“If there is a god he will have to beg my forgiveness” Scratched into a wall at Auschwitz

Acres of ochre colored bones
Neatly stacked in a labyrinth
Of walls three meters high;
Solemnly the silence of the vaults
Is broken by the guide:
“Here sleep six million Parisians”-
Six million toothed jaws,
Six million skulls with hallow caves
Where eyes once saw the daylight
And lived, as fate would allow.
Here the crypts of the dead decay
Slowly through a timeless night,
An oddity of the grotesque,
Fossilizing into stone and dust,
An empire of exhumed ancients
Rotting in the crowded cemeteries
Making room for the next generations,
The bedrock of the fourmillante cite.

I have no feeling for this population
Of perished beings whose spines
And ribs crack in forever stillness;
They died with the smiles of believers
That their spirits would rise from the earth
To the fast clouds above them.

But I shudder in the damp air-
That abstract number made real
From the site of these skeletons
Jammed in an endless tomb.
Six million Jews, who worshipped life,
So efficiently round up and slaughtered
In a decade now half forgotten.
Proof enough there is no waking god,
Or that prayer is anything
Other than a disease.

Somewhere in the catacombs
Of my being I see the executioner’s hood,
I hear his screams of hallelujah
As I go naked to the gas chambers
With members of my blood line.
Few bones or traces remain
Of the starved and paltry corpses;
Most were piled in fiery ovens
And the ochre colored ashes
Were shoveled in the swamps
And fields around the camps-
Let no human clutter
Stand on that ground!
Let weeds and wildflowers
Rot to make the soil sweet
For a city of twisted trees
To take root and touch
Some unknowable force of goodness.