It is Oswiecin now,
wood and stone homes,
ashes and asphalt,
and plots of cabbages and potatoes
along a lane that runs with mud each spring.

It has been scrubbed clean,
faint scent of lye soap,
of wood smoke, boiling cabbage, sausage.
There has been fresh whitewash splashed on old bricks.
It is ordinary, sterile, chaste, unoffending

But in the froth of winter
from the mottled granites of the Carpathians,
who for centuries have crouched
as stark gargoyles--sentries,
there are ominous shrouds of slate clouds
that roll over Oswiecin,
then, as if they realize where they are,
they rush in a boiling tumult--to get away.

There, cold, amid winter birches;
distant, beyond the wide platform;
abandoned; at the end of rusted tracks.
And ghosts, heads shaved,
with fresh numbers in blue tatoos,
all they own in a stained kerchief
still stand in queues.
For it once was Auschwitz.

John Quinn is father of two grown women and husband of another. He has lived, played, and worked in and around the Chicago area all his life. Retired from a Fortune 500 company, he spends his work week lunching with friends, walking, reading, and writing.