Touring towns along the Danube, my rough Jewish boots trample cobblestone streets. Inset in sidewalks, brass stumble stones naming townsfolk murdered during World War II. Along the waters, a somber synagogue carved with perished names, marked and unmarked moss-covered graves.
At Austria’s Mauthausen concentration camp skeletal yellow-starred Jews, pink-triangled gays, Spaniards, Poles, and Russians worked until dead. Non-Aryans stacked like canned fish in barracks at winter degrees. Prisoners chiseled granite, lugged 100 lb. rocks up steep stairs. Stumblers on the “Stairs of Death,” “Parachute jumpers” flung to their deaths. Inside brick buildings, gas lines rusted concrete. Weak prisoners marched in for hot showers. Chemical death.
The camp, above town, disguised behind forested hills. Our guide reveals a letter from a neighboring farmer’s wife who objected to watching prisoners shot, then thrown off cliffs. She made this request: Could the atrocities be staged elsewhere so she wouldn’t have to see.
What happens to democracy when hatred and evil link arms? It’s not news to us what’s happening in the US. Adelanto Atlanta Aurora Bismark Battle Creek Brooklyn Casper Calexico Chicago Des Moines Detroit El Paso Honolulu Houston Leavenworth Lewisburg Miami New Orleans Newark Philadelphia Tacoma Youngstown. Caged migrants: 70,000 already detained.
Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz Victor Manuel Diaz Heber Sanchaz Domínguez. All dead. An unmarked black SUV just screeched by tinted windows rolled down. Masked men shouldering guns.
Ronna Magy’s recent writings appear in SWWIM Every Day, Cholla Needles, Made From Midnight, Rise Up Review, Women in a Golden State, The Los Angeles Press, Persimmon Tree, Writers Resist, and Sinister Wisdom. An alumna of the Napa Valley Writers Conference, Ronna’s curated readings of seasoned queer women poets for the Outwrite and Circa Queer Histories Festivals. She’s a retired ESL instructor and textbook author.
