POPE PIUS XII KNEW

December 1, 1942

by Susan Cossette

Letter between Pope Pius XII, who served as Pope during World War II, and a German Jesuit reveals Pius knew of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust —James Gordon,  Dailymail.com and Wires, September 18, 2023

You knew and what did you do?

 

The Jesuit priest wrote to you.

The SS was running death factories,

6,000 Poles and Jews killed every day.

 

You knew about Auschwitz and Dachau.

 

Did you pray on your lapis lazuli rosary 

for the teenaged girl who saw her parents murdered?

Face down on her wooden bunk, 

after the tan suits shaved her head and pubic hair.

 

Your supplicants say you worked

behind the scenes to help Jews 

and stayed mute to prevent worsening 

the situation for Catholics in Nazi-occupied Europe. 

 

Your detractors say you lacked courage,

despite pleas from Allied powers fighting Germany.

 

Pius, Pius you knew, you knew.

The yellowed typewritten letter says it all.

 

Pius what did you fail to do?

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

WATCH THE VIDEO

by George Held

Screenshot of the video of the murder of Tyre Nichols.

For Rodney King

 

 

After Memphis, what more can we ask video

to do? After Tyre Nichols, what more

can it confirm? About barbarity,

good ol’ American barbarity? 

The Nazis had nothing on us when it

comes to barbarity. Just look at

the video and see those black men in

uniform dishing out murderous mayhem,

 

killing Tyre as surely as pink-cheeked

SS troopers brutally murdered an old Slav

or a Jew. Yes, these assassins, blond or black,

and legitimized by uniform, carry out

the will of the culture, brutalize the despised

while we, mute, wait to watch the video.

 

George Held occasionally contributes to The NVN and has poems now in Ultimate Reality and Jerry Jazz Magazine.

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY, 2021

by Howie Good

The SS officer rolled the corpse over, and the girl saw the face of her music teacher, with blood here and there. He had gone to fetch a ration of bread, and a loaf was sticking out of his coat. The girl drew closer. It looked like a serious piece of bread, and Jews had little to eat, soup that was mostly water with grass. Her instinct was to grab the bread and run. But she left it. She left it because she saw his face, with blood here and there.

&

When someone complains to me about trivial stuff, I’ll say, “Oh yeah, try going through life as a Howard.” In Judaism, at least as practiced by my parents, one is named in honor of a person who has died. I was named in honor of my mother’s father’s brother. I never met him. I’ve never even seen a picture of him. He died long before I was born and without leaving a trace—except for the 100-year-old man, a former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, arrested in Germany on 3,518 counts of being an accessory to murder.

&

It’s spring in name but not in substance. The land, to my amazement, seems to constantly rearrange itself in wild new patterns of rage and decay. On the border, small brown children languish in lockups. On city streets, young black men in police chokeholds beg for breath. There is something I have to do. I don’t know how I will do it. I just know from the pressure of tears behind my eyes that it has to be done.

Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).