Porrojmos: the Great Devouring

“Porrojmos”
Is what the Roma call the Holocaust –
And it came as no surprise
To experienced Roma eyes,
This “Great Devouring” –
For Nazi racial ideology
With its delusory biology,
Had already said the only way
In the bright new day,
Where
“Tomorrow belongs to me”,
In a thousand year Reich,
Where Might is Right,
For ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer,
Was to stop Gypsies, as they put it,
Breeding.
For re-creation and miscegenation
Was misleading,
To a society based upon racial purity
And doctrinal probity,
So this meant concentration camps
And sterilisation, with the lamp
Of fascist academia acting as a beacon,
For eugenics was the guiding reason,
And the way for doctors to get on,
Until petrol replaced the needle,
The spade, the scalpel,
Flames, the knife,
As gypsies were burned alive:
Lists ticked with no pity nor error,
Despite the screaming terror;
But Zykon gas was so much cheaper,
Than petrol ditches dug ever deeper,
And so horror itself was soon surpassed,
With 250 Roma children gassed –
Buchenwald guinea pigs in 1940,
Another beacon for the Holocaust story.
And while the winter rains,
And the chambers’ drains,
Choked on the smell of gas,
The death trains danced
To the tune of the Final Solution’s
Finely-tuned
Timetables.