'When an Individual Dies, a World Goes Out'

Magdalena Dora Blau was a Jewish Dutch girl, not yet three years old, when she was murdered on August 11, 1942 in one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. From its opening in 1941 until it was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, some one million Jews, 70,000 Poles, 25,000 Sinti and Roma, and 15,000 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union and elsewhere, were killed by the Germans at the Auschwitz complex of camps. 

After his friend Edgar Bowers died in February 2000, Dick Davis wrote a poem in his memory, “A World Dies . . .” (Belonging, 2002):

 

“A world dies when a person dies; who sees

And savors life as he did who is dead?

No one now lives the myriad privacies

That made the life that ends, now, on this bed.”

 

In an interview Davis said that even though he and Bowers were friends for many years, “we were still strangers to each other,” and added:

 

“There’s a remarkable line from Wittgenstein in which he says, ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world.’ The truth is, everybody lives in that private place. Everybody. And it’s so strange. We all interact, and we live publicly, and we share all kinds of things, but when an individual dies, a world goes out, It’s gone. The person’s particular take on the world is gone forever.”

 

[Davis’ interview with William Baer is found in Thirteen on Form: Conversations with Poets (Measure Press, 2016).]