Three Poems
by Adi Samant, 2025 Business Fellow
Photos taken at the Auschwitz I Memorial in Oświęcim, Poland, 2025.
The Birds Have Learned to Chirp Again
Inside the museum, glass cases hold
what’s left of lives
a child’s shoe dulled to grey,
hair shorn and piled like crops of death,
suitcases marked with names
no one calls anymore.
The walls seem to breathe sorrow.
Dust settles on memory
like ash once did on lungs.
I cannot speak:
the silence is the language here.
Stepping outside, the air feels stolen,
as if the sky itself refuses to exhale.
The gravel crunches underfoot like brittle bones,
and shadows gather in corners,
unafraid of the sun.
But listen, a sparrow clings to barbed wire,
singing.
Its notes fracture the hush,
spill warmth on the frozen heart.
I do not forgive.
I do not forget.
But I witness.
I carry.
I promise.
Somehow, among ruins
green things push through earth.
Three little flowers have
bloomed. Somehow,
the birds have learned to chirp again.
Trees as pictured at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oświęcim, Poland, June 2025.
Black and white pictures taken by the SS in 1944.
What the Trees Remember
We stand here in green hush,
limbs raised not in praise
but in witness.
You call this meadow peaceful.
We nod in wind-blown agreement,
but remember what peace cost.
We heard small feet pressing the grass,
mothers’ soothing questions
with practiced lies they hoped were truth.
We listened as promises fell
like brittle leaves.
We watched them wait—
children tracing shapes in dirt,
dreaming of bread and beds,
not knowing the doors went one way.
We heard the shuffle of lines,
the soft weeping when guards turned,
the words spoken gently to hurry them along.
We felt the earth tremble.
We drank rain that washed red.
We have held every unmarked grave
in our tangled roots.
Now you come here,
quiet, respectful,
your cameras lowered,
your voices hushed.
We want to speak:
do not be fooled by our shade.
This green is not innocence
but memory.
We want to say:
take this silence with you.
Carry it like seed.
Let it break open in you.
Grow into vigilance.
For we remember.
And, if you
listen, so will
you.
Left two: pictures of houses in Oświęcim, Poland, June 2025
Right top: Schöneweide Forced Labor Camp
Right bottom: Sign board as seen in Oświęcim, Poland, June 2025
Juxtapositions
I stand outside Auschwitz
and see homes with painted shutters,
flower boxes spilling color
onto soil that holds unmarked graves.
How do you build a life
where so much was stolen?
How do you plant roses
where ash once fell like snow?
But I think too of those
who came back with nothing but memory
and chose to stay—
their defiance a kind of homecoming.
Liberation wasn’t leaving
but claiming the earth
that tried to bury them.
At Schöneweide, I watch children
chase each other past wire fences,
laughter ringing over a garden.
Two steps away, men once bent
under impossible weights,
bodies breaking in the name of empire.
I can’t look at the barbed wire
without hearing chains.
But the children run on green grass
as if no one ever starved here,
as if history were only in books.
Later I run past a sign
I ❤️ Oświęcim
like any city proud of its name.
And I want to tear it down,
scream how dare you love this place.
But I slow.
What is a city
if not someone’s home?
Where else should love go
if not the place
that knows all your ghosts?
I don’t know how to hold
all of this:
the beauty, the horror,
the memory, the forgetting.
I only know I must.
Because to see clearly
is the least I owe them.
Because life keeps growing
even in cursed soil.
Because love insists on rooting
where it was once forbidden.
Adi Samant was a 2025 FASPE Business Fellow. He currently works as an engagement manager at ZS.