We want to remember the Holocaust
like going to a horror movie,
watching evil through a telescope,
but really it’s a mirror,
an x-ray of what we’re capable of—
all of us, not just “them.”
We could not easily be the torturer
but we readily let it happen.
That’s us.
The train to Treblinka still runs
through Gaza, only now we take
the killing to them, the bombed
out villages, the mothers weeping,
the child picking through a pile of bricks.
We sigh, and scroll on. The trains run.
Bodies crammed on shelves like books
horrify us at Auschwitz, or a slave ship,
but not too much an El Salvadoran prison.
Well, it horrifies us, yes, but only
through our telescope. We don’t see it
in the mirror. Our own capacity.
Somebody else does that.
Not us. It’s not our mirror.
We’re just the ones who let it happen.
The Holocaust isn’t history. It’s who we are.
We can’t oppose evil without claiming our own.
Love your enemy as yourself.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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