In a Northern City

•

In a suburb of Hamburg,
that most civilized of cities,
we were sitting in the garden—
so neat, so orderly, cauliflower
aligned with rows of cabbages—
and my host mentioned that
his elderly father, who had been
a soldier on the Eastern front,
still did not come down from
his room when any Americans
were present.
                        It was a day
in early summer. We were dining
on several kinds of sausage
and drinking good local beer.
My friend, ever the kind host,
and always ready to respond
to my insatiable curiosity,
pointed toward the far end
of the garden, to a low mound
of earth. It covered, he said,
the family bomb shelter.
And yes, it was, remarkably,
after all these years, intact.

I was intrigued. "May I—- "
"Of course," he said, "but please
be careful on the steps." And so
I went down into a dark space
where I knew he and his sisters
had huddled while overhead
wave after wave of Lancasters
and B-17 Flying Fortresses
had dropped bomb after bomb
until nothing at all remained
in the entire burned-out city
that was not utterly scorched
by fire too hellish to be imagined,
the smoke from that fire visible
for hundreds of kilometers. This
for many nights, many weeks
in the final two years of the war.

It was extraordinarily quiet
down in this primitive shelter,
far from the center of the city.
One would have crouched on
crude wooden bunks and waited
long hours for the all-clear siren.
Which, after the first few raids,
never came, because the sirens
were incinerated by the bombs.
As I came up the wooden steps
I noticed, on the second floor
of the house, a window curtain
falling back into place again.

The next morning my host
drove us out to Neuengamme,
a concentration camp a few k's
down the road, where thousands
of prisoners—Gypsies, Jews,
Poles, Hungarians, Russians—
had waded about in a huge pit,
clawing up clay that was needed
to make new bricks to rebuild
the factories the Allied bombers
were systematically destroying.

The prisoners labored in the muck
and the filth and the cold, under
the most appalling conditions,
until they could no longer stand,
whereupon they died of hunger
or were shot, and were replaced
by still more prisoners. The SS
was remarkably good about
documentation, and took plenty
of photos—of how the prisoners
in their rags were made to stand
in the snow, how the police dogs
snapped at their heels, or how
naked men were bent backward
over wooden horses and beaten
with rubber hoses until they died.
You can still see hundreds of these
technically perfect photographs
in the Neuengamme Museum.

It is bad enough to encounter
the evidence of such atrocities
midway in your own life, yet
it soon becomes apparent that
you are far from innocent.
You have only to look around
to notice that people are still
being taken away in the night,
that others are being treated
shamefully and abominably—
often in your name, or allegedly
on your behalf, or for your own
welfare, or by means of money
you pay in taxes. Permission
is constantly being given to treat
strangers in this manner. Forms
are being signed by bureaucrats
into whose eyes you will never
be required to look. Directives
are being carried out by agents
and independent contractors
who have been granted immunity,
their faces permanently masked.
All of this is sanctioned by officials
in charge who are careful enough
to make sure there will never be
any documentation whatsoever.

I have lived for many years now,
and I have come to the realization
that I am a solitary man, someone
peering through a half-parted curtain,
someone who sees below a procession
of ghosts and phantoms. At times
the figures almost elude my vision,
as though some unearthly light
shone through them, burning away
their tattered uniforms, their stripes,
their beliefs, the colors of their skin.
At other times they seem like a river
of flame that cannot be extinguished,
that flares and burns more brightly
even as it recedes farther into time.

The figures in this long procession
are men, women, and children
who were converted into smoke
and cinders during the last century.
What they witnessed, what they
endured, what transformed them,
what compels them to seek me out,
can be framed in a single concept,
one to which all of us must respond,
if it is ever to be said that any of us
has a conscience. In their silence,
their anonymity, they insist that
in spite of all that has happened,
and in a higher sense because of all
that has happened, it is not simply
still possible to behave humanely;
it is in fact necessary to do so. This
is what they would have me know.
They wish me to let the curtain fall,
to come down, and stand beside them.