"Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!" An updated version would replace Mexico with Ukraine and the United States with Russia. Geography supplies a turbulent history in both cases.
I was born a few months after the Second World War. Unlike many of my younger compatriots, I am familiar with the horror--millions starved--that Stalin inflicted on Ukraine and the even greater horror of the subsequent Nazi invasion, the brutality of which caused the death of millions of lives.
I periodically imagine the terror of aerial bombardment. Lying in a bed while the ceiling falls over me after a bomb struck my house. Running down a street flanked by exploding houses. Waking from a nightmare to discover that my house and I are still there. For now, I tell myself, for now.
I once met a woman who survived the terrible fire-bombing of Dresden, which took place in February 1945. I wrote a poem a few years later to commemorate the fiftieth year of the city's destruction.
The Survivor
a host of Judgement soldiers
plunder everything,
crack shock troops of total war,
each one a six-foot flame.
Moma, that was many years ago.
It's as if she hears angels,
confined to the head of a match,
scream in pain as it ignites: among them
her parents and their youngest child.
Her family fled to the cellar;
she ran outside, terrorized
by an army of flames,
running without looking back
until she reached New Jersey.
She never talked about it
until one day in her old age
the low drone of a jet became
a flock of bombers: she ran outside,
fleeing the heat of her stove.
Our house is on fire, our house is on fire--
Come, this will put the fire out,
I tell her, a Sisyphus task,
trying to put out the fires of hell
with spoonfuls of nursing-home Jell-O.
2.
Well, it has happened many times since. And it is happening again.
I remember talking with a man whose parents were both Holocaust survivors. He told me he had been convinced that, after the brutalities of the Second World War, civilization had learned its hard-won lesson. No country would be stupid enough to wage war again; its citizens wouldn't let them, he told me. This was during the Viet Nam war. He had long since realized his illustion. People haven't changed at all.
For seven decades after 1945, much of the world has enjoyed a long stretch of unprecedented peace. Alas, this is due solely to the fact of the presence of nuclear weapons. Although individuals can act "Gospely," that is, treating each other with loving-kindness, in aggregate the old saying homo homini lupus (man behaves like a wolf to man) still very much holds. Individuals, however, often act savagely as well. If, say, a terrorist had his way, I, as an American, even if I were as good as Gandhi, would be killed, felled by the poison darts hurtling from his vicious eyes. There is enough hate in this world to bury all saints and sinners alike. It's sad to say, but if you live in a major country, only nuclear weapons assure, however temporarily, that you haven't been incinerated yet. Things haven't changed for the past 100,000 years; like chimpanzees, we can be loving and kind, like chimpanzees, we can be wickedly vicious. When one crazy, powerful chimpanzee has amassed weapons', including nuclear weapons, and is willing to use them, one realizes that the separation of humanity from thuggery is merely a step and a thought.
3.
Many years ago I translated from the German a group of poems and a diary by a young Jewish woman. Ruth Rosenfeld, who escaped Germany just before the border closed. Here is what she wrote in 1934:
For power: men, more ruthless than a pack
Of wolves preparing to attack.
They eat, yet they remain unfilled,
Full-filled with one desire--hate, still?
Without end, human animals wage war,
No longer heed their center. Tearing peace asunder,
They rush on, greed-obsessed, to plunder
Everything. What's good they godlessly ignore,
And God remains beyond us, more and more.
Hate, still? Yes, Ruth, unfortunately, yes. This poem could have been written today, and--if we survive--probably could be written tomorrow.
A thug with delusions of grandeur is running amuck. Over Ukraine, his neighbor. Fear of nuclear war limits intervention. The result is alas! the slaughter of innocents. Pity that poor invaded country, so far from God, like us all, and so close to Russia!
Putin obviously underestimated the resisitance of the patriots south of the border. They are fighting valiently for their country, and will eventually win. When his identity is at stake, a thug, however, will not back down. That vile man has painted himself into a corner. Good news? Ultimately, perhaps; but it will take a lot of death and destruction before he reaps what he has sewn. When a rat is cornered, it bites.
The worst might be yet to come, but I am confident that Ukraine will survive. It has to. But at what cost?
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