The Pied Piper

I wish I could believe in Irving,
And the lies of the deniers,
That the Holocaust is our delusion:
No gas chambers,
Not even thought,
Of A Solution,
Final or any other sort

O ye, how I wish that it were all a lie,
A fairy tale, Snow White, Big Bad Wolf, Pied Piper,
Who enticed away the children -
And perhaps I should believe
That all the missing ones
By a pied and piping charlatan
Were led into a gaping mountain
To emerge somewhere far, far away,
In a wondrous land of youth,
Where now they live and play
Content while we, the rest of us,
Toil out our petty lives in mourning
For those who went away.

I suppose that I could see myself
In the pleasant fields of Auschwitz,
Among the blooming flowers,
With no barbed wire or camp,
Nor jackboot there
To stamp the fragile petal
Of humanity.

But if there was a piper pied or otherwise
And, yes, there surely was,
It was not the victims that he hypnotised,
But those he poisoned all too willingly
With enchanted and insane rhetoric
Marched goose-stepping on
To his demonic tune
To work deranged mechanics
Of human rendering
On industrial disassembly lines.

So when you hear that pied and piping charlatan
Promise in beguiling tune
To lead you to Utopia,
Smell a rat
And when he offers you a cornucopia,
Smell a rat, Smell a rat.
When he promises to lead you to The Mountain,
Smell a rat,
Or the Fountain of Eternal Youth,
Smell a rat,
Or the Spring of All the Truth,
Smell a rat, Smell a rat, Smell a rat.

O yes, it's so convenient to believe in that.
It never happened,
Foul conspiracy
To write just men down in history,
Lovers of Mozart and Schubert symphonies,
As genocidal monsters
With weaponry of
Gannt Charts, Destruction Schedules,
Critical Path and SWAT Analysis,
Collection Networks:
Industrial butchery
And systematised depravity
To Satan's own statistics
Delusion?
Delusion?

But yes, they know that's what I'd want to hear,
The news that it was all one mass delusion,
To wake one sunny morning and to read
The banner headline in The Daily News
'Holocaust Not Real - It's Official'
Lost faces come to life,
Appearing everywhere.
They've been suspended
And can't remember where,
Frozen in time,
Not a day older, not even a grey hair.

But would that make
Voices choked in ashes
Sing again,
Words of love chained round
With wire and iron
Whispered again,
Laughter of just one found child
Ring again.

Now if you hear that pied and piping charlatan
Promise in enchanting notes
To lead you to lands of sweetest dreams
Smell at rat,
And dawns of joyous wakings
Smell a rat, Smell a rat,
And when the very tune he pipes
Is the one ……. the very one
That you have always longed to hear,
Smell a rat ,
Smell a rat,
Smell ……..a …………..rat

DEDICATION To the memory of the family of my father-in-law, the Serebrovskis, which was exterminated by the Nazis in 1941 in the village of Luninetz, Belorus, and those of the family of my mother-in-law, the Belogrotskis, who were murdered in the village of Bogoslav, the Ukraine, in the same year.

^

Biography

BIOGRAPHY Nicholas (Nick) Lynch was born in Tullamore, Co Offaly. After graduating in English language, literature and theatre at the University of London, he went into management consultancy, where fiction and drama seemed to make a lot more sense. For 20 years, he was a partner in a communications consulting firm whose clients included major UK industries and government agencies. He now works from Israel, where he lives with his Israeli wife, Ora, and divides his time between Israel, France and the UK. Nick writes a lot of poetry, but has never published because he has always felt that poetry is written by people, including himself, who can't write prose, or who just can't be bothered. However, recent developments have shaken this conviction. Nick can be contacted at nicholas.lynche@free.fr