'Ashes'…….by buddy black, 2007
Ashes were falling
Like winter snow,
Yet people who saw it
Claimed not to know
That what they were seeing
Was human snow.
And the boxcars came
And the boxcars went,
Having disgorged the souls
The devil sent
To stoke his evil fires of hell.
Hundreds,
then thousands,
Then millions to come,
God only knows
The horrible sum.
And the bands played on
As the plan played out,
How could anyone person
Now have a doubt,
What this killing machine was all about.
Women, and children,
And babies all,
Young men, old men
Big and small.
Their screams and pleas
Fell on the devils mute ears.
And no cared to see their tears,
As The SS came in the middle of the night
To complete their deed
Before the break of light.
Time was more valuable
Than these wretched souls
Because the Final Solution
Was their driving goal.
They had no time
For hide n seek
Yelling and screaming
And killing the weak.
Individual men
With a common goal
Each man conspired,
And each shared the role,
Of tormentor, of killer
Of human souls.
And the boxcars came,
And empty they went
Having disgorged the souls
The devil sent.
Separated by gender
Young and old,
In line they waited
In the freezing cold,
While the SS stripped them
Of clothing and gold.
Dogs and whips
Forced the soon dead foreword,
And they all knew by now
It was death they marched toward.
An SS doctor at the head of the line
Paid particular attention
To the sick and the dyin,’
And with the flick of a wrist
He sealed their doom
And sent them off
To the killing room.
Auschwitz, Belzec, Maidanek,
And Treblinka, death camps,
work camps,
It mattered not which,
For their fate was sealed
As they faced their doom,
And were herded like sheep
Into the killing rooms.
By gas or by lead
It mattered not now,
They had no choice
As to when or to how,
It was simply a matter of time
They all would be dead.
This conspiracy of death
Passed down from the top
Like a snowball to hell
Near impossible to stop.
It soaked up the Jews
And the gypsies all,
The sick and the well,
The young and the old,
The big and the small.
Through the heat of the summers
And winters biting stark cold,
Mothers now knew
Their babes would never grow old.
And the boxcars came
And empty they went,
And soon the population
Was nearly all spent.
One million, Two million, Three million,
Four, Five million, Six million,
How many more!
The devil himself and all of his men
Could never put the world
Together again.
His bookkeepers, and ledger men,
His SS, and police,
Engineers, and oilers,
And all who stood by
Then tried to think of a suitable lie,
Like ‘following orders was all that I did,
How was I to know
What the devil had bid’.
But the world and they all
Share this terrible guilt,
For they each are a stitch
In this patch work quilt,
Woven with millions of human souls.
While ashes were falling
Like winter snow,
While ordinary men
Killed ordinary people,
Hoping the world would never know,
That what they were seeing
Was human snow.
Researchers Rebuild Old Tech to Play Lost Recordings of Holocaust Survivors
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The main gate at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Image Credit: Michel Zacharz AKA Grippenn via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.5
In 1965, the University of Akron acquired a set of audio interviews with Holocaust survivors following World War II. Their historical significance was immense, but there was just one problem: The technology required to play them had become obsolete. Now, more than 70 years after they were recorded, Cleveland Jewish News reports that the university finally has a way to listen to them.
The recordings were made by David Boder, a Latvian-born U.S. psychologist who made it his mission to gather testimonies from Holocaust survivors while the event was still fresh in their minds. He used wire reels to record the audio, but by the 1960s the medium had been phased out by changing technology. What’s more, his own personal recorder, which was also given to the university, had broken down by that point.
With 48 of Boder’s wire spools in their possession and no way to hear the contents, a team from the University of Akron got to work making a player of their own about three years ago. They purchased a nonfunctional wire recorder from eBay and used that as their foundation. From there, the team updated the machine with modern components. “[…] some parts I found in my basement and some parts I found from other electronic suppliers,” James Newhall, project leader and Akron’s senior multimedia producer in instructional services, told Cleveland Jewish News.
The second song Frank sang for Boder was “Our Camp Stands at the Forest’s Edge.” This was an anthem the Nazis forced Jewish prisoners to sing at a labor camp in Poland, and while the lyrics have long been known, this is the first time researchers have heard the melody. After studying the recordings, the university eventually hopes to convert them into a digital archive.
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