Never Again?

The past, beyond our grasp forever

because it can’t be reinvented,

proclaims to us the message: “Never

again.” Its sins can’t be repeated,

but re-envisaged they may cast

a pall upon our future which,

while past is held onto too fast,

sinks into a nostalgic niche.

Retrievals of the past are in-

authentic, the original

an artifact we cannot win,

forever lost, made fictional.

The past is far beyond our reach:

its image fades and won’t return

however hard some try to teach

about it so that we may learn

its relevance. Since beyond

our grasp forever, let us let

it go, so that we won’t be conned

by those proclaiming: “Don’t forget.”

The missile that the Russians shot

into the Babyn Yar’s memorial

was for those who this rule forgot

a sad et tu Brute tutorial.

In the 6/19/22 NYT Linda Kinstler describes the destruction by a Russian missile of a memorial in Kyiv commemorating the murder by German forces assisted by Ukrainian collaborators of 33,771 Jews in a two-day massacre on September 29-20, 1941:

A sports complex, which was designated to become a museum to the Holocaust, was heavily damaged; the windows of other structures exploded from the impact…..On Twitter, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine wrote that the strike illustrated the world’s failure to prevent genocidal atrocities from recurring. “To the world: What is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?” he wrote. “History repeating …”

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians have started calling the Russian soldiers raschists, a neologism that, as the historian Timothy Snyder writes, means something like “Russian fascists” but connotes much more. It is a term underscoring the fact that Russian troops are committing the very same crimes that, in many cases, their grandparents fought to end. Their commanders claim to be preventing genocide, while their soldiers are engaged in committing one; they are destroying the same cities that their predecessors liberated. And, Ukrainian officials have said, they are doing their best to cover up the evidence along the way.