Image by Joseph Cosby | The Old Guard
The Beautiful Game
At Bergen-Belsen, 1943,
Our soldiers used the babies
For soccer balls. We cuffed the mothers
To posts and invited them to watch.
When a baby stopped screaming, a
Final kick to the head, and that was that.
Then a guard would toss in a fresh one.
Oh, I’m aware that the nickname
Came along after the Holocaust.
The Beautiful Game.
The Beautiful Game.
Having lived those days,
I could never call it that.
Sausages
On that long-ago morning my frau and I craved sausages.
She wanted link sausages. I wanted patties.
So, we heated a 12-inch cast iron skillet
And filled it with sausages.
Linked, chewy, phallic sausages for her.
Round, comforting patties for me.
Hints of maple sugar; hints of sage.
Sausages sausages sausages.
We kept eye contact as we
Ate our… sausages.
Thinking, how happy we are!
As we ate our… sausages.
Not for one moment did we consider
The piglet, pulling on its Mother’s teat,
Just an innocent little nuzzler.
It’s destiny? To become sausages.
Not thinking of the porcine bonds
Being formed in rural Schleswig-Holstein.
The look, the lust, the love.
Not for a moment, thinking of
The blind trip to the factory
Where sentient beings,
Having no say in the matter,
Would become… sausages.
February 13, 1945
We knew this night would come.
We did not know the precise date, but
Its coming was a certainty,
Because the war was lost.
And that is why we had kept her intact.
We secured her accommodations
In the finest suite in a guarded hotel.
Catered meals; anything she wanted.
We could not leave the City.
Dresden was ours to protect.
We would defend the City or die.
That we would die was a certainty.
How do you live when you know…
You know, without doubt, that
You will be dead within the month.
How do you carry on?
You will never see your wife again.
Your school sweetheart that you married.
The children that she gave you.
The children that you love.
We would dine with her, one by one.
Dressed in our finest uniforms.
Our medals polished.
Our Teutonic manners correct.
When I visited, we played
Her little gramophone,
Always Beethoven.
Often the Pastorale Symphony.
On another night, another Officer
Might ask her to amuse him with cards.
Or, one might request that she read poetry.
A few simply drank wine while admiring her beauty.
Men at war always capture women.
They make necessary use of these women.
The Japanese had their stables of
Chinese comfort women.
We had our women too.
Nubile, long-haired Jewish girls
Whose dark beauty far surpassed
That of our blond frauleins.
Our personal stable of mares,
To peruse, to use, to abuse, and
When we grew bored with them,
To be shipped to the camps.
They rode in cattle cars,
Those prim little Daughters of Abraham.
Once they were music students,
Readers and writers of poetry.
Now they were the cast aside whores of
The Master Race — the Third Reich.
No doubt most of them
Found their fates in the furnaces,
And welcomed the purifying fire.
But I was speaking of her.
The protected one.
The untouched, off-limits one.
The greatest beauty of them all.
Why can I make such a statement?
We had voted, you see.
When we sanitized the Dresden Ghetto,
We voted. She was unanimous.
I had assured her that when Dresden
Was safe for Jews to wander, she
Would be set free. We Officers had agreed
That he who molested her would die.
Then February 13, 1945, happened.
This was the night those who
Called themselves the Allies
Firebombed Dresden.
They turned our beautiful City,
The Florence on the Elbe,
Into a mass of molten steel
And ashes and bones and guts.
It was our night to die,
And we knew it.
The hundreds of air raid sirens
Ruptured our poor eardrums.
We, the Senior Officers,
Commanded the Junior Officers:
Hold your positions! Do your duty!
Defend our City! Save Dresden!
Then we repaired to her suite.
I myself was given the honor
Of gently rapping on her door.
And so I rapped, but gently.
When she opened the door,
Her countenance told me that
She was pleased to see me.
But then she saw the rest of us.
In an instant, she comprehended
Her final mission in this war;
For everyone in every war
Has a final mission.
And her mission in this war,
As even a fool could instantly grasp,
Was to distract us through the night,
While beyond these walls, our Dresden died.
Of all our little party, only I survive
To reminisce about that night.
When I think of her, I like to think that
She turned her mind to both the music
And the deafness of Beethoven.
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