The Song Of The Six Million
It didn’t begin with uniform wearers,
armband bearers, that’s just where it ended,
with proud keyholders to blandly
wicked gas chambers.
It started on the streets, in the shops
and bars, with late night whispers
and jokes about the Jews and who’s
to blame for all the ills of the day.
It was carried along
like a smile, like a song
by the middle-of-the-roaders,
the go-with-the-flow-ers,
the deaf, dumb and blind
and the want-a-quiet-lifers.
And no-one really noticed
unless they were called Cohen,
or Meyer or Levin or Stein
but everybody knew
about the over-sensitive Jews,
touchy and greedy
and have you ever noticed
how they don’t look like us?
And so like a snowball in winter
it rolled merrily along,
like a smile, like a song,
this wonderful new truth
that would make the nation strong,
this great Fatherland
with its old ways and new,
a promised land for all –
well, all but the Jew.
It didn’t start with Panzers
rampaging through Paris,
nor ghettos, nor mass graves,
children cowering in attics.
No human skin lampshades
in the fabled masterplan,
but call people sub-human
and yourself Superman,
and it’s only going one way.
Down a dead end street
where grandmas and grandads,
aunties and uncles, half-starved children
and their mums and dads
are lined up against a wall,
the lucky ones spared
a last train ride to a death camp
nestled in the countryside.
Their voices ghost out
from bulletholed walls,
from obscene trenches,
from railtracks leading
to Arbeit Macht Frei,
a laughable legacy
from a sick joke world.
Six million strangled battlecries
to beware ignorance and fear:
“We too thought
it could never happen here.”
