The Red Army overran Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Horrified by what they found, the Soviets
were baffled as to how best to respond
to that which cried aloud to heaven for vengeance.
In the end they let the SS guards go home
if they could but make it to the end
of a double line of liberated inmates
armed with spades and shears and rakes and hoes.

Systematically demeaned as they had been
none of the inmates demeaned themselves
one jot the more. They leaned upon their tools
watching Adolf’s bodyguard stride haughtily
to the gate, looking neither to the right nor left.
The SS camp guards, to a man, walked free.
Reaching home, they must have given thanks,
like Hitler, to Providence: Rewarder of the just,

changed into civvies, burned the dark uniform,
unfolded maps, counted their hidden cache,
reckoned if there was enough to reach America
after bribing checkpoints and border guards
to let them slink out of the conquered land,
relieved to have retained their precious lives
for all the sub-humanity they’d wasted: glad
that race supremacy had been acknowledged.