No Looking Away - March 10 2026

 

No Looking Away

March 10 2026

In the final desperate days

with the enemy at the gates

they hung the cowards and traitors,

even though it was already too late

for treachery to count;

limp bodies

along a line of lampposts,

swaying in the wind

like festive bunting

suspended flags.

Or like gutted pigs

dangling from hooks,

emerging from the killing floor

in a warm abattoir. 

Even amidst the rubble

with no power for light

lampposts still stood, 

lining the streets

in all their elegant filigree

and reassuring order;

fond reminders

of the time before.

A row of gracefully curved arms

projecting sturdily out,

as if the city fathers

had foreseen the need for gallows

when planning their boulevards

and grand promenades.

Afterward

when no one talked about the war

and swore they’d never been Nazis

or even sympathized

the smell of rotting bodies

somehow persisted,

sickly sweet

cabbage-like

rotten egg;

indelible

as the stink of tobacco

that absorbs into plaster and paint,

suffusing the room

no matter how much you air it out.

Sense memory

does not permit

absolution or denial.

There’s no looking away from smell,

and it lodges in the mind

like that furtive parasite

that burrows into your brain

and eats its way deeper.

It seems the true believers

who fought to the end

and thought purity the highest ideal

never tired of death

even when millions had died.

Did not believe in sparing the enemy,

and took it on themselves

to decide who that was —

the neighbour they resented,

a man they’d secretly envied,

their lover’s spouse.

Adolescent bullies

who never grew up,

and small men 

strutting in their uniforms

with jack-booted swagger,

exacting revenge

for their own insecurity

and imagined slights.

In the recent New Yorker, in an article entitled “Lying Low - what everyday life was like in wartime Berlin”,  Elizabeth Kolbert reviews Ian Buruma’s book Stay Alive: Berlin 1939 - 1945. 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/16/stay-alive-berlin-1939-1945-ian-buruma-book-review

The following paragraph painted a picture that really stuck with me, and I immediately felt compelled to write.

In early 1945, as the Soviets closed in on Berlin, prisoners of war were forced to dig tank traps in the city’s rubble-strewn streets. These were referred to—privately, at least— as Lachsperren, or “comic traps,” because it seemed that the only use they would serve was to give the Soviets a laugh. The hunt for defeatists continued, ever more gruesomely. S.S. men and military police went around searching for deserters and “cowards.” When they found someone they thought fit the bill, they hanged him from a lamppost. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a German journalist who was part of a resistance group called Uncle Emil, wrote in her diary about encountering one such corpse. Passersby tried not to look at the body, which was swaying in the wind. “There are so many lampposts in Berlin, thousands of them,” Andreas-Friedrich noted.

Germany has done an admirable job of remembrance. (Japan, not so much.) We forget at our peril, and in this poem the persistence of smell becomes a metaphor for memory.  Even when you deny or look away, it’s there; and eventually emerges in things like post-traumatic stress, abuse or self harm, a desperate deathbed repentance. 

I’m not sure how to understand things like historical guilt and collective guilt, and I see how they can come to be resented. But in my opinion, we are all implicated anyway. After all, would you have really been a hero, or — immersed in that milieu — had the moral clarity and courage to oppose? Rather, we tend to go along to get along; conformity becomes contagion, propaganda indoctrination. This is the problem when we distance, demonize, and dehumanize the Nazis (or just caricature them), rather than force ourselves to see in them our common humanity:  to admit that we probably wouldn’t have been better. Just as if you lived in the early 19th century, you would likely never have questioned slavery. (Even though, admittedly, some enlightened souls actually did.) You are product of your culture, not some universal and absolute morality you were born with.

At the risk of sounding shoehorned in, I had to include this line: and thought purity the highest ideal. Because purity — racial, ideological — is the great bugaboo that’s common to all extremist movements, both left and right. Sometimes literally: Hitler was not just a racist, he was also a notorious germaphobe.  

I have to admit, when I wrote Small men in uniforms / and bullies with impunity, I also thought of the poorly trained and badly selected ICE agents in the US who were hastily recruited to fulfil Trump’s deportation quotas. What you get when you give authority to middle school bullies who never grew up.