October 8, 1999
Editors note: The following column is by Roger Martin, longtime writer on research topics at the University of Kansas. His KU research webzine can be found at www.research.ukans.edu/explore/. He produces a biweekly column for Kansas print and broadcast media. Photos of Martin are available from the KU Office of University Relations, (785) 864-3256.
I know this psychiatrist whose mother's apartment was burglarized. The crooks left three items on her kitchen counter: an ace of spades, a butcher knife and a pair of her panties.
There's much more of this kind of thing afoot in the world, and far worse. East Timor. General Pinochet. Muslim massacres. We seem to have reached the hour of the beast.
Well, I've just come across a poet whose work has jarred loose an idea about how to ward off evil.
His name is Brian Daldorph. He's an assistant professor of English at the University of Kansas.
He was interviewed recently for the year 2000 edition of Poet's Market, a reference book of places for writers to publish their work. Daldorph talked about trying to see through other's eyes. In his first book of poetry, "The Holocaust and Hiroshima," he speaks in other voices as well.
In one poem, "Joshua Lubetkin Strangles His Son in the Forest near Wlodawa, Poland, 1942," he is Lubetkin.
"There were twenty-five of us Jews in hiding
in ditches in the forest.
Nazis and Ukrainian peasants were hunting us,
at least a hundred of them, armed.
We had no weapons but our bare hands.
When the Ukrainians got close to our camp,
my son started to cry.
He spat out the wet rag I stuffed in his mouth.
I prayed for him to stop stop stop,
I prayed so hard I thought my head would burst,
but he kept on.
When God told Abraham to kill his son,
an angel intervened.
There was no angel to stop me,
no God to wash my son's blood off my hands."
In another poem, Daldorph finds the voice of Hermann Schmidt, who executed orders for Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz.
"Obeying orders, Dr. Mengele
I did some of your dirty work in Auschwitz,
marching Jews to the gas chambers,
shooting a Jew who spat at you,
injecting Jews with phenolic acid.
When we evacuated Auschwitz,
I threw away my black uniform
and stole a suit off a clothesline.
I went back to my people and they took me in
as a hero who'd done his duty,
No questions asked.
Now they're hunting you, Dr. Mengele,
the Angel of Death:
you always were too big for your boots.
But even at Auschwitz I was only Hermann Schmidt,
nobody, nobody at all."
These poems and others by Daldorph suggest to me how crucial a long-legged imagination is in saving us from evil. Such an imagination permits us to vault into the perspectives, and the humanities, of those whose minds lie far from our own.
It's when imagination turns paltry that we can harm others. Perhaps we see them as cardboard cutouts. Or perhaps they're entirely beyond our grasp.
In either of those cases, we can do anything at all to them.
In the Poet's Market interview, Daldorph admits failing to write a poem from the point of view of Mengele: "I just couldn't get it. In the end, he was really the black hole of the collection."
At the moment we don't "get" other people, evil can colonize us. It's only by risking the brave leap into alien hearts, minds - and voices - that we may inoculate ourselves from it.
Columnist Roger Martin is a research writer/editor for the University of Kansas Center for Research. He also writes for and edits Explore:, research webzine of the University of Kansas, at www.research.ukans.edu/explore/.