WARSAW

It is impossible to put into words what we have been through.

Mordecai Anielewicz, April 23, 1943

The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth . . . 

No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.

Heinrich Himmler, October 17, 1944

Nacht und Nebel . . . night and fog.
Over there, what remains of the Warsaw Ghetto.
A few empty buildings, a remnant of the wall,
A synagogue restored; the rest bombed to rubble
In a final desperation to prove that 400,000 lives
Meant nothing, nothing more than this.
But every stone is a consecrated memory,
Has a story to tell and tells it still,

And here, a street of old houses, out of place
And time in a city destroyed and built new again.
It is impossible to walk here and not think
Of the one house that might have been yours.

You don’t have to go in again to see the long
Hallway, floor scarred by the boots of soldiers,
Doors hanging on broken hinges, the unfinished
Meal on the table, bloodstains still on the stairs
To the attic where they found you hiding
And took you from your life to slowly starve
Behind the walls from which no one returned
Until their bodies were interred in the street.

Walking here now you feel something in the pit
Of your stomach, something you can’t quite describe.
A little like guilt but more like grace . . . thankful
For the accident of birth by which you escaped.


(Nacht und Nebel was the name given to Hitler's
order that dissidents were to be exterminated.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising began in April 1943
and was crushed in less than a month. Those who
survived were sent to Treblinka and other death camps,
the Ghetto and the city almost completely destroyed.)