Two poems from a series about Heinrich Himmler's personal masseur, Felix Kersten. He used his influence over Himmler to secure the release of many prisoners — much like Oscar Schindler. Elizabeth Lube was Felix Kersten's Secretary.
Biskupin: the facts
Not quite Atlantis — submerged city of myth — rising entire
and dripping from the depths.
More like the makings — a jumbled mess of timbers
needing careful reassembly.
The national dailies dub it Polish Pompeii, chuffed to uncover
evidence of a site settled by Slavs
as far back as the Bronze Age.
A schoolteacher out walking in '33 finds wood fragments
floating in Biskupin Lake.
Buried deep in history's sediment —
two and a half thousand-year-old ruins.
Five years' work carbondating beams and struts, figuring
the layout — a breakwater, ramparts, one hundred houses
from local pine and oak.
A wooden Iron Age fortress on an artificial island.
Marshland water as preservative.
Here is a past to build a future on. Polish ancestors —
ingenious, skilled, sophisticated builders
able to defend themselves.
Visitors flock — thirty thousand in the first five years.
The euphoria doesn't last long. In '39 Nazi hordes swarm
across the border. All of Poland to be cleansed of Poles —
Lebensraum for pure-blood Germans.
Poland — taken out of Polish hands.
Posing intellectual, Himmler sets up SS Ahnenerbe,
Ancestral Inheritance Bureau
Nazi think-tank briefed to prove
continuous Aryan world rule.
They loot, lie, alter chains of evidence
to claim Germanic reign since the Iron Age
proving history is what the victors say it's going to be.
Like a bunch of Iron Age he-men they muscle into Biskupin.
Himmler makes himself patron,
renames it Urstadt — original town
bending even the name to suit their ends.
Hans Schleiff (Hauptsturmführer, archeologist) at your service
confident he would do the Reich proud.
No qualms about altering the archeological record
fudging facts. He claims German invaders
overcame the early Poles, rebuilt the town,
improving its design.
Biskupin, he glibs, another shining example of the Reich's reach.
A minor wrong
when set against five and a half million Poles
dead by Nazi hands.
Elisabeth Lube opens her heart
Mutti treated him like one of her own. Naturally I helped her out.
I'd darn his socks, turn collars on his shirts,
his cuffs as well. Occasionally he'd get a bolt of cotton —
the tailor run up