Kielbasa

Nothing grew where Eden now was, Stanislaus saw. It had taken a long time. A fifteen year old boy had begun work in #5 Slaughterhouse in Wroclaw almost 70 years ago. A very thin boy. Wladislaw the foreman gave him various things that did not go to the butchers and meat factories. There was a room at the back where he showed Stanislaus how to make sausages. They were good. Better than what had made Stanislaus so thin. Ivan came and left the gates open. People still talked of liberation, but it wasn't that, in Stanislaus' view. The boy had walked away from the other 7,000 skeletons and stopped at the gate of that Slaughterhouse. It was only 6 kilometres from the places where the Eden Meat Products factory now was to the slaughterhouse. History said that it was one-and-a-half million lifetimes.

And now Stanislaus was back. The opening would be attended by local dignitaries and a junior minister from Warzawa. Stanislaus had seen him first on the tv: a typical bureaucrat, very like Hőss had been, if you thought about it. The junior minister had been put in charge of redeveloping the site. There were protests and that's why Stanislaus had put forward his proposal.

'It should be one of us, Pan Minister,' he'd said.

'One of you? Why?'' The minister looked up from his desk.

'It might be best. The Amis and their friends from Galilee. Some people still care.

'Do they?' The minister asked.

Stanislaus looked around the office. The Solidarna Polska emblem hung in a large frame behind the minister's desk. Photographs of the minister with Ludwik Dorn in the Sejm flanked it. Then he stared at the man behind the desk for a while until the minister spoke.

'Maybe you're right, Berkowicz.'

It had been easy, Stanislaus reflected. As easy as leaving behind the kashrut. When you spent the day with slaughtered pigs, what did it matter? Besides, Stanislaus had shown a gift for the sausage, Wladislaw had seen it, straight away. Whatever the foreman gave him Stanislaus spun from offal wheat into sausage gold. They had started at a street market, at the weekends. The first Saturday every link had been sold by 11.15. Wladi and Stan celebrated in Mleczarnia, although Wladi left early. Stanislaus looked out of the window at him, collar up against the wind, then turned away at the sight of the congregation leaving the half-rebuilt synagogue.

One shop, two, seven, a chain throughout Poland and a branch in Brooklyn. Looking backwards it happened so quickly. At the time it had been... a long-winded process. The first factory had been purpose built in 1965. Of course, there were quotas and the curse of full-employment and the crêche within the factory walls. There were the commissars to pay, and the Służba Bezpieczeństwa too.

God bless Lech Wałęsa and capitalism for enabling one factory to become ten. And then in the 90's, somehow, it had stopped being about sausages. First there were the one-word-name supermarkets over the border in Germany, then factory farms in Austria and Britain. Acquisitions, take-overs - friendly and hostile; mergers and outright theft although they called it other names. His company owned everything from kindergartens to crematoria.

His birthday, 85, a good day to open it. Eden Meat Products Factory. He wondered how long people would still call it Oswiecim or the Germans' name for it. Stanislaus watched as the Minister finally cut the ribbon after a speech which even he must have found boring. The guided tour was cancelled. The TV cameras would film the motionless machinery and tomorrow it would begin. The old Jew smiled as smile as cold as the Tatra mountains. Refrigerated wagons would bring good German flesh to make into kielbasi and Stanislaus would sell the Germans their own grandfathers back to them in their beloved sausages.

*Best read between this poem and this one.