What were you doing when Hitler rode to town?
Did you join the line of smiling faces on the boulevard
giving him Happy Heil HItlers?
Were you boycotting our businesses,
breaking our windows on Kristallnacht,
or hiding your head in the sand,
pretending not to see or hear or know?
Were you a teacher when Jewish kids were banned from schools,
but thought it was just the latest ‘departmental policy’?
Were you the friends, the neighbours, the co-workers
who turned us in?
Were you rounding up my relatives,
taking their homes, their businesses, their possessions,
then marching them to the ghetto,
and then to the cemetery?
Were you just ‘following orders’, driving trucks and trains,
not bothering to notice
the cattle cars packed with people?
Or were you a carpenter hammering nails and boards,
barely aware you were making gallows,
one after the other after the other after the other?
Were you that drop in the sea of humanity
who rose up,
or were you the sea of silent souls
that just flowed along with the Nazi tide?
What were you doing
when Hitler rode to town?
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Thought provoking words for reflection.
Such a black mark in world history.
Wish it had never happened.
It is very important that the Holocaust be remembered and taught as something that should never be repeated.