[Marcia Karp]

Originally Posted by Bruce McBirney

[...]
Alicia, I appreciate your kind words on the poem’s ambition, but realize you and a number of other folks felt the end of this one overshot--or undershot--the mark with a thud. So I’ll write mostly here about the concerns on the ending.

Regarding the last line, I chose the places listed there of 20th/21st-century atrocities to represent victims from different continents and of different ethnicities and races—white, black, Asian, and the American melting pot. My hope was to suggest the universality of suffering and cruelty even in our “modern” time, so far removed from the ancient place in the poem.

Perhaps their god sees far, hears cries that mourn
From Dachau, Darfur, My Lai, and New York.

Dear Bruce,
It has never occurred to me, nor am I persuaded, that the pertinent description of victims at Dachau would be white.

Best,
Marcia

[David Anthony]

As a point of information, Dachau was a labour camp. The death camps were further east, not in the German homeland.
(In 1945 German soldiers, on leave from the Eastern front, were accommodated in Dachau when American troops arrived. Thinking they were concentration camp guards, the Americans lined them up and shot them.)

[Bruce McBirney]

Hi, Marcia. You raise an interesting point.

Stated differently, I meant the list of places in the poem simply to suggest the diversity of the victims. My wife, who is Jewish, didn’t have a problem with the line in the poem, nor with my post that you quoted explaining the line. (Nor with this post, which she read just now before I posted it.) Her family was not affected by the Holocaust, but she had family members--her grandmother and uncle—stabbed and left for dead by Czarist troops in Russia, so she has a pretty keen sensitivity, as all should, to any minimization or trivialization of the Holocaust. When she fills out forms that request racial identification, she checks “white” or “Caucasian.”

Having said that, I see your point (as I understand it) that referring to the victims of Dachau as “white” may be problematic in that their Nazi murderers committed their atrocities in the name of being Aryan/white. My sincere apologies for any insensitivity of phrasing in the explanation you quoted. As I say, my intent was to express the diversity of the victims of mass violence at different times in different places in the world.

The related point, I believe first raised by Michael, is whether Dachau (or any other Holocaust site) should be listed together with sites of other atrocities that clearly were of a much lesser scope. I don’t know the exact figures for Dachau by itself, but over 6,000,000 Jews died in the Holocaust. (I believe at least tens of thousands of the 6,000,000 died at Dachau, though. David, you’re quite wrong about that. My wife has visited Dachau, and seen the ovens.) The death count in Darfur is “only” a fraction of that—I believe over 400,000, with many more displaced. The toll on 9/11 was several thousand. About 500 people died at My Lai. So while all these of these tragic places have immediately recognizable names, there is no question that none of them compare to the Holocaust in terms of the sheer scope of the evil perpetrated there and the number of people killed. (Of course, as I said in another post, any mass murder is an immeasurable tragedy to the lives affected, regardless of how many or how few.)

As I said before, based on the reactions here, the use of any list of such places may be a problem, particularly in a 14-line poem, since it may lead readers to ask whether the places in question are being “ranked” in comparison to each other, or to other places not listed. If one does use such a list of 20th/21st century atrocities, however, my own feeling is that it could be seen as trivializing the Holocaust not to include it.

I would be interested in reading the poem by Julia Alvarez that Alicia mentioned to see how she handled this issue. In any case, this discussion has been valuable, since it underscores the care and thought that should be given in referring to such tragedies, even for a well-meaning purpose.

Best wishes.

--Bruce

[Marcia Karp]

Thank you, Bruce. (I didn't find what you said to be insensitive, just puzzling.)

Best,
Marcia

[A. E. Stallings]

For what it is worth:

“Let’s make a modern primer for our kids”

Let’s make a modern primer for our kids:
A is for Auschwitz; B for Biafra;
Chile; Dachau; El Salvador; F is
the Falklands; Grenada; Hiroshima
stands for H; Northern Ireland for I;
J is for Jonestown; K for Korea;
L for massacres in Lidice; My Lai;
N, Nicaragua; O, Okinawa;
P is the Persian Gulf and Qatar, Q;
Rwanda; Sarajevo--this year’s hell;
T is Treblinka and Uganda U;
Vietnam and Wounded Knee. What’s left to spell?
An X to name the countless disappeared
when they are dust in Yemen and Zaire.

--Julia Alvarez

[David Anthony]

Originally Posted by Bruce McBirney

Hi, Marcia. You raise an interesting point.





(I believe at least tens of thousands of the 6,000,000 died at Dachau, though. David, you’re quite wrong about that. My wife has visited Dachau, and seen the ovens.) Best wishes.

--Bruce

--Even so, Bruce, what I tell you is correct, as a quick check on Google will confirm (and I too have been to Dachau and seen the cremators). Also I think the close in your poem is compromised (or perhaps made ambiguous) by the American killings at Dachau in April 1945.
Why not use Auschwitz instead? That was undoubtedly a death camp.

Best regards,
David

[Bruce McBirney]

David, it is true that many more people died at Auschwitz than at Dachau. I’m quite comfortable with my prior posts, though. Per your invitation to check the web, I looked at the English language website for the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, the website for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and others. It’s pretty clear that Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp; that it served as a model for all later German concentration camps and as a “school of violence” for the SS; that the “labor” to which hundreds of thousands were put there was not a benign inconvenience, but “an instrument of extermination”; that prisoners who were incapable of further work due to typhus, malnutrition and any other cause were murdered in killing centers; that tens of thousands of the 6,000,000 Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust died there; and that it has long stood as a symbol of the Holocaust.

I’m quite sure my reference to it won’t be mistaken by anyone as referring to the story you mentioned regarding American soldiers, enraged at the unbelievable conditions they found, killing some of the Nazi prison guards after their surrender without trial. Regardless of the merits or details of that story, and without condoning any unjustified killing, SS guards certainly would not belong in a list of slaughtered innocents.

If anyone wants to know what the author meant by my poem, they need only look here. This is where the poem was “published,” and it’s appeared here with more than ample explanation of what it means:

For the 6,000,000 Jews who died in the Holocaust; for the 400,000 (and rising) who have died in Darfur; for the 4,000 who died at the Trade Center; for the 500 who died at My Lai; for all others who have died brutally, needlessly, the gods weep. And we should, too, both for them and for ourselves, for allowing it to happen over and over again.

Shaun, you surmised I was writing about something I cared about. Damn straight. For those who thought the ending was a “cheap shot” or a sermon, or that I should have left the travelogue without the ending, I can only say that I wouldn’t have bothered writing it without the end.

Thanks, everyone, for your time, fellowship and insights. For my part, though, I stand by the poem. Each word.