Yom Hashoa Poem by Gert Strydom

There are things
which people never discuss,
like wickedness and destruction
and loss of humanity
that comes with hate.

It’s funny how people
loose sight of God
and declare wars in His name
and kill the innocent in office towers
and lose all humanness.

I could never understand
why like animals,
people have been kept in camps.
Even my great grandmother
died in a British concentration camp
and the names of the predecessors
of many Afrikaners,
stays written on their harts.

I see terrible photographs
of people lying like broken shop dolls,
where they are famished, molested,
embarrassed, degraded, broken and killed
and Yom HaShoa
hits mighty blows
into my soul.

Having been a soldier myself,
I wonder how warriors
could lose all humanity,
or were they only
sociopathic animals
without any honour and fame;
when they demonstrated their cruelty
in Auschwitz–Birkenau,
Buchenwald, Treblinka
and at other places.

I am a Afrikaner boer
and from Scottish decent
and my forefathers fought as boers
and rebels, against the British
and my Scottish great grandpa
stood against them.

We can go back
and trace and know our families
and somehow every body;
might be a Jew.

I sometimes wonder
from where my father’s names,
Jacob and Solomon comes
and if it is only from
the sacred book.

Still identity, integrity
and freedom
and being humane,
goes much further
than race and nationality.

In the end
everybody stands
at the feet
of the Judge and Creator;
where words and deeds
carry their own power.

[Yom HaShoa=Holocaust Remembrance Day. With thanks to Mahdokt, for the pictures and message in her email that inspired this verse.]