Children, The Gas Chamber, and Nationalism
The children are always first in my mind,
their hands still shaped like questions,
their mouths open not yet trained
to praise a flag.
They are eating bread,
they are tugging a sleeve,
they are counting steps behind a parent
who believes—because belief is easier
than seeing.
Nationalism begins like a lullaby.
A low hum, a promise of belonging,
a voice saying you are safe because you are ours.
It tightens later, the way a tourniquet tightens—
for your own good, they say,
to stop the bleeding.
The gas chamber does not know ideology.
It does not distinguish enemy from child.
It is only chemistry,
the blind obedience of molecules
entering the lungs,
burning the soft pink trees inside the chest.
The body tries to reason with air,
tries to remember how breathing used to work.
I imagine a child pressing their face
into a mother’s coat,
breathing the last private smell of home—
soap, sweat, fear—
while outside men argue about borders,
about purity,
about the necessity of sacrifice.
Nationalism loves abstractions.
Children are not abstract.
They are weight.
They are heat.
They are the small animal panic of survival
that history footnotes away.
Later, we will say never again
as if the words themselves were gates,
as if language could hold back gas,
as if love could be retroactive.
But the children are already gone,
and what remains is the question
we refuse to inhale:
how easily we traded their breathing
for our certainty.
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