We all seek normalcy in our lives, but at the same time we know that every second of every day there is a man once handsome, a woman once beautiful, a youth or girl once flippant and brave, skin tightened over bones nearly bared, scarcely alive, there are phylums and species of tradgedy and horror, hidden in prisons and hospitals.

There are many who have seen and done, who passed through the portals of horror who decades ago passed into the sunlight. Their children and grandchildren pick up their kids from school, make dinner, help their children with their homework, yawn, go to bed with their partners. They do not talk about work. They talk about seniority and benefits. The horrors of the world are viewed indifferently by people who rationalize their sins of omission.

A Polish Film department professor remembered--the absurdity, the nausea of incongruity after he was captured in the sewers of Warsaw. You learn this in all institutions--
to expect the validation of fear.

One night in the hospial, a very large man, finding me awake, said nothing, but left and returned with strawberry yogurt and still without speech, fed it to me with a plastic spoon.

In that place there was no knowing what would happen next--the unimagined, the unthinkeable, or a simple act of charity. This stood out against its dark background as absurd, impossible, the result of some hallucinigen.

People learn by copying the acts of those with power, as young wolves to hunt by emulating the pack leader. This is why you will find pictures here of skeletons laughing in wonder. A BYU Polish Survivor of the camps, spoke often and once to the weekly required Symposium.

He said to be ever vigilent, to mark the day when the mountains begin thier inexorable march. I found the reference in a Lutheren Hymnal, saved by the Community Church of my Siberia because the residents, though they feared to be known as German, liked the old hymns the most. ''Even the mountains," one hymn said "flee before the daugntless.''

Our good professor had been in the film industry before the war. Afterwards he had been in the resistance. He was captured by the Nazis in the sewers of Warsaw. He was in solitary, nearly dead, when a big American burst into the room and offered him a cigarette.

LaughIng at the absurdity of survival he could only stare.Tortured, he expected only another dreary day of it. That he should have lived to see the unthinkable, the nauseatingly absurd.

My closest SFSU friend was a girl when a Preist who had survived the camps passed through San Francisco. He had many pictures of the Camps and he showed them to her one by one, saying she must never forget seeing them, in honor of the dead.

It was her work, then, to be certain that nothing of the kind happened again. You may have beleive that such things will not happen in America. It has happened and may again. Nievité is no defense. You will become old.

My Long Poem details "friendly fascism" . ''Never ask for whom the bell tolls . . .'' In America today we no longer ask, few seek the answer. Few victims, in thier shame, dare speak.

KMW

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I remember oneof the surviviving women Lani Silber interviewed saying that from where she sat at her typewriter she could see into the men's area of the camp.

She said they almost always stood apart from one another. While the women huddled together for warmth, Men who had the better jobs in the camps, electritions. kapos, got much better rations and access to the women's camp. The surviving women in the camp had had something the Nazi's wanted. They suffered cruelly,
but could trade their bodies for food, The men who tradetheir food for comfort fared little better than their comrades. Perhaps it made a kind of sense
to them--they did not know who would win the war. The Nazis worked hard to convince their slaves thay liberation would never come. They may have felt that the young women must survive if their people
were to survive.

ABANDON HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE
ARBEIT MACH FRIE

www.xanga.com/autumnwindbringsdeathofsorrow   Paste into Browser.  Bad browser day, paste html below into editor--at the right time, for the right reason,  Notice the frail woman clinging to the kapo. DAY AFTER TOMORROW IS A HOSPITAL DAY__Friday I lose a kidney.