Schindler's List

Schindler’s List

In the hushed streets of Bielsko‑Biała, the cold wind howled,
and a man with a sharp cigarro traced a list across a page.
Names like ink‑ed spears, a ghostly line of hope,
the burden of survival written in the margin of fear.

The factory rumbled beneath the mason’s clack of boots,
machines turning, iron‑clad hearts that beat for gold alone.
Yet amid the sputtering, the flicker of a lighter,
Schindler whispered Faschism is a crime; let us not…
A promise spoken like foreplay before a war’s cacophony.

Families, too small to be counted, in soot‑stained pockets,
were tucked into quotas of names, their futures traded
in the murmur of the factory drums, a secret poem
that read that war is cruel, but humanity is still a poem.

The list, a dare beyond donning a uniform— a ribbon of life—
told of children's pallid cheeks and mothers’ silent tears.
It carried the weight of galaxies: a person’s count,
a man still carrying a pocket of souls, a single, heavy stone.

We still clutch it in silence, a wartime relic of blue‑coloured parchment,
the names a holocaust mausoleum set beside a forge’s dwell.
Sombre, but benign, the list survived, reflecting a quiet triumph,
and after smoke settled, we read again the virtues of the great carriers.

Tonight, on the evening of a bleak autumn, a British narrator recites
the inked verses: In my furnace of iron, I did not merely forge.
I forged humanity, one name at a time.

Far from the factories, the memory lingers— an echo, a ghost of Schindler’s list
that our classroom trophies choreograph from folk‑lores and silent ceremonies;
it whispers to us all that it’s not the guns but the cords of compassion that hold history’s full string—
a legacy, handcrafted, a list engraved upon the soul of the world.