Antifascist rally at Buchenwald concentration camp, 1945.

 In British-occupied Hamburg, a joint KPD-SPD action committee convened in July 1945 with broad support from their respective memberships to declare:

The will to merge into a powerful political party lives in the hearts of the millions of supporters of the once warring German workers’ parties as the most meaningful outcome of their shared suffering. This desire is deeply etched into all of the surviving prisoners from the concentration camps, prisons, and Gestapo institutions.

A pause, an end, a beginning, fresh,
a beginning after a pause,
all these are given in time
to measure the steps and the directions we take.
Give yourself a time to pause.
The pause will show you where you are;
the pause will show you where
you were heading for.
A lot can happen in a pause.
Holding my breath, I enter the pause;
holding the edge of Time
I come out of the pause and flow
with the river of Time.
I have survived often,
the times of a pause;
I will survive
until the time comes when the pause will be a real pause, not a small interval in Time. 

There were times when I was set
face to face with the Light and the Rays.
I heard you call my name.
"Get up my dear, it's morning, rather too late," you said.
But face to face with the awesome light, I was terrified to seize the hand.
The colours of the primal state
overwhelmed me in their stark simplicity.
but you seemed equanimous.
You were always one step ahead of me,
in the balancing as well as in the follies.
When all were engaged in the desperate deed
of saving your body and your undying spirit,
you had gone past the meditative state of analysis.
You had reached past the ephemeral
to draw your own derivatives
on what was worth preserving and what wasn't.
The breach of understanding between what you wanted to convey,
and what I failed to catch, was expanding enormously.
You were speedily crossing the line, moving past touch, sound, taste, and sight.
You had gone into the second state of meditation, deep reflection on the Mind,
the supreme witness of sensations and thoughts.
Then all the torment ceased, and you were in bliss.
A beatitude began to shine on your brow.
Even the ecstasy ceased, and you were in complete concentration.
You were your own mentor now, the complete heretic, the fearless atheist
that you were in life, so were you in the concentration achieved in the moment of death.
Thereafter, I lost track of you.
But somehow, knowing you in life, I can see how you fared on the route ahead.
Compassion, not for your smaller self, but inclusive of all, which sometimes you glimpsed in life,
fondness, love and stern justice, which were the markers of your life here;
dawned again on you in their pure undefiled spirit.
Thus far and no further, we were companions of life here.
Did I play my role of goading you on in this life
like a nagging, stubborn wife?
Did I hold you to life, like the deity holding one with the chain?
Did I help you like the deity fighting the forces of death?
And if finally I came, like the deity holding the heavenly bell,
letting fall the rain, of nectar on your soul,
I can say that I fulfilled the mission of my life.

The fligh bird!