Yesterday, we traveled to the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, a beautiful neighborhood on a lake that is home to boat clubs, villas, and resorts. The vibe of the area is so relaxing that it is easy to forget–and inconceivable to picture–that one of these villas was home to the Wannsee Conference, a ninety minute meeting of high ranking Nazi officials, including Adolf Eichmann, during which the logistical details of the Final Solution to the Jewish problem was planned. Seeing the conference room, with grandiose windows opening on to a gorgeous lake, in which factories of killing were planned was too much to comprehend, and though I knew that I felt, I just felt a sense of numbness at the ironic juxtaposition of life and death. This irony was added to by the fact that, when Eichmann listed the Jews in Europe that were supposed to be annihilated by the planned mechanism, the number summed up to 11,000,000. Though they failed at this, and the Nazis killed only 6,000,000 Jews, the total number of people killed, also equated to 11,000,000–a striking and scary parallel.
While sitting by the lake at Wannsee, I was touched to draft a poem. This is still a work in progress, but I’d like to share the first stage:
Tell me: what did you see in that lake
out the window, when the meeting
got boring, when you
zoned out, in the conference room at
Wannsee? Was the sky
blue that day? Did fish
swim that day? Were there boats
sailing? Could you see their wakes?
Did you ever wonder if the lake could hold
the Eleven Million?