin
I looked up, drawn to some invisible peace and holiness
As if the Jewish souls here, were hovering around us
Blessing us
Pleading for us to stop
And revere the sight
Where innocent went
Babes in arms,
Children and youth blossoming,
Now crying, bemoaning their intuited fate
Mothers swelling in new life, screaming, sensing danger
Men, their protectors, being slaughtered too
Grandparents aged or the disabled resigned to the smell of evil
The end was the same for everyone
One peoples, extinguished en-masse
Death reigned
A death camp that witnessed 900,000 mass murders
Where no person was given a chance
The educator of our group
Gathered us around
To listen, to understand and deeply hear, story and circumstance
A small skull emerged out of the granite block and disappeared as
Quickly
I gasped, recoiling at the image
We moved forward
Towards the vastness of the memorials
And there upon the Russian monument
The skull, conceived, now loomed upon the lintel
Captive towns, signaled by stones and numbers hauntingly named
Villagers were emptied, as ash in the fields
And as we wandered, we stooped, knelt and touched
The memorials with pangs of silence
We received a hug, or gave another a touch or look of care
Which brought our hearts together in this great witnessing of grief
Then we assembled to read, pray and sing
To the forgotten, to hold the unbearable tension between our lived lives
And their lost ones
To retrace these steps in compassion and sorrow
So we might
Erase the memories of this road of death
One hundred trillion years from now
But we can say, today, “never again”.