The fucked-up trees

Just got back from a week in Poland... still processing everything that I saw and learnt and heard, but this is a piece from my diary a few days in that I thought I would share...

The trees are freaking me out again.
Some are a kind of silvery white colour. Others are sprouting so you can still see the white on the trunk but it's speckled with patches of green. Because of the season it's like they're changing before my eyes, from white to green.

Scattered patches of colour, with seemingly no rhyme or reason.
It seems strange because there's so much pattern in these forests. The trees stand in such long, straight rows. Or maybe it's because the trees themselves are so tall and straight.

People got killed in the summer and the winter and the spring and the fall.

When I'm in Israel I think about nature all the time. It's part of my experience of the place.
Every tree that I see grows from the soil of Eretz Yisrael.
Every tree is a Zionist.

Here every tree is a Nazi.
Every tree tells the story of a life being cut short.
Every tree watched Poles stand idly by.
Every tree screams different views of Poles dealing with this reality today.
Or not dealing. Trying to deal. Working out what to deal with. How.
Every tree gets nourished from soil in which millions of people are buried.

Trees are meant to be beautiful.
Nature is meant to be beautiful.
Fuck, the sun is meant to be beautiful.

The sun here is white.
Sun and trees are meant to mean light and beauty and growth.
Here it's all death.
Maybe the sun's rays aren't white... maybe they're grey.

The problem is that they are beautiful. No trees are actually Nazis.
They didn't actually kill anyone.
They're not actually screaming anything.

They're just standing there. Mute.
The truth is that they want to scream, they want to tell their stories.
Everything they've seen. Witnessed.
Get it all out so they can deal with it. Move on. Get back to being trees.

But instead they just stand there.
The sun tries to tell it's story with it's grey rays, but it doesn't work.
The trees try with their grey trunks, but they fail too.

Maybe the trees and the sun are the 6 million Jews murdered.
Stories untold. Eternally.