January 12, 2010

First it came . . .

First it came for the ground of Tuvalu

And I did not speak out

Because I was a Polynesian.

Then it came for the glaciers of Bolivia

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Bolivian.

Then it came for the monsoons of India

And I did not speak out

Because I was not an Indian.

Then it came for my water

And there was no one left

To speak out for me.

A modernized Version of Martin Niemoller’s Poem –

The poem is a modernized version, referring to global warming, of the poem by Martin Niemoller (1892-1984), “First they came for the Jews”:

First they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me.

Martin Niemoller was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor, one of the founders, with Karl Barth (1886-1968) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), of the Confessing Church, which opposed the nazification of German Protestant churches. Imprisoned in 1937, he spent time first in the Sachsenhausen, then in the Dachau concentration camp. He was liberated by the Allies in 1945. The poem has been traced to a speech Niemoller gave, in 1946, to representatives of the Confessing Church, in Frankfurt, Germany.