Poetry has the right, responsibility even, to deal with all that is human: to communicate, to share emotion, to stimulate thought and to help understanding – along with much more of course.
So listen then for a moment to a man, normal in many ways, convinced of his own normality and decency, yet deeply involved in evil.
Evil is so complicated.
Horrific actions can be justified; they may not even be seen as such by the perpetrator, when evil is all around and worse things are being done...
.jpg)
Gold
My name is
Hellinger. I mine for gold.
Not for me
those specks of dust
flushed down
some distant stream,
nor heavy work
with spade and hammer
upon unyielding
rock. The gold I find
has been
refined – I leave it to others
to fire the
furnace. My finished gold
falls in little
balls to rattle in my bowl.
No fight, no
piracy – this is not stealing,
rather rescue.
No gold rush here –
this good old
gold, cold in its warmth,
lies waiting
for my forceps.
I am skilled in
the extraction.
The vein I work
is soft and easy
I know exactly
where to look –
unlike an
ignorant prospector
which is not me
– I am informed.
I inflict no
pain, commit no crime,
and contribute
to the greater good.
I even feel a
certain reverence
and some
respect for how my gold
once made good
those cracks and crevices.
Meanwhile I
mine abandoned treasure
in my
particular professional way.
Dr Martin Hellinger, a dentist at Ravensbruck, joined
the SS early on, rising to the rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer. He argued at his
war crimes trial that ‘though it hurt one’s feelings of reverence’ he had
committed no indictable offence. The gold he extracted from the freshly
executed was sent to the Reichsbank. He served a prison sentence and
returned to years of successful dental practice.
Comments
Post a Comment