Holocaust Poetry

Holocaust Poetry

Compiled and introduced  by Hilda Schiff   

Quill Press; New edition (7 Jan 2002)

Poetry may be the only medium capable of dealing in a fully satisfactory way with the intense — and often unbearable — feelings evoked by the holocaust.  Only in the poem do we find full expression given to the emotions of  pity, anger, and perhaps even rage. Hilda Schiff’s admirable compilation contains the work of a very wide range of poets, many from eastern Europe, and all translated into English.

Many of the poems are of  course harrowing — even if they do not quite catch your breath as sharply as an unknown subject might. Still, the smallest, most subtle shift can provoke the deepest feeling, as in Nelly Sachs’ O the Night of the Weeping Children:

          Yesterday Mother still drew

          Sleep towards them like a white moon,

          There was the doll with cheeks derouged by kisses

          In one arm,

          The stuffed pet, already

          Brought to life by love,

          In the other —

          Now blows the wind of dying,

          Blows the shifts over the hair

          That no one will comb again.

It must be almost impossible to read that without your eyes watering, and it is surely the thought of the children that moves us so unbearably. But there is also a sense in which we feel no less for the adults. Could anything be more desperately and heart-wrenchingly sad than Elie Weisel’s Never Shall I Forget (?):

          Never shall I forget that night, 

          the first night in the camp

          which has turned my life into one long night

          seven times cursed and seven times sealed.

A similar feeling of transcendent sympathy is evoked by Primo Levi’s Reveille:

          In the brutal nights we used to dream

          Dense violent dreams,

          Dreamed with soul and body:

          To return; to eat; to tell the story.

          Until the dawn command

          Sounded brief, low:

                 ‘Wstawac’:

          And the heart cracked in the breast.

There is in such poetry a small gleam of comfort to be derived from the fact of a surviving will to expression. But our knowledge of the conditions that wrought that creativity will not leave us while we are reading.

The holocaust is a subject that contains not a grain of humour. Though there is just one poem in this collection which permits of an ironic smile: Bertold Brecht’s War Has Been Given a Bad Name:

          I am told that the best people have begun saying

          How, from a moral point of view, the Second World War

          Fell below the standard of the First. The Wermacht

          Allegedly deplores the methods by which the SS effected

          The extermination of certain peoples. . .

                                                                        . . .in short

                        the feeling

          Prevails in every quarter that the Nazis did the Fatherland

          A lamentably bad turn, and that war,

          Although in itself natural and necessary, has, thanks to the

          Unduly ininhibited and  positively inhuman

          Way in which it was conducted on this occasion, been

          Discredited for some time to come.     

One of the most inventive of the poems is Czeslaw Milosz’s Campo dei Fiori, in which he juxtaposes the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto with the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno in Rome in 1592. In both the indifference of the crowd is described: In Warsaw/One clear spring evening/to the strains of a carnival tune/The bright melody drowned/ the salvos from the Ghetto wall. And after the burning of Giordano Bruno: Before the flames had died/the taverns were full again/baskets of olives and lemons/again on the vendors’ shoulders. The last verse of the poem suggests that there is always a danger in ignorance and forgetting:

          Those dying here, the lonely

          forgotten by the world,

          our tongue becomes for them

          the language of an ancient planet.

          Until, when all is legend

          and many years have passed,

          on a new Campo dei Fiori

          rage will kindle at a poet’s word.

The hope for the future must be that instead of rage kindling mobs, anger will kindle in majorities of thinking people — as we have recently seen in eastern Europe, and as was demonstrated by the immense courage of the Danes in the Second World War.

Here, finally, is a poem found on the wall of a cave in Cologne where Jews had been hiding. It was unsigned, and is translated by Hilda Schiff:

          I Believe 

          I believe in the sun

          though it is late

          in rising

          I believe in love

          though it is absent

          I believe in God

          though he is

          silent. . .

(Other translations are: Nelly Sachs by Michael Hamburger; Primo Levi by Ruth Feldman & Brian Swann; Bertold Brecht by John Willet)

                                                                                            Peter Hart