Auschwitz is not a word –
it is bone and wire,
smoke knotted in the lungs of Europe.
Human dignity wrenched from beds,
from their shirts and shoes,
from little hands clutching mothers’ fingers
by the tracks.
Here, there is no music
except scraping shovels,
no prayer except the silence
after the shouting stops.
Stripped of names,
paraded as numbers,
lives poured out
through cracks in the barracks.
How disgusting,
to weigh souls by the load in a cattle car,
children’s laughter snuffed beneath
boots slick with filth.
To witness days passing,
not by sunlight, but by the pulse
of hunger,
by hair shorn and piled in sacks,
by gold teeth pried from headless mouths.
Dignity shrivels beneath orders barked,
bodies fenced like shameful secrets,
flesh whittled by starvation until
even memory crumbles.
Yet somewhere – a hand still squeezed another.
A man hummed lullabies to the dark.
A girl – barefoot, trembling –
whispered her brother’s name,
refusing to be reduced
to ash or silence.
We say never again –
but only if we can bear to look,
to see the world’s capacity
for filth and cruelty;
to count the cost –
not in numbers but in
the collapse
of our own humanity.
Today,
dust settles over names we can’t pronounce,
over teeth and shoes and suitcases –
and still we must remember:
decency is not granted,
it is carved,
again and again,
from the wreckage left
by those who believed some
deserve nothing
but disgust.
