When the tour-bus driver passed the empty parking space

for the third time, circling the lot for some superior

spot from which to dis-engorge his van, we impatient Americans

tried to help, pointing and shouting, to no avail.

*

“Nein,” he said quietly, and drove on.

*

When a slot opened up, just two spaces down

and I waited for my friends to disembark, I ambled over, curious

to see if a huge pothole or scattered thumbtacks had been the root

of his reluctance – or was he superstitious, and this space numbered thirteen?

*

Instead, I encountered a nondescript plaque embedded in the asphalt.

*

Below my sneakered feet, the words announced,

in German and English,

lay the bomb shelter-turned-bunker

where Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were married in 1945,

*

and where they committed suicide the next day.

*

From the parking lot we walked to the Memorials

to the Murdered Jews, the Persecuted Homosexuals,

the Victims of the Euthanasia killings and

the Murdered Sinti and Roma of Europe.

*

And it struck me-

*

The Germans had not “erased history.”

The atrocities of the Nazis were remembered

in museums, and on small plaques on buildings

and in parking lots that warned,

*

“This evil thing happened here.”

*

But it was the victims, not the perpetrators,

who were honored with remembrance

in memorials, buildings, gardens, and plinths,

their voices rising in ghostly chorus to sing,

*

“Never again,” as broken hearts sang along.

*

No Roma or Sinti are asked to vote

at Heinrich Himmler Community Center;

no sick or elderly Germans recuperate

at Josef Mengele Hospital;

*

No taxes are paid at courthouses named for leaders of the Third Reich.

*

No Jewish children are required to study

at Reinhard Heydrich Elementary,

Joseph Goebbels Middle School,

nor Adolph Hitler High.

*

Only in the United States, are the honored dead

*

the ones who bought and sold human beings,

the ones who wielded the cruel lash,

the ones who rebelled against and seceded from

this country we claim to love.

*

Only in Jacksonville, are the black and brown children we love

*

required to study at elementary schools

named for Joseph Finnegan and Stonewall Jackson;

middle schools named for Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, and Kirby Smith;

and high schools named for Andrew Jackson, Jean Ribault, and Robert E. Lee.

*

Change the names.

Honor our living children, not a lost cause nor our evil past.

~

Poem by Darlyn Finch Kuhn

Photo by The Post-Star