A P R I L   1 9 9 5

IMAGINATION

In the Holocaust survival literature, prisoners
Are constantly getting beaten up with clubs,
Getting smashed with clubs, battered, pounded, broken,
Until they're taught the lesson of the camps:
To be alive is punishable by death.
This happens everywhere, and at all times--
The testaments are vivid--but in all the stark photographs
I've never seen a picture of the clubs.

In the museums I've never touched an artifact.
We have the pictures of the stiffened dead
In trenches, yes, but not the clubs
That put them there. We've seen the Lugers,
And those terrifying snarling Alsatian dogs,
And the whips, the hanging posts, the chimneys.

But not the clubs. Of course they were of hardwood,
The sort so dense that flesh is irresistible.
Forest ash? Birch? Apple? Oak, probably.

And did they actually manufacture them, as Nazis
Manufactured all the grim necessities?
And were they smooth and polished, then, like the canes
And crutches you see everywhere after a war?
Or were the clubs mere local opportunities,
Foraged-after, fallen Polish branches
Unstripped of bark, and craggy with knots?

And just as there was skin made into lampshades
And hair they used to make carpet slippers with,
Just so, were the clubs later carved
Into other useful items? Toy shovels?
Pencils for the children? Tiny Hummel figures?

Little disguised totem souvenirs
Of Jews and Gypsies, Politicals and Homosexuals,
And might the SS have traded in such things
Had they thought of them, after the war,
Though these were men of minuscule imagination
Given monstrous opportunity to wield it?

Totems, though. Yes. Carved folk figures
Of the dying and the dead. What better way to show
What they have done? Imagine, they would fill
The shelves of shops just after the armistice,
Row after row for sale or show, though few alive
With Reichsmarks enough to buy them.

But the rougher clubs, the barky,
Knotty ones that did the most damage, that smashed
And maimed and murdered--what of them? Kindling,
Probably, then ashes up the chimneys, wind-borne,
Then nothing but soft soot on the foreheads
Of the children as they trudged off to school . . .

Questions . . . Questions, and suppositions.
And now they sit in front of us, the children,
At their desks, hands folded. And what can we teach them?
Imagination is a terrible gift. Cultivate it accurately.

Steve Orlen teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona. His most recent book is The Bridge of Sighs (1992).