The White Rose

Wherein the Enlightenment had so radiantly shone ...

descended a darkness o'er the land, a blackening,

not of locusts sent by God ...

but that of an even more stubborn Pharoah

whose heart was even harder ...

whose command over masses numbing,

yet ultimately insufficient to blot out the light of day.

Ashkenaz- a land in which so many B'nai Jacov,

had come to make their homes.

Though in galus, already centuries old, why next year in Jerusalem ...?

This Pesach yearning ... hadn't they already arrived?

fought well in defense of the Fatherland?

who bore the Iron Cross proudly? '

Yet was there no foreshadowing of the darkness?

or had it not been when the land forgot Moses Mendelssohn,

and... bore Alfred rosenberg?

Had not Heine known that a land wherein books are burned,

so will humans ultimately be?

where the admonitions of the few prophetic voices

drowned out by the din of the incredulous

whose skepticism and cynical mockery provided advance notice

of evil's transcendence?

Or might it have been when men's apathy and fear

began to terrorize living space and individuality's resistance little remained?

when Jew hatred and blood letting were becoming national pasttimes-an opiate with which to

drug the masses and passive stupidity replaced the excitement of free thought's spirituality.

It was this same land in which not all debauched themselves

on the alter of the golden calf:

Hans and Sophie scholl were two such people

on whom had not been lost the distinction between right and wrong.

That same ageless lesson from the origins of mamkind's innocence.

The Gestapo executed Hans and Sophie Scholl

whose parents had taught them diligently and ...

spoken to them at home of right and wrong..

Nurtured had been these young people on individuality's inquisitiveness,

enough so that when almost all had become bad,

Hans and Sophie still believed one should have the courage to believe only in what is good.

When so many hysterically applauded tyranny's hypnosis,

this brother and sister had the presence of mind

to stand up and proclaim freedom's stubborn persistence

while the majority clung to falsehoods, deludely and tenaciously.

Hans and Sophie held that living a lie ...

was unworthyof the sacrifice they had prepared themselves to make

should their sojourn lead them too close to the truth.

Our sages knew that few are the righteous whose defiance of evil

leads them across death's yard to the gullitine,

but not before which blossoms pushed out the rot of weeds and beauty overtook ugliness.

For who could have foreseen that a WHITE ROSE ...

could burst forth in a land whose gardenswere fertilized

by the ashes of auschwitz, dachau, buchenwald, treblinka ...

a land wherein only the presumpton of guilt became the standard

of an obscene perversion of justice

and good people were perfunctorily tried and condemned ...

whose only "crime" was they had managed to remain human

in a country where depotism reigned not because ...

there were no good prople left,

but that there were so few.

Alan D. Busch

Revised 2007