The Lethal Life

Shot, burned, stabbed,
bludgeoned, gassed
drowned, crushed
and buried alive,
all these were ways that
Jews, Roma, Anarchists,
prostitutes, warm brothers*
and Communists amongst others
were those who died at the hands
of the Nazis in the many concentration camps
that they built in Germany and across Eastern Europe.

Nothing said and done now can return those folk
so they can lead the lives they once expected to have,
but what remembering the way they all died
does achieve is to remind those living now
of how lethal the human indifference to suffering is.

The Soviet Union was one of the Allies,
rather than among the axis powers.
Was this why the West said so little
about the forced labour/death camps
that the Soviet Union kept open,
1945-60, years after the last Nazi camps
were emptied to at best become museums?
Asking now how many lived and died
in the Soviet camps when the Soviets
were usually such good record keepers
is a good question that won't get an answer. 

Go out in peace, and make your peace active.

*the term that German gay men chose
to describe themselves to each other,
it was coined/chosen in Weimar Germany.