The Good place

Aleksander's Antidote

‘Twas the middle of July, 1942.
Mother nature was fine.
The human nature was the one that was snotty.
And snorty.
It was high on gunpowder and blood.
One ear said ‘Schwing!’ and the other said ‘Thud!’.

There was a screaming frau (woman)
in the town of Birkenau.
It’s a storm before the revelation.
A mere addition to the human population.

At the Birkenau satellite camp, the mud.
Smoking a pipe, watching the flag unfurled.
For a moment, he forgot about the dying species.
It was a concentration camp, you know?
A human was worth nothing more than faeces.

“She’s got stamina, Blimey.”, he thought.
The screaming stopped.
“It’s going to get chimey”,
he thought.
But, a deafening scream accompanied the next chime.
It wasn’t the baby.
Neither it was the mother.
He blamed the heavens and ran inside.
Captain Aleksander Kaminski, the third,
The man in uniform,
The man under the hailed,
The man of the Swastika,
held the motionless bundle and
cried like a son-less child.

The man of steel wasn’t a screecher.
But later that night, I guarantee,
he cried more than the mother,
at least by a pitcher.
Each salty drop flinched the knife.
Why was he crying though?
It wasn’t his son, nor his wife.

The mother now, was stretched like a cord.
How a moment ago, she had an army of servants,
more than a devout Jewish could ever afford?
Now, all she had were the whipsters who kept their distance
at least, by a tool.
Every whip had a shriek,
no doubt.
But, her eyes.
Those smiling eyes.
They shuddered them.
“I did it, you fools”, she screamed at them.

The morning was grislier then the night.
The morning was obscurer than the night.
The soldiers stood in a single file,
guns out of their might.
The captain pointed at the rope-hung-mother,
“Who did that?”
No one dared to peek at her.
“Who in-the-hitler’s-Earth let her get away with it?”
He turned around. Screamed at her.
“Who did it?”
He knew it was her.

“We were tired, sir”
“All of you?”
“Jakob and me, sir.”
“What about the others?”
“We just wanted a shut-eye, sir.”

“Too early for food?”
Thought the pair of gunshot-startled vultures
at the far end of the dense wood.
It wasn’t a uniform that thuded the earth.
But, a shit stained rag.
The Kaiser was losing,
soldiers were at a dirth.

Long ago, on 31st of January, 1901..
In the city of Aachen,
There was another screaming mother.
It was a bit grisly but, he kept peepin’.
Aleksander’s brother, into the world, was slippin’.

He was happy,
he was going to get a new toy.
Then there was the strange cry.
Today reminded him of those ghosts.
Of the ghosts he always had a fear of.
He has lived this earlier.
He has seen
how a war stricken man can annihilate his wife.
He has seen
how a war stricken man can point at him, by a knife.
He has seen
how a mother tightens up just as
the tiny neck squeezes through the torn hymen.
He has seen
How the wife of a war stricken man can
can take her revenge, Amen.

Back in the present,
For the next fortnight
the camp was without a captain.
It didn’t matter exactly.
Their time was up.
The war was done.

“Dear Mother,
You promised me you’ll never come back.
but, I was looking at you.
I put a bullet straight through you.
Why aren’t you dead?
Why am I more afraid of you?
More than the war stricken-man? ”
Said the letter he wrote.
After his first kill, out in Mainz.
It’s like a poison that runs through his veins.
The war-stricken man and his beloved wife,
still holds him by his reins.

At the end of the fortnight,
he stepped out.
No one was there.
At least no one alive.
All his ‘workers’ were hanging
about the same place as she was.
They didn’t know where the war was.
All they saw was a way to end this.
They killed every other uniformed man
as a bliss.

But, Aleksander was happy.
Not because his deed undid itself
without the tools.
Not because he had nothing to lose.
But, because the impure,
shit-laced,
rags showed him mercy.
They left him a noose.

500 people were scrapped in the list of “Casualties of the fight.”
400 Jews.
99 German soldiers.
And a smiling Captain with a belt so tight.

Call it a suicide or euthanasia, perhaps.
Call it a Holocaust that went afloat.
I call it freedom.
I call it Aleksander’s Antidote.