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Necrosol

“The Stutthof concentration camp was located on the periphery of the Vistula Spit in northern Poland, and was in operation from 1939 to 1945 during World War II. A total of 65,000 people died as a result of exterminating living conditions as well as executions… The soils of the German Nazi Stutthof concentration camp have clearly been transformed due to mass killing of a large number of human beings.” —Charzyński et al. (2015). Geochemical assessment of soils in the German Nazi concentration camp in Stutthof (Northern Poland). Soil Science and Plant Nutrition, 61: sup1, 47-54.

They keep repeating: don’t forget.
_They say: we never will.
But who remembers Europe’s debt
_to children it has killed?
It’s hardly thought of: babies shot
_or smashed against a wall.
The kids from Warsaw, Dom sierot—
_an orphanage. Gassed all
by the Treblinka personnel—
_great Germany’s fine force.
The nation’s pride, as one could tell:
_the world had not seen worse.

Treblinka’s smoke ascended high
_to cover Poland’s soil—
they find it right there when they try.
_They call it necrosol.
The children’s ashes are ingrained
_in grains that Europe eats.
When Europe’s fields are blessed with rain,
_their tears are mixed in it.

Some questions linger. They’re outside
_the realm of common thought:
what good is it to be contrite—
_for someone who is not?
Is that a people’s fault if choice
_was stark—and hard was it:
to spare some children—or to toss
_them all into the pit?
When Poland, Hungary, or France
_were murdering their Jews,
what was a nation’s preference—
_gas chambers, guns, a noose?
The children’s ashes feed the grass
_of lawns, and Poland’s fields.
There must be scientists who ask
_of harvests that they yield.

But caution’s needed, what to say
_when getting to the roots:
there is a law to make those pay
_who tell the horrid truth.
It’s nasty when their fathers’ crimes
_are called just what they are.
They would forget of Paneriai
_in Lithuania.
They would not think of Jews who burnt
_in England’s pleasant land;
the infants whom their mothers brought
_to perish, hand in hand—
in Kiev, ghettos, or Vel’ d’Hiv,
_or centuries before.
It’s Europe’s custom: don’t let live—
_not Jews. Come, murder more.

And come they do, brought in by hate
_that’s hammered in their youth—
but don’t you dare, you cannot say
_the truth. It’s too uncouth.
Don’t try to change the caring minds
_embracing human beasts,
when good intentions make them blind—
_at best, to say the least.

But better yet, they can hope that
_it’s Jews who’d get the worst.
Why care if there is a death threat
_when it’s to them, at most.
Perhaps the savages will act
_as planned in ahadith,
and leave no Jew alive at last—
_unlike what Europe did:
it tried but failed to murder all…
_Unsated, still unfilled—
the soil of Europe, necrosol.
_Its nations’ timeless guilt.

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Poet’s Note

Necrosol: “nekros” is Greek for “corpse”; “solum” is Latin for “soil.”

Paneriai (Ponar; Ponary): a suburb of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, is the site of mass murder organized and executed by the Nazis and local killing squads. In 1941-1944, 50,000-70,000 people were killed there, most of them Jews.

Dom sierot (“House of orphans” in Polish): a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, whose entire population of over 190 little children and staff, including Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit), a famous writer, was murdered in 1942 in the extermination camp Treblinka.

“England’s pleasant land”: In 1189, after Richard I refused to admit a delegation of English Jews to his coronation, a mob burned Jewish houses in Westminster, killing those who tried to escape. In 1190, The city of York’s entire Jewish community was trapped by a mob inside the tower of York Castle. Many members of the community chose to commit suicide rather than be murdered or forcibly baptized. The rest were burned. Those were not the only pogroms in England.

Vel’ d’Hiv (the Vélodrome d’Hiver): a sports arena in Paris, France, where the French authorities, collaborating with the Nazis, rounded up French Jews in 1942 to transport them to Auschwitz.
A Polish 2018 law: “Art. 55a. 1. Whoever publicly and contrary to the facts attributes to the Polish Nation or to the Polish State responsibility or co-responsibility for the Nazi crimes … shall be liable to a fine or deprivation of liberty for up to 3 years… 2. If the perpetrator of the act specified in section 1 above acts unintentionally, they shall be liable to a fine or restriction of liberty.”—https://www.ms.gov.pl/pl/informacje/news,10368,nowelizacja-ustawy-o-ipn–wersja-w-jezyku.html

Ahadith: plural of hadith (“report”), is the body of traditions and practices of Muhammad, the Sunnah, which Muslims are supposed to follow. It is mentioned sometimes that the genocidal intent of Hamas is obvious from its Charter that talks about killing the Jews. What is usually omitted that this part of the Hamas Charter is a direct quote from a sahih (authentic) hadith, part of the Muslim scripture: “Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger ﷺ as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews” (Sahih Muslim); “Narrated ‘Abdullah bin ‘Umar: I heard Allah’s Apostle saying, “The Jews will fight with you, and you will be given victory over them so that a stone will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me; kill him!'” (Sahih al-Bukhari).

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Michael Vanyukov is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Psychiatry, and Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh. He immigrated to the United States 30 years ago as a refugee from the Soviet Union.


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14 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Michael, your poem should shame the world, but of course we know better, since the same ancient hatreds exist, though many of them just below the skin. As a student at the U.S. Army Russian Institute, we made a trip to Poland and toured Auschwitz. One officer classmate spent a lot of time looking in on the of the bin displays housing luggage. He had tears in his eyes, and I asked him why he was staring. He said he was looking at each piece of luggage (they all had names written on them) to see if his grandparents’ names were on them. I did my best to understand and comfort him. I commanded one unit in Germany that debriefed Jewish family migrating from the Soviet Union and later was XO in the states of another unit debriefing them for any military intelligence information. You are a great writer, and your poem sends shudders up my spine. The information you provided at the end was important to understanding the impact of your great poem.

    Reply
    • Michael Vanyukov

      Dear Roy, thank you so much. You are too kind. I am happy my words met with your response I could only hope for. I have finished The Velvethammer, btw—what a fascinating story, from the side I could only guess about! I hope to find more details about that.

      Reply
  2. Brian Yapko

    Michael, congratulations on writing one of the most brutally honest poems I think I’ve seen on this site. It is an exercise in bravery, candor, forensic detail and condemnation of those who have never actually earned forgiveness and who, in fact, have now earned a harsher judgment than they can presently grasp. Oh, but they will. History will demand it.

    You’ve packed a great deal of historic detail into these short lines and you’ve given them imagery that is, frankly, hard to look at and which haunts the soul, even in these jaded times. One stanza stands out to me as particularly horrifying and yet essential reading. I will quote it verbatim because it is both incredible poetry and offers karmic consequence wrapped in forensic analysis:

    Treblinka’s smoke ascended high
    _to cover Poland’s soil—
    they find it right there when they try.
    _They call it necrosol.
    The children’s ashes are ingrained
    _in grains that Europe eats.
    When Europe’s fields are blessed with rain,
    _their tears are mixed in it.

    It is a concise but shocking meditation on Europe’s literal and figurative cannibalization of its Jews. In this day and age when the term “genocide” is so grievously abused and manipulated to turn all morality upside-down and to make a tiny minority population (0.2 percent of the world’s population) magically responsible for 90% of its ills, it is important to look at what a real genocide looks like: 1,500,000 Jewish children were slaughtered in the Holocaust. Say that number out loud: One million five hundred thousand children were brutally and deliberately murdered. They were not collateral damage from errant bombs. They were not starved by their own people to score propaganda points. No, these were children who were SYSTEMATICALLY butchered with bullets or poison gas. The only thing that comes close to the brutality of the Nazi regime was Hamas beheading babies in front of their parents or baking them alive in their ovens in the presence of their restrained, screaming parents. Hamas is happy to betray its own people for a sound bite or a cover story — anything to fetishize their professional victimhood. Anything to milk public opinion against the evil Jews who are simply trying not to get killed. Again.

    I’m glad you brought up the slaughters in England. Similar pogroms took place throughout Western Europe during the Crusades. The Crusaders going to fight the infidel could not bear the idea that Jews (and their property) would remain behind unslaughtered. Easy target since Jews weren’t even allowed to have weapons and were forced to live in ghettos from which they couldn’t escape.

    Back to your poem. Now that Europe has decided to betray the few Jews who they didn’t slaughter 80 years ago, a proper understanding of FORENSIC history is essential. We look at evidence, not propaganda. We take the testimony of the remaining victims of Nazi atrocities. We weigh the ashes of cremated exterminated Jews by the metric ton. We count gold molars and wedding rings harvested from the dead. And we count lampshades made out of Jewish skin. I could keep going, but it makes my heart hurt. And that, Michael, is what makes your poem so exceptional.

    I’m very glad that you wrote this poem. I would not have had the courage or the skill to do so.

    Reply
    • Michael Vanyukov

      Dear Brian, your review is an amazing work by itself, and I am proud Necrosol caused it. The latest events make my blood boil, as all our past rises anew right in front of us. Thank you, dear friend.

      Reply
  3. Theresa Werba

    Michael, in a time when it is once again fashionable to hate Jews, and to use war as an excuse for virulent antisemitism, I am grateful for your thoughtful, measured poem, which reminds us of the horrors of the Holocaust in raw and evocative terms. You might be interested in my poem “The Ballad of Babi Yar” which was published here a few years ago: https://classicalpoets.org/2020/11/the-ballad-of-babi-yar-by-theresa-rodriguez/

    Toda Raba and Shanah Tovah!

    Reply
    • Michael Vanyukov

      Dear Theresa, thank you for your kind words! Thank you also for your poem. I owe only to my grandma’s foresight that she left Kiev before she and her two daughters would end up in Babi Yar, as others from our family did. It is heartbreaking to read, again, now in your masterful English rendition, the actual German order to Jews, “All Yids in Kiev must report,..” My translation of “жиды» would be “kikes”, but even that does not quite express the level of Jew-hate endemic to Ukraine, Russia, and … generally necrosol. Thank you! שנה טובה ומתוקה!

      Reply
  4. Laura Schwartz

    Michael, it took me over an hour to get through “Necrosol”, leaving me fractured. The grief, horror, and sorrow you described are permanent and personal, so I could only handle one stunning, gut-wrenching stanza at a time. Shamefully, I knew nothing of England’s 12th century brutalities towards Jews, but with that history running long through their veins, I’m sadly unsurprised the country is entertaining a mega-resurgence of hatred. In tears I moved forward, your words, our truth, stabbing my soul. Michael, your poem is bloody perfection, a piece for the ages.

    Reply
    • Michael Vanyukov

      Dear Laura, I wish there were no history like that to reflect on, or that there would be no reason to. I wish I really could deserve your kindness, by a more adequate expression of what turns my dreams into nightmares: the never-ending story of hate and all the disguises it keeps pouring out.

      Reply
    • Mia

      Dear Laura, I live in England and I try to keep in touch with what is going on, and I would like to assure you that there is no mega resurgence of hatred against Jews.
      But it is well known that the prime minister is very pro Islam and is no doubt seeking to appease his so called supporters.
      The vast majority of British people are now seeing the take over of their country and remonstrating but sadly it appears to be a little late.
      Please also try to remember that their forebears died fighting Nazis. One reason , in my humble opinion that severely weakened the U.K. But they did the right thing.
      I do think that the Jewish people have been tasked with being a light unto the nations but unfortunately have not had much of a chance to be that. I am sure someone somewhere will not like me saying that. I assure you I stand for Israel and the land that has always belonged to them.
      May God have mercy on us all.

      Reply
  5. Margaret Coats

    Michael, your poem as a plea for gathering all the evidence is well-stated and timely. A poem can have the conveying of data as an important purpose meant to influence the reader. I have long wondered why European scientists in all fields were not encouraged to use their particular methods to gather more evidence earlier. In part, I believe, the early establishment of the number “six million Jews” killed in the Holocaust is to blame. Holocaust denial laws were formerly brought to bear against anyone even suggesting the number might be different. Therefore, there was fear that scientific analysis might contradict “six million.” The number could be greater. Of course it could also be fewer, or inconclusive, or the results could be interpreted wrongly, but why NOT study the matter from every angle? Truth demands it. That’s one reason I appreciate the still ongoing effort in Israel to find out the name of every single victim, insofar as possible. Since not all names are available to population studies, the number collected may not seem large enough. But isn’t it humane to list all names we can, even if we never document them all?

    And evidence, either physical or documentary, will not last. The soils at Stutthof can be classified now as necrosol because a large number of human beings were killed there. But soil is generally a surface characteristic subject to change. And other locations, for many reasons, might give varying results calling for careful interpretation as well as investigation. Scientific study in any relevant field is preferable to imagination! Even history is to some degree a social science, which is why you bring evidence that was recorded long ago but might be unavailable or forgotten now. Well done there; it supports the argument for scientific analysis precisely because few historic places can now be analyzed by present means.

    One little alteration to your note: the Latin word for soil is “solum,” a neuter noun. The adjective or noun “solus” refers to anyone or anything “alone.”

    Reply
    • Michael Vanyukov

      Dear Margaret, I have written a reply to you already, but it disappeared when i hit “submit.” You dig deep, as usual. To be sure, you are right about the need to study. That is how I arrived to the the term “necrosol” and the article I quote (and thank you for correcting my Latin mistake–I hope Evan can make it right). It is also with bitter irony, however, that I refer to those studies in Necrosol, which are as macabre, while legitimate, as counting the victims of the Shoah. As they say in a very different context,,it is the thought that counts. The same murderous thought, again and again. Thank you!

      Reply
  6. Michael Vanyukov

    I wrote this in 2018, upon reading about the Polish law referred to in the Note. I decided to offer “Necrosol” for publication now, when the latest bout of European antisemitism, inspired by the 10/7 *continuing* mass murder of Jews, including small children, has culminated in the open endorsement of genocidal terror by Europe. As correctly assessed by the Hamas chieftain Haniyeh, it “raised the Palestinian [murderous] cause to an unprecedented level” and “opened the door to recognition of the Palestinian state.” The enlightened European governments and the UN are recognizing the nonexistent and never-to-exist “palestinian” state, a KGB lasting invention, whose virtual reality has always had but one goal: the annihilation of Israel and Jews. This recognition allows Europe to think it will kill two birds with one stone – whitewash their nations’ crimes against Jews and appease their exploding Muslim population. Instead, it is likely to finish Europe.

    Reply
  7. Paulette Calasibetta

    “Necrosol” is beautifully penned; the detailed imagery and raw facts deliver a powerful message, a message we should never forget; yet it persists today, in the greed for power in the diabolical hearts spewing deception for truth.

    Thank you for your well researched and resourceful poem.

    Reply
    • Michael Vanyukov

      Dear Paulette, you helped my hope that my message can get to the reader. I wish that history and the present events were just in pursuit of power. That object can be reached by bloodless means – and human have evolved mechanisms for that. Those mechanisms, however, cannot satisfy the human murderous instincts, especially when they are “legitimized” by an eliminationist ideology, such as Islam, communism, or Nazism. And while Nazism was suppressed at the cost of tens of millions of lives, and communism – at least until recently – has not been truly legitimized in the West, Islam has been misconceived of as another “Abrahamic religion,” despite its overt call for world domination by monstrous means. It is stuff of nightmares when the two totalitarianisms, communism and Islam, join hands—as they’ve started to in Europe, followed by the US. Thank you!

      Reply

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