Washington Holocaust Museum, 3/14/98

The old nightmare revisited,
Hobnailed boots, gleaming bayonets,
The Aryan race in its full glory,
Ethnic cleansing by genocide,
Mass murder in concentration camps,
Gas chambers, ovens burning, burning,
Human flesh turning into smoke and ashes,
Memories of stark fear and terror,
Millions of Jews, Gipsies, foreign
And disabled men, women and children
Murdered in camps while German children
Hand flowers to the Fuehrer,
With martial music playing, mobs screaming,
Hysterical, hypnotized masses in a frenzy,
German supermen destined to rule the world
In a thousand year Third Reich,
Only to be burned in their cities later
Or die by the millions in Stalingrad
And all over the continent of Europe
For the mad ideology of their insane Fuehrer,
Human folly at its very worst,
And people walking through the Museum
Seem stunned by man's inhumanity to man,
With one woman saying: "This can't be true",
"It was, it was", I said to her, "I was there",
"But where was God?", she asked me,
"What God, what God?", I answered,
For my faith died in Auschwitz...

Alfred Charasz
Copyright 2006 Alfred Charasz