• [The most harrowing part of the trip for me was the 4th station of the cross led by Fr Manfred. There I had been assigned the reading, and had to read outside a hut used to house Aryan children torn away from their discarded parents, about the Nazi practice of murdering all children born in the camp by full immersion in a barrel]. 

Baby baptised

In bucket of frozen cold water

Immersed

Held

Under

 

Until no breath came

No slap on the rear to provoke a cry

Silenced instead forever

 

Doorways opened to them not of a nursery

But by weeping angels

Assigned as an infant’s guardian

But with swords constrained to be sheathed

As in Gethsemane

 

As SS guards rid the world of

The ‘vermin offspring of vermin’

Unrealising their crime before

Heaven’s court and

The coming wrath against those

Who need a millstone round their feet

To escape the horrors that await

One flung on the vengeance of an outraged God

At the dealings with his convenanted humanity.

 

 

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This series of post are poetry written at Auschwitz-Berkenau during a rescreen-shot-2017-01-12-at-12-03-02treat 75 years after gas was first used in the ‘final solution’ to exterminate the Jews.

The group was led by some remarkable people, including a German RC priest, Fr Manfred who had remained there for 25+ years since writing his phD on the holocaust.

Bible reflections were given by Sam Wells and Pete Wilcox, and when poetry owes its origins to their lectures they are credited as such.