Nazi dawn, Dachau’s gates opened wide,
swallowing prisoners for a dozen years,
incubator for the Holocaust.
Long hard roads and a collision course
for victims in their gray-blue stripes,
for gray SS, and American soldiers,
Rainbow 42nd, Thunderbird 45th,
all of their dead pointing the way.
Explosion for the world to see.
Skeletons, alive and dead, liberators’ tears of rage,
SS sprawled in the coal yard, in the moat,
unmourned by those behind the wire.
Grill ironwork gate swung open,
crematorium doors clanged shut.
Nazi twilight at the end of April,
one final plume of oily smoke,
in the Berlin bunker, pilot beacon, for the fires of hell.
I knew that “April is the Cruelest month”
before Eliot spoke to me in his Waste Land, in his “Burial of the Dead”.
I knew it after April 1st, that year,
Easter, a renewal day, of life and hope everlasting.
Five days later, we buried our dead.
I knew it when April, just one-third gone,
instead of lilacs in full perfume, shells burst on us,
black grey and acrid, in full springtime flower.
I knew it when friends in the cellar, where we dove for cover
laughed at the shelling, ate home-canned peaches,
and cared not that we escaped through a miracle of the conical burst,
vase-shaped, for the bouquet delivered.
I knew it when the heat of April, not yet half-gone, had melted away our rifle company.
Our President died, and no one much cared.
When a buddy was hit, quiet incantation,
“I’m glad it wasn’t me.”
I knew it in those later years, when we drank too much,
followed by tears and rage, and silent guilt.
But by then it was too late to atone for the cruelty of April, of the war,
and the men who fought and also suffered.
I knew that April and the war would end together, but not quite.
One last cruelty, the worst, lay open before us, in the death train,
at the crematorium, behind the wire.
Tomorrow it will all be ended,
and we victors and victims can proudly proclaim,
Nie wieder!
Jamais plus!
Nyikagda bol’she!
Never again!
We could feel it coming, summer did not in the least surprise us,
coming over the Taching See.
Summer was early that year, exactly on the 8th of May.
Summer ended that cruelest April,
but next year April comes again.
Who can ever be free of Dachau?
Not the inmates who somehow survived.
Not the Americans of ’45.
Not the visitors who come to see.
Not the old guards with their secret thoughts.
Not the townsfolk of ancient Dachau.
Not Germany.
Not the rest of the world.
And not the spirits who stand in the Appellplatz
waiting for the last transport call,
or who stir the leaves of the memorial birch
and breathe gentle sighs on the candles’ flames.
We both beat the odds against the enemy, one and the same,
you in the camps, we in the infantry.
This is a lasting bond with odds that we both would fall
unless the enemy finally fell.
We as survivors both before and after that late April day
had discovered the secret of beating the odds.
One of you told me that he entered and left twelve different camps.
“How did you survive?” I said.
“Luck,” he said. “An ounce of luck beats a kilogram of skill.”
And luck is needed to beat the odds.
We all suffered the cold, but we had three layers of wool.
and you had ersatz cloth with no warmth.
We both faced death daily, but we had rifles in hand,
and you had only empty hands.
We all wonder at the miracle of survival
and greet each day as a special gift.
Luck, or Providence needed in those deadly times,
sixty-five years ago,
with the deck stacked against us,
but we found the ways to beat those odds.
Drawn together by the Dachau magnet,
from throughout Europe, from every country,
from across America, from every state,
those imprisoned innocents,
those who fought to kill the tyrant met in turmoil,
death and sorrow, raging fury, and jubilation.
The din has ceased, this uneasy place is quiet now.
The shuffling gait and slumping file of despair and anguish
are survivors’ lasting memories only.
Those who reached out from inside the wire
to those who stared in disbelief,
look now, just once more,
deep into each other’s eyes.
See half-hidden there remembered pain
from injuries past and comrades dead,
in KZ lagers, on battlefields,
all victims of the same dark force.
A pain unending, despite that sunlit springtime moment,
when gun fire ended, guard towers emptied,
and life and hope returned once more.
Raise a glass, extend a hand, salute to all of the survivors.
Final victors über alles, final victors over evil.
Santé, good friends, farewell.
PDF: Memories_of_Dachau-sample.pdf
Early in February 2020 I took out from the library The Liberators, by Michael Hirsh, a narrative of eyewitness accounts from American infantrymen who stumbled upon and helped liberate the Nazi death and slave labor camps on the western front in 1945. It was painful to read, to say the least.
The book included two poems by liberators, and I googled them both, hoping to find more. One of the G.I.s, Dee Eberhart, had three additional poems included on the Comité International de Dachau website, and I resolved to set the four to music. I also learned Dee was still alive, at age 95, and I was able to reach him to get permission to use his poetry. We talked for an hour; his mind was as clear as could be. His daughter Cory sent me two chapbooks of his poems, Relics of War and Illusions, the latter yielding still another suitable for composition. Dee told me he wrote his poetry to try to forget what he witnessed, but it did not work.
Dee died in August 2021 at age 97. To have made his acquaintance is one of the great honors of my life. May he rest in peace, and may his memory be for a blessing.
I am deeply and eternally grateful to Dee and Cory Eberhart, and I can only hope I have done justice to Dee’s haunting yet inspiring words.
I had not expected to begin the project until June 2020, but the lockdown necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic gave me time to start work in mid-March. I completed the composition on April 13. The ever-worsening news of the pandemic, plus living intimately with Dee Eberhart’s searing poetry, made composing emotionally difficult, as did my own memories of three visits to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and especially of my 2017 pilgrimage to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The opening motif, D-G-D-C♯-C, ran through my head even before I began writing. It seemed like a bugle call that just runs out of energy. It leads to a slow, dirge-like march that not even Hitler’s ignominious death can alter. The dirge recurs briefly in the second and third pieces and again becomes the basis for the final piece.
The shoulder insignia of the 42nd and 45th U.S. Infantry Divisions displayed, respectively, a quarter-arc rainbow and a “thunderbird,” the latter designed by a Kiowa Native American.
The musical material in this section originated in my 2003 piece, “The Miracle of Hanukkah.” Maestro Robert Shafer advised me that its jagged nature was out of character with the rest of that composition, so I replaced it and saved the original for another time. That time is now. I felt the dry, molto marcato 7/8 motif would mesh with the story of the U.S. infantrymen, advancing slowly under fire.
Unlike the first piece, the motif is interrupted twice, once by the Easter rejoicing, once by the dirge leading to the penultimate “Never again!” in four languages.
Before fleeing the American forces, the SS guards loaded hundreds of inmates into a train — the death train — and locked the doors.
The Taching[er] See (Lake Taching) is in Bavaria, near the Austrian border.
Hebertshausen was a Dachau sub-camp containing, among others, Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war. The Appellplatz was the area in which prisoners lined up for daily roll call. SS officers would designate the ones to be transported to death camps in the east.
As with the death train, SS guards murdered thousands of prisoners before fleeing the advancing American troops.
I tried to evoke the Eastern Orthodox tradition (which includes memorial candles) with a chant-like chorale, mostly un-metered and a cappella, interrupted briefly by the dirge.
The 6/8 meter was an obvious choice to fit the poem, but as a result the piece came out more up-tempo and dance-like than I had envisioned. It was as if I had no control of what I was writing. Still, it creates for me a vivid image of soldiers and freed inmates, not quite believing their good fortune, dancing together on the graves of the SS.
It is now many years later, and liberators and liberated gather, some likely for the last time, at a Dachau reunion, still haunted by their memories. The dirge returns in full force, with reprises from each of the first four pieces. The composition ends with the very first motif, the last three notes inverted.
Eberhart could not resist an ironic reference to “Deutschland Über Alles,” and neither could I.