The idea seems to be that even with the advance of decades since a horrific event, later generations still bear a moral responsibility for atrocities commited in their country's name; one cannot consider themselves excluded from the fatal commotion that had come before--there is no statute of limitations as to when no longer carries the blood stains and the culturally enscribed rationalizations that made the murder of millions a massive event performed both for the greater good and a fulfillment of an historical inevitability. There is no generational priviledge; whatever one tries to do in occupation, hobbies, lifestyle, the routines of contemporary life, on grand and smaller scales, echo the terror, whisper of one's connection to the evil that was perpetuated, implies without subtlty one's responsibility to change the culture to the true nature of a collective personality that made the unthinkable an historical fact we must confront.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day:
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you’re sitting down to a meal.

Hecht, though, is heavy handed in this delivery of what is history lesson and moral that would make for an easy round of applause; one can't argue with his politics or his sense of morality, but the parallelism he uses goes quickly from being an effective device to a trick used a few times too many. As with some other poems of his I've poured over, there is a smugness in his work I find grating, even on points I would otherwise agree without pause or reservation. Handwringing is what occurs to me, a routinely glum observation that humans are fully capable of being evil , dispicable bastards, and that the people who make such monstrosities possible are likewise horrible. This would make a fine speech,but it makes for a poem that wears it's morality like a loud suit of clothes.