by
Poet's Day

And There Was No One Left

And There Was No One Left
by
Poet's Day

This week’s poem is chosen to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. It is ‘First They Came’ by Pastor Martin Niemöller.

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892—1984)

Poem 423. First They Came

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

This is a simple but powerful poem and it addresses one of the things that enables the rise of fascism—silence. It is easiest not to rock the boat and make it easy on yourself but, as Pastor Niemöller observes, eventually the crosshairs rest on you and yours and there is nobody else to protest.

Niemöller was himself antisemitic and a Nazi sympathiser at the outset but he was sent to the concentration camps for his opposition to Nazi control of the churches, so his words are charged with the real knowledge of what his silence had cost.

The poem repeats the same idea for the Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, and the Jews: each time the members of a community are silenced and borne away, and the remaining residents say nothing out of fear or indolence and because they themselves are not part of the community being attacked.

Eventually, as the fifth verse emphasises, ‘they’ come for the narrator of the poem and it does not matter much whether they are Black, Romani, LGBTQ+ or follow a different political persuasion—the outcome is the same, and since the communities have been whittled down in a kind of perverse version of natural selection where the least obtrusive members survive, the survivors are progressively less likely to make a fuss and the process continues.

I like it because it expresses the danger of remaining silent in the face of fascist oppression.

There are several performances of this poem on YouTube but Ed’s version is powerful and compelling.