Imbibing Auschwitz

We imbibed Auschwitz deliberately;
It was bitter despite the sweetener;
The hot chocolate made it go down easier,
As did the blurry images of old towns, old kings,
Litanies, histories,
Packaged neatly in their dates and movements and stern font stylings:
Just another piece of the tour.

The extraordinary is often mundane:
A daily regimen of gassing
And burning bodies
In a small concrete garage.
No one is allowed to watch the process,
Lest it make them unstable.
The condemned are condemned to carry the
Ashes and bodies; cleaner that way.
A few metric tons of human
Hair for the textile industry,
Deadly efficiency,
Damned precise,
Mechanical consumption, the furnace
Belches the stench of burned flesh
Over the city.  The locals had their own
Worries.  Who knew that people make
Good soap?

We came together, a family,
But we went through Auschwitz alone,
Separately.
They took our hair,
They tried to take out our "I's and
Replace them with epithets and
Nine-digit numbers, like
.coms a website of
Our interconnected hatred,
Apathy, destruction, and sin.
Here lie the cobwebs of history to be
Swept under the rug or used
To normalize goods and evils ad nausem,
Tag lines for escapists.
As if there were no Nazi
Inside of me,
That it was just a German devil machine.

I swallowed Auschwitz; I enjoyed the experience,
The pain. I critiqued the self-serving nationalistic displays;
I partook in crimes against humanity.

We opened the valves,
Together, we took showers,
We are the victors and the victimized,
We are the villains and the passersby.
All mankind is my brother.
We are ashes and blood,
fire and screams.
We are bodies.

I was scanning the lines of the dead
For the eyes of a pretty girl.
I'm sorry Ms. Frank, but
We certainly are not very good.