What is racism? by Michael Rosen

What is racism?

It’s a clockmender who left his country to get a better living and all is fine until things start changing there’s an invasion he and his wife run to another town and the people who are supposed to keep law and order decide to put him and his wife on a list and then they decide that they will make them wear a special badge marking them out as different and then they decide that they will take all their money away from them and the clockmender and his wife have nothing much more they can do but sell old clothes in the market where they must put a special badge on their stall marking them out as different and they send letters to America for help from their relatives and they hear stories about how people like them are being shot and transported to places where they never come back from so they run again and they hear rumours of a place where they’ll be safe and they get there somehow and then someone from the army that invaded arrives and he hates people like the clockmender and his wife and he has lists and with the help of the people who are supposed to keep law and order he gets hold of the clockmender and his wife and he puts them on a train to a housing estate which has been converted into a kind of prison and from there they are shipped to a big station and from there they are shipped out of the country to a special place where people will work till they die where people are tortured where people starve to death where people fall ill and have no means of being cured where people are shot where people are gassed to death and the clockmaker and his wife are never seen again… No one in their family knows what happened to them for years and years until one of the letters that the clockmender sent to America turns up and bit by bit one of the people in the family finds the books that have the lists of the people who like the clockmender were rounded up and shipped out and bit by bit he puts the story together he doesn’t fully know why he’s doing this other than that he doesn’t want it to be that no one knows he doesn’t want it to be that people specialise in saying that such things didn’t happen so he finds out more and more about about the clockmender and his wife and the clockmender is called Oscar, known as Jeschie and his wife is Rachel and Oscar is Oscar Rosen who was my father’s uncle and now you know what I found out now you know what I wanted you to know and now I know that this isn’t something that no one knows.