The photos show a pool with a slide
and a sand pit – an idyllic family setting
separated from the gas chambers by just a few yards.
His grandmother told the children to wash the strawberries
because they smelled of ash from the ovens.
“So you ask yourself, they had to die. I’m alive.
Why am I alive?
To carry this guilt, this burden
That must be the only reason I exist
to do what he should have done.”
Goeth was played by Ralph Fiennes.
“I kept thinking this has to stop
at some point they have to stop shooting.
If it doesn’t stop I’ll go crazy right here in this theatre.”
She left the cinema suffering from shock.
Both she and her brother chose to be sterilised.
“When my brother had it done, he said to me ‘I cut the line’.”
Seeing his father’s childhood home he broke down
kept repeating the word “insanity”.
Taken from an article in BBC magazine about the descendants of high profile Nazis, 22 May 2012. Some words and phrases omitted for scansion. Submitted by Grace Andreacchi.
Verbatim Poetry 