Could I have acted under Hitler’s dread?

Viewing innocent neighbors trampled dead?

Their tragic flaw: Jewish by nature’s law;

Offspring—imperfect: genes—mere devil’s claws.

If I’d seen them herded off in boxcars

Would I have shouted, “Stop your Aryan cause!

Your crimes so base—damned your purest blood;

All are humans ‘neath Hitler’s killing flood;

Dare you bury a Jewish people in German mud?”

Would I have watched kids and moms in ditches cast?

Viewed Jews bullet riddled to heave their last?

What man witnesses such horrors real

And stands as mute as silent structural steel?

Looking back now, appalling long years have passed.

Would I have joined these kin—in death been gassed.

Jews, my friends, yet just one lineage away,

To suffer torture, fire, shame and decay.

Such thoughts hark back: a time of living dead.

Could I have acted under Hitler’s dread?