Browsing in Thom Gunn's Poems 1950-1966 in bed last night, I happened on one I hadn't noticed before – 'Epitaph for Anton Schmidt'. With no clear idea of who Anton Schmidt was, I looked him up, and discovered that he was an Austrian who, recruited into the Wehrmacht on the outbreak of the Hitler War, used his position to help Jews in Lithuania, hiding them in his apartment, securing them work permits to save them from the death pits of Ponary (where up to 100,000, mostly Jews, died), aided the underground in the Vilna ghetto, and used Wehrmacht trucks to transfer Jews to safer locations. Having saved some 300 Jews, he was arrested in January 1942, court-martialled, sentenced to death and shot on April 13th. An ordinary-seeming man of no special gifts, described as 'a simple sergeant' and 'a socially awkward man in thought and speech', he seems to have been motivated only by basic human decency, underpinned by a firm Roman Catholic faith. After the war, he was promptly recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, but there was no official commemoration of him in Germany until 2000.
Epitaph for Anton Schmidt
The Schmidts obeyed, and marched on Poland,
And there an Anton Schmidt, Feldwebel,
Performed uncommon things, not safe,
Nor glamorous, nor profitable.
Was the expression on his face
‘Reposeful and humane good nature’,
Or did he look like any Schmidt
Of slow and undisclosing feature?
I know he had unusual eyes
Whose powers no orders might determine,
Not to mistake the men he saw,
As others did, for gods or vermin.
For five months, till his execution,
Aware that action has its dangers,
He helped the Jews to get away,
– Another race at that, and strangers.
He never did mistake for bondage
The military job, the chances,
The limits; he did not submit
To the blackmail of his circumstance.
I see him in the Polish snow,
His muddy wrappings small protection,
Breathing the cold air of his freedom
And treading a distinct direction.
This is a poem that needs no commentary. I will only draw your attention to the surely unique rhyme of 'Feldwebel' (sergeant) with 'profitable'. And here is a photograph of Anton Schmidt. There is indeed something in those eyes...
Such people make one feel somewhat ashamed. This is characteristically rigorous from Gunn and is apt.
ReplyDeleteYes, you can't help but ask yourself what you would have done. I guess Schmidt was slightly unusual in that he was more passive than active, not seeking out people he could help but saying Yes when asked. But how many of us would have done that, in the circumstances?
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