Last Train To Auschwitz
Kill a few and they throw you in jail, kill a lot and they'll make you king (for a while).
I have written a lot over the years on the topic of the Shoah, the Holocaust. It’s been a constant theme and pre-occupation, for many reasons.
My thesis is one of memory, the need to remember. Also, that the struggle must be constant, eternal against the kind of tribalism, non-universalism, “othering” and dehumanizing that is the soil of war and extermination.
We see it today in Ukraine. The sad process begins on both sides. While once like Germans and German-Jews, Ukrainians and Russians lived side by side, never noticing their differences - they now think of each other as vile, non-human, evil. Same with the Hutus and the Tutsis, same with the Croats and Serbs, same with the Iranians and Iraqis. What is this force that makes good people start to hate each other? Who gives rise to this great wind that makes us hate those not of our persuasion, our group?
I think of Hitler’s own comments about extermination. He said, “Who remembers the millions Genghis Khan killed. Nobody. They only remember him as a great man, a nation builder.” Men like Hitler, Putin, the heads of Nato, Biden and Xi Jinping are psychotic, they don’t live in the here and now. They live in their heads, in grand illusion. This is how hate starts, at the top. From then on, it’s just all marketing.
I’ll leave you with a poem below, in my recent collection of poems on the Holocaust — poems about power, evil and why we keep killing each other, en masse.
Here is a pdf copy of my book – Last Train To Auschwitz. Get the paperback or Kindle copy HERE.
Esoteric Erotica
I study
your pendulous breasts,
two suns buoyant
pointing to fertile orb below.
I enter
through vallied loins,
both phallus and heart
magnetized by sensual expectancy.
I leave
through tangled limbs
quiet in relief,
washed by the breath of life.
I study
your twisted reclining mass
wondering if,
Joseph Mengele would see the same.
Collection of poems on the Holocaust and the book Last Train To Auschwitz are unique literary works.
My uncle Czesław Ostańkowicz survived the most severe concentration camps during World War II. After the war, as a writer, he dealt with this subject. His books were about life in camps.
Czarna z komanda Bayer (1958), Dziwny normalny świat (1962), Porażeni nie chcą umierać (1973) a także zbiór reportaży Sprawy zwykłych ludzi (1959); ponadto wspomnienia prozą Ziemia parująca cyklonem (1967), Straszna góra Ettersberg (1968) oraz wiersze Strofy pawiackie (1980).