Map Maker of (Number Five)

Simon sits in the paddock entrance
alone at his table with his drawings,
in his pocket a piece of cotton jade
(Number 29 of Work Team 3).

Although the State has copies
it promises to keep, he worries
New Europe doesn’t want to remember,
how much love passed down that road
(Avenue 1 New Life Township).

The train station and the
lorry turnaround, carefully designed
facades of terminus settlement
all so efficiently removed.

Surprising then, they took the fence
down and he stood forgotten in the silver birches
until there was nothing, the homicidal
order disappearing under daisy chains.

These days they come to find where family
and whole villages were not recorded,
thank him for not forgetting by rolling
them up in his magic carpet of ink
(3 metre by 3 metre Chart).

And he can’t say a thing but wonders
if they understand but still blame him somehow,
because a pretty girl in 1942 with sand
in her hair and sepia eyes wearing a
chartreuse pinafore,
(Stack 12 Dresses and Other Sundry Items) –

asked would it hurt much and
because he was only fifteen and could
only mumble “only for a little while”,
he lives to know it’s still going.

Published in Peace, Tolerance and Understanding Poems from the ACU 2015 Prize for Poetry, ACU Melbourne 2015.

Andrew Denton did ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ discovering the murder of his whole village occurred in the Treblinka camps. 925000 Jews were murdered here, and an unknown number of Poles, Russians, and Romas. He  spoke to the Map Maker at the entrance to the site, who told him his story.

Photo: Herbert Pfoch an Austrian soldier, ‘Train to Treblinka’.