Recently I read two poems which I want to share without much commentary – partly because they speak for themselves.
The first is by Primo Levi, the Italian chemist and resistance fighter, who survived the Auschwitz death camp and thereafter wrote books of astonishing grace and hope about agonizing tragedy and ultimate evil. In this poem he writes about the child turned into volcanic stone at Pompeii 2,000 years ago, the young girl Anne Frank converted into ashes in Bergen-Belsen and an unknown child vaporized at Hiroshima.
