CHELMNO
Gotzfried served at Majdanek which, with seven gas chambers,
was one of the Nazis’ six “extermination camps, where the industrial scale
mass murder of the Holocaust was at its most intense.
The others were
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno.
The Guardian
Friday May 21 1999
Oddly no train ran to the town,
so a crowded bus took me from Torun
to another Poland and another history.
To my purblind and naive eye,
it was a pleasant place when I arrived
that night, clumsily holding Renata’s hand,
as I had those of unwelcome partners
walking as a child to hear the vicar.
And so cold to the touch! In the church now,
though dressed in winter togs, I was run through
by the feel of the stone statuette on my
gloved hand and her still stonier gaze onto
the town below the hill, all cheerily aglow,
yet withholding a certain matter from scrutiny.
From the tombs of the Catholic dead,
great slabs of marble never to be defaced,
as though sensing another quietus,
I rushed down the hill in a manic rush
to a boozer with endless jars of piwo
for those who could not quite follow
the little town’s monumental secret
or her stony stare, implacably discreet.
Who had won the war? Who was the baddy?
When not tramping to church meekly
or storing up a life time’s failure
to hold hand’s without causing discomfort
for myself or those who won my heart,
I had found to those questions an answer
in a picture of a tall and gangling Kraut,
reminiscent
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