THE CHEMIST OF AUSCHWITZ

Proposing no experiment beyond
the necessary test - Be this man,
survive, and then recall -
the mankind-addict who trusted
instruments and laws that rule
each matter-pattern (as it holds
still, dances, holds, repels,
resists in its essential style) -
would perforce explore those properties,
enlarge the so far found, controlled,
compounded possibilities,
and, by his other art, spell out
characters, motions, motives,
attributable histories,
material and human
around the tabled elements -
an alchemy of tales.

Even at violation's limit -
a numbered turd interred
under slavers enslaved and sheathed
in the ordered shit of terror,
keepers and killers dutifully cruel
and rivetted in metal obedience
to idealistic love of hate -
Levi's obstinate observing
included more than their
abject insults to being and bone,
their normalised enormities,
their multiplied-till-mundane murders.
He went on knowing their own
neglected singular voices and faces,
while their souls' lewd uniform
he left almost invisible.

Another survivor of a managed hell,
van der Post (philosophical
explorer of misty uplands)
undertook to understand his hurter's
honorable oriental heart,
its race-deep knightly reasons:
he divined an arcane fineness
within the cultured ferocities,
and flirted with visionary
lovingness for well-done evil.

Not Levi’s method to define
the enemy's inward self -
Levi laboured just to bring
about belief
by unemphatic accurate accounts
of bruising visible fact.
Measurer of minutiae,
he accomplished something
surer than judgement,
cleaner than forgivenness.

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