STORKS OVER AUSCHWITZ
Benjamin Sevart, FASPE
Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) promotes ethical leadership for today’s professionals through annual fellowships, ethical leadership trainings, and symposia, among other means. Each year, FASPE awards 80 to 90 fellowships to graduate students and early-career professionals in six fields: Business, Clergy & Religious Leaders, Design & Technology, Journalism, Law, and Medicine. Fellowships begin with immersive, site-specific study in Germany and Poland, including at Auschwitz and other historically significant sites associated with Nazi-era professionals. While there, fellows study Nazi-era professionals’ surprisingly mundane and familiar motivations and decision-making as a reflection-based framework to apply to ethical pitfalls in their own lives. We find that the power of place translates history into the present, creating urgency in ethical reflection.
Each month one of our fellows publishes a piece in Memoria. Their work reflects FASPE’s unique approach to professional ethics and highlights the need for thoughtful ethical reflection today.
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A stork passed overhead during my tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau as a Law Fellow with FASPE in the summer of 2025. This sight called to mind a senior staff member’s self-described “disturbing” remark that Auschwitz was the only place in the world they had ever witnessed the bird in flight.
Struggling weeks later to write a more academic reflection paper, I could neither shake the image from my head nor explain why it struck me so deeply. This poem poses that question through a series of vignettes meant to evoke the unease of the place and the personal and professional introspection the program sparked. It is intended to be read aloud.
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There guides answer delicate questions from Turkish doctors and Swiss lawyers
asking righteous how the wicked could stomach the constant killing.
Scant few connect his liking for paychecks and six weeks’ vacation.
There students suffer lectures about children’s sketches
protected by plexiglass in the Czech barracks.
Some snicker and scurry around like kids do.
There chimneys mark out ranks as terracotta soldiers,
silent, stoic, and decades into ceaseless sleep.
The others creep upon one’s thoughts unseen.
There a gatehouse lurks unspeakably obscene
in selfies clicked by thick-skulled visitors.
On second glance it seems weak, sickly.
There ballast crunches where God, ashamed, hid
his face from women men selected.
Just past sight the tracks stop.
Spend a scorching summer’s day there
to look, see; to listen, hear; to weep.
I think what stirs your soul will be the sky.
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Benjamin Sevart was a 2025 FASPE Law Fellow. He is an attorney in Washington, D.C.