The Holocaust poets who can help us to understand genocides past and present

On Holocaust Memorial Day we remember the victims of the Nazi Holocaust in 1940s Europe and all those affected by later genocides.

I believe that reading poetry is an important way to commemorate these victims because it is such a personal form.

The events of the Holocaust are familiar to many people as dates and numbers. The first concentration camp opened in Dachau in 1933. In 1942 the infamous meeting at the Wannsee took place in Berlin to decide upon the “final solution” to the perceived problem of Jewish people in Germany and beyond.

Some 6 million Jewish people were murdered, some 200,000 disabled and ill people were killed in Germany alone and 400,000 people were forcibly sterilised because they possessed traits the Nazis deemed undesirable.

Such statistics are well documented by Holocaust historians. But behind these numbers, overwhelming in their sheer vastness, are individuals, those whose voices we hear especially clearly in poems.

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People wrote poetry as realisation grew of their likely fate even before the murderous events that later came to be called the Holocaust. Many wrote poetry about the Holocaust later, because they survived and wanted the world to hear their stories, or because they lost family members and wanted to remember them.

Among those who wrote after the Holocaust was German poet Volker von Törne, who was wracked with vicarious guilt for his father’s Nazi past.

But it is the poems written as the events of the Holocaust were unfolding that strike a particular chord. These are poems by prisoners facing execution, by Jewish members of society forced to live in overcrowded ghettos, by those in camps and those about to be transported to camps. Often such poems were written on odd scraps of paper, carefully hidden or buried in the ground, or smuggled out of prison, ghetto or camp.

These writers, desperate to tell their stories, chose poetry because of its immediacy, its conciseness, its emotional impact and its ability to say what cannot easily be said in prose.

Almost none of them wrote in English, so English speakers read them via translators who can speak their words for them, fashioning new versions that aim to capture the style of the originals with all its resonances and as much of their immediacy and impact as possible.

Poets of the Holocaust

Some Holocaust poets became famous, and their work has been translated many times. One of the best known, Paul Celan, was a Romanian-German poet. His parents died in the Holocaust. He died by suicide in 1970, having written some of the most memorable poems about the Holocaust, including Death-Fugue (1948), which described the repetitive and deadly rhythm of camp life and death.

German poet Nelly Sachs, who escaped at the last minute to Sweden, won the Nobel prize in 1966. Her work is readily available in a number of excellent recent translations.

Other famous poets of the Holocaust include Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, Italian essayist Primo Levi and Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti.

But the stories told by these famous poets, important though they are, can only give a partial picture. Often the fine details of everyday experience, the fears and hopes of individual women, men and children, have a particular resonance in the work of lesser-known poets.

Romanian-German poet Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was only 17 when she wrote her poetry of fearful anticipation. She was transported to a concentration camp where she died a year later.

Lithuanian poet Matilda Olkinaitė was murdered at 19. How would their poetry have developed had they lived? We will never know. But what they have left us, recreated through their translators, is a highly sensitive view of life in the chaos of approaching catastrophe.

Voices in anthologies

For readers who want a fuller picture of Holocaust poetry, anthologies are invaluable. They usually have an introduction, or notes, providing the context that is so crucial to understanding the poems.

Two older anthologies, Holocaust Poetry by Hilda Schiff (1995) and Beyond Lament by Marguerite Striar (1998) are still very useful.

More recently, I co-edited the anthology Poetry of the Holocaust (2019), which arose from a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Our aim was to collect less well-known Holocaust poetry, and, with the help of 35 translators from languages as varied as Yiddish, Norwegian, Japanese and Hungarian, to present the poems in original and translation, with a contextual note for each.

We tried to include a broader range of poems than earlier anthologies have tended to do. The anonymous Song of the Roma, for example, laments the fate of the more than 200,000 Gypsy, Roma and Traveller victims of the Nazis.

Many poems in the anthology document very specific events, such as French writer Andrė Sarcq’s To the Twice-Murdered Men, which depicts the dreadful detail of his lover’s death at the hands of the Nazis, who treated gay men with unfathomable barbarity.

Polish Resistance member Irena Bobowska suffered the cruel removal of the wheelchair upon which she depended. She imagined the world she has lost in So I Learn Life’s Greatest Art.

German poet Alfred Schmidt-Sas wrote with extreme difficulty, as his hands were bound. He reflected on his imminent beheading in Strange Lightness of Life. And in My God, French poet Catherine Roux told of the horrifying and mundane details of her arrival in a concentration camp: “I’ve no hair / I’ve no hanky.”

It is only by listening to these individual voices that we can really begin to understand what the many millions of Holocaust victims went through, and what victims of genocides all over the world have suffered and are suffering at this moment. Poetry helps us to do this.

Jean Boase-Beier acts as Translations Editor for Arc Publications. She has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for research relevant to this article.