Comrade Häftling
Liberation cannot come too soon
As a corrupt evil sports politician makes obscene calls for peace during his corrupt organisation’s corrupt tournament of corruption bought with oil money that is killing the planet and the blood of thousands of slave workers, remember the thousands of Ukrainians still in Russian hands are being murdered, tortured, genocided and beg for liberation. Scumbag.
The last football I went to and will go to was in Kyiv in 2012.
Here is something truly international. One of the poems my grandfather (patron of this site - he’s the one playing cards in our little icon) wrote about Auschwitz where he was prisoner 169601 - Polnische Politischen. He should have been killed earlier for his work as an underground publisher but he cheated the Gestapo by pretending he was only a courier - also a delayed death sentence in the camps which included Dora, where he welded V2 rockets for SS Colonel Von Braun, father of the US space program and US hero.
(Häftling is a prisoner in German. P stands for Polish on a prisoner’s triangle in a concentration camp. A red triangle with a P was a Polish political prisoner - aka resistance)
Comrade “Häftling”
Pages fall from the calendar,
The wheel of life incessantly turns,
The old nightmare does not terrify us any more,
It slowly fades from memory.
Just sometimes during a sleepless night
Looking at a window, I freeze:
I feel that you are with me again
Nameless “Häftling” - my old friend!
So when the moon, like a gong, shines in the sky,
The stars are lined up for roll call in silence,
My old camp friends - I call you,
Comrade “Häftling”, can you hear me?
Your name doesn’t matter here,
Comrade “Häftling”, nothing more,
I don’t even know your name,
Your name: - the hundreds of thousands.
Do you remember? On the same wire
Your sight hung and when you were barefoot,
We both dreamt of boots -
And our hair was also shaved the same.
How many times did we stand for roll call
We stood together for roll call in a line,
Or went to a worthless and stupid job
Five of us, barefoot in the snow.
And the same reason was the cause,
We lived in poverty, in humiliation,
On our chest, under the triangle, there was:
Our pride, our unbroken heart.
And the same strength made u believe
In that which will not never die.
The only difference between us two,
Was the letter on the red triangle.
God let us return to our countries,
So I returned to the grey Vistula,
And maybe today you’re at on the Danube shore,
Or maybe on the Loire.
There are mountains and rivers between us,
But the thread of shared experience connects us,
You are close to me, even so far,
I see my brother in you.
It doesn’t matter that you’re not a Pole, this doesn’t change anything.
Race, differences of nation don’t matter.
We are connected by bonds of blood,
Blood split in camps for one thing.
And if the months and years pass,
Let this live forever in your memory,
That this barbed wire joined us together,
Auschwitz joined us together forever.
Poems from the Alexander Kulisiewicz archive, Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, Kraków 1984, ISBN 83-03-00603-7.
Shout out to Aiden. He kept his sense of humor about his concentration camp like experience!
Continue liberating Ukraine. No pause for liberation from genocide. Not because of a war losing near-fascist American general or because of an obscene example of blood-drenched sports washing.
