Return To Strasshof

I get off the train where a sign greets me: Welcome to Strasshof! I feel strange and Curious, detraining unbounded on a sunny Day of July in this suburb of Vienna Where as a small boy during the war, I was a prisoner. The town is quite charming But hardly anyone here knows About the concentration camp. Finally, an Albanian guest worker takes me To the camp site. Hitler's lager was here, He says. The place is a tangle of shrubs And woodland and the old guard tower Rises in its middle. I take pictures, when suddenly A tall and furious man runs out of a house. He gesticulates and yells, Why I take photographs of this place? History, because of history, I tell him. Strasshof has a railway museum. However, No memorial commemorates what happened Here in the war years. Only the enduring Silence speaks of the eroding remembrance: The execution of memory.