The Right To Write

and read and share over long distances
is something we take for granted.

But it was something that the citizens
sent to the death camps could not imagine,
long before they were arrested in their homes,
along with all their many neighbours-
and given an hour's notice to pack
a suitcase apiece, including the children,
as their sole possessions for the foreseeable future,
about which they had been deceived beyond belief.

Could you put all your life
into a large, strong, shopping bag
-the sort you fill with food every week- 
and leave everything else behind for the unknown?

That is what they did, not knowing how,
if even just a few of them got back,
there would be nothing and nobody left
for them to return to. 

What ever was there when they left
had been either obliterated,
or parcelled out to strangers.

In reality, for several years,
before they were arrested,
their right to think or reason
was slowly being constricted. 
As propaganda and the new laws
hid how between 1935 and 1945,
across Eastern Europe,
the landscape became dotted
with 'work camps', opened by Nazis
and maintained by local collaborators. 

The right to speak and hear about this
was banned back then. It is not banned now.
But those who try to speak out now,
who write, read, and want to hear the stories 
will still find the freeze,
in the old ban from the past
as a living echo inside of them, 
as they make it their duty
to bear witness to what resisted
being born clears witness to before.