A refusal to mourn

Fausta writes:

This morning Wretchard brought to my attention this Belgian senate report (in French) dated May 4, 2006. The report states that thousands of documents dated from 1930-1950 relating to the persecution and deportation of Jews in Belgium in the 1930s and 1940s were systematically destroyed "on a massive scale". Padded in the language of bureaucratese, the report says that essential documents from the Attorney General's Office pertaining the involvement of government officials, church authorities, local magistrates, and the royal family, specifically King Leopold III, during the German occupation were purposely destroyed, some as late as the 1990s.

Well, read the whole thing. I recalled Dylan Thomas' lines: (more follows)

---

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Dylan Thomas was wrong. After the first death, there is another.