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Poetry of The Holocaust
This powerful, unique collection contains poems written not only by members of Jewish communities in Europe (representing the largest group persecuted by the Nazis), but also poems by people who were targeted on other grounds. Some belonged to political or religious groups who openly opposed the Third Reich, or they were homosexual, or members of communities such as Sinti and Roma, or they were perceived by the Nazis as disabled.
The work in this anthology originates from across Europe, and has been translated from many different languages. Most translations are specifically for the anthology, or have not appeared elsewhere. This wide-ranging volume gives a sense of the variety of Holocaust victims, and their poetic responses to the Holocaust; from the haunting to the primal. It covers the Holocaust in three distinct time periods; At the Beginning; Life in, Ghettos, Camps, Prisons and the Outside World; Life Afterwards.
The work in this anthology originates from across Europe, and has been translated from many different languages. Most translations are specifically for the anthology, or have not appeared elsewhere. This wide-ranging volume gives a sense of the variety of Holocaust victims, and their poetic responses to the Holocaust; from the haunting to the primal. It covers the Holocaust in three distinct time periods; At the Beginning; Life in, Ghettos, Camps, Prisons and the Outside World; Life Afterwards.
- GenresPoetry
227 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2019
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March 23, 2020 POETRY OF THE HOLOCAUST - AN ANTHOLOGY. Edited and introduced by Jean Boase-Beier and Marian de Vooght.
Arc Publications www.arcpublications.co.uk
amazon and other online booksellers
This multilingual anthology evokes a landscape of breathtaking horror, inhabited by ghosts. A world of wolves howling as an angel carries off the sun, and dead spirits stream like smoke through empty air. Spring is blind. Hills shake with awful laughter. Clocks dare not strike the hour. In a trilingual land, silence is the fourth language - the silence that rips wounds open.
The moon reveals the shadow of a drowned boy. Pine trees blink their eyelashes in a forest full of cries. A woman begs a passerby for stars. A dead soul kisses a bud at his own grave, and asks a mourner to do the same, so that the virtual caress can be exchanged. A poet vows to return as a yellow star, to remind the world of Auschwitz.
The poems, mainly shown in their original language with English translation, are often heightened by the mixing of the cataclysmic with the mundane. A prisoner stumbling forward on a death march, nostalgically recalls the annual making of plum jam. A bus conductor punches a hole in the conscience of his passengers.
And there are trains. So many trains, crammed with Jews. Roma, homosexuals, political prisoners, the handicapped, the mentally ill.
Jerzy Ogórek z Będzina, an 11 year old Jewish boy in the Krakow ghetto, imagines travelling on one such train, asking "where is it going?" And he gives himself the answer – Auschwitz. An anonymous Romani poet in the camp's Gypsy lager begs to be allowed to remain asleep and to dream, so that no one will know of his suffering – there is "no more fire, no joy, no laughter." In THE THREE REFUGEES, Jan Campert describes the impression a trio of exhausted strangers at Amsterdam Station made on him in 1941. Gathering up their strength, the group leave the platform and go out into the sunshine of the wartime city, not knowing what their fate will be. Two years later Jan Campert was interned for helping Jews escape to Belgium. He died in Neuengamme Concentration Camp.
In an imaginary postcard, Mircea Lacatus, a Romani poet from Transylvania, gives a satirical view of prisoner life. He notes that the food is good, though sparse, and the guards don't beat the interned when they fall down.
Abraham Sutzkever, from Lithuania, expresses the anguish of the parents of a newborn, a splinter of sunset. The birth contravened the laws of the Vilnius ghetto, and the baby was discovered and murdered by the Nazis.
The French Communist politician, Maurice Honel , describes the brutal minutiae of camp life, the teeth-chattering cold.... in the circus of crematoria. Fosty, an artist, imprisoned in Buchenwald because of his involvement in the Belgian Resistance, describes how a magical glade is invaded by accursed axemen who turn the pastoral scene into a charnel house. A French Resistance member, Charlotte Serre, uses short phrases to paint vivid images of lice, blows, whips, rollcall, and the watchtower that turns and turns like a carousel. In a powerful poem from Ravensbrück, Catherine Roux, another member of the French Resistance , writes how after a brutal strip search, her defiant pride in France. her civilised country, clothes her in love and makes her feel like a queen.
Irena Bobowska, a member of the Polish Resistance, a wheelchair user jailed for editing an underground newspaper, tells how memories of music transform her desolate prison surroundings into a sunfilled garden.
Estonian Jaan Kaplinsky asks in his accusatory savage poem, "how long can we stand here, how long believing that life is beautiful?"
Alfred Schmidt-Sas, awaiting beheading for spreading anti-fascist material, writes a brave and stoical piece about the luminous blaze of hopes or fears, the strange lightness of life so close to death.
Responding to a series of photographs taken in Brussels, 1943, Hugo Claus wrote the Dutch poem EVERY SUMMER REBECCA LIVED AMONG US. Rebecca, the Gypsy, with her oiled hair, skilfully reading palms, was unable to predict her own future. Terechtgesteld. Executed.
András Mezei, Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust, has written a painfully vivid scene of a Hungarian Jew, who, about to be shot, recognises a neighbour in the firing squad, and yells out, "Gustav! Aim straight between the eyes!"
In a mystical piece, Lithuanian Matilda Olkinaité, shot by collaborators in 1941, writes, "death bade me sing my final hymn, and death bade me dance my final dance,"
Yukiko Sugihara, wife of the wartime Japanese consul in Kaunus, Lithuania, describes her husband tossing and turning at night. He was desperately trying to figure out how to acquire more transit visas for refugees who were hoping to escape Europe via Japan.
DANCING GYPSY by Stanislav Smelyansky, is an ironically charming short verse in which a Gypsy invites a soldier to put away his gun and watch him dance, The Russian poem is in complete contrast to Smelyansky's GUILTY, a vicious accusation of the world at large, in which he roars, "you blame Hess, I blame you!"
In CLOSED TRAINS, Takis Varvitsiosis from Thessaloniki grieves for his Jewish countrymen as they are transported away. In a similar vein, Greek Yorgos Ioannou reveals how he is always waiting for the train from Krakow to bring back his deported Jewish neighbours. Every time he hears a creak on the stairs, he goes out to check if they have returned, then paints sunflowers to mask his disappointment.
Many poems describe the emptiness of days bereft of friends and family, the anguish of surviving alone with memories.
Romanian Paul Celan, who later drowned himself in the Seine, mourns for the mother who was shot before her hair could turn white and whose heart was torn by lead. The Dutch Chawwa Wijnberg is shown album photographs of murdered relations , the nervous smoke from her mother's cigarette evoking other smoke.
In ENCOUNTER, a delicate, moving piece, Norwegian Gunvor Hofmo grieves for her Jewish friend murdered and burnt with thousands of others. She hears her best friend's voice in the evening rain as the birds sing a dirge.
TO THE TWICE MURDERED MEN by André Sarcq is a harrowing tribute to the homosexual victims of the Holocaust, demanding recognition for their atrocious suffering . He dedicates his poem to the "homosexuals massacred by the nazis. inside and outside the camps."
SILENCE is Rita Gabbai-Simantov's heartbreaking Ladino lament for a lost Saloniki neighbourhood of Sephardic Jews. Ida Gerhardt, a Dutch poet who saw her Jewish friends being taken away, never to return, sums up the guilt of the innocent. About to lay flowers at Anne Frank's statue in Utrecht, she imagines the statue coming to life, rejecting the floral tribute. Ed Hoornik,also writing in Dutch, was arrested for publishing illegal literature, and expresses his lifelong trauma as "the survivor, the dead one who didn't die, the dog howling at the moon."
In SIXTY YEARS LATER, Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, sent from Lithuania's Vilna ghetto to Kaiserwald forced labour camp, recounts in Yiddish how she and her friends entertained children in the camp, explaining the inability of the Lord to rescue them. "God, too, wore a yellow star, How then could He save His children?" In SOMETIMES A HUNGER GRIPS ME, she relates the fearful hunger pangs of a well fed survivor... "there is bread in my house, more than enough. Then why the sudden ravenous hunger call? Probably, so I should not forget - "
In IT COULD BE, Rajzel Zychlinski dramatically expresses her shock when she believes she sees Dr. Mengele in a Tel Aviv cafe. the awful hallucination awakening dreadful gasfilled memories.
In a powerful short poem, Ceija Stojka , the well known Romani Austrian painter and writer, writes "auschwitz is my overcoat, bergen-belsen my dress and ravensbruck my vest. what is there to fear?" Another Romani poet, Hungarian József Choli Daróczi, says that God the Gypsy was orphaned at the gate of the Gypsy camp, and as a Gypsy, failed to find a manger and a roof. He observes, as do others in this collection, that God was powerless to save His people.
Renowned Dutch historian, Jacques Presser, writes a beautifully understated poem of a returned man who grows lovely roses. Despite the gardener's outward serenity, his traumatic memories cause his hands to violently tremble at sudden noises. Another Dutchman, Maurits Mok in THE FACE OF GOD AFTER AUSCHWITZ, tells it like it is. Surviving his parents and his sister who were murdered in Dachau, he scorns those who turn spit into prayers.
Mariella Mehr, the well-known Swiss Yenish author, was one of the victims of the Kinder der Landstrasse project, which decreed that Yenish children should be forcibly removed from their Swiss Yenish Traveller families. Her poem has a folkloric feel, in which dead children are covered with almond blossom, and wild herbs and mint are placed on the forehead of a corpse. The poem has a stark epilogue. To all Roma, Sinti and Yenish, for all Jewish women and men, for yesterday's murdered and for those of tomorrow.
THEY ALL WENT, by Bosnian Flory Jagoda, is an evocative Ladino lament about absence and deletion in a destroyed neighbourhood. There are no grannies, hair coiled in a bun, no roses, no cradles, no tambourines, And the poet, now living in America , asks, "where did they go?"
"It is seven hundred and fifty miles to Sobibor – I worked it out one evening with a map," observes Bert Voeten in THE TRAIN. Dutch husband of a Jewish survivor, his savage poem combines the horror of his wife's wartime train journey with a comfortably warm contemporary commute. "They should have gassed them all," a Dutch salesman casually comments.
"I often dream of Auschwitz nowadays," writes Boris Slutsky, recalling in Russian the walk from the station to concentration camp. The prisoners are greeted by a flying swan, which turns out to be smoke from the crematorium.
Yael Globerman's SECOND GENERATION expresses the ever present undercurrent of past persecution. The Israeli born daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors displays her transgenerational trauma while eating plum cake. "I hear something deep roaring and surging; There's a sea underneath the foundations of home."
Philomena Franz is a Sinti Auschwitz survivor, whose bleak piece WHEN I WAS A CHILD, describes how in her youth, she saw stones as flowers, but scarred by her memories, now sees flowers as stones.
Israeli Nitsa Dori writes a striking poem in Ladino. "Tell us no more train stories,.. you have passed on all your grief, let us weep for you with tears of love."
It seems sacrilegious to criticize such a moving, important work, but it maybe could have done with a bit more editing. On three occasions, the word Gypsy is written with a lower case "g", a serious oversight in a volume of such sensitivity. The introduction states that the Nazis intended to exterminate whole communities and whole languages, such as Yiddish, Ladino, and Romani. Therefore some examples of the Romani language would have been welcome. The compilers admit they lacked the relevant knowledge to source such poems, but an online search of Romani Organisations would have put them in touch with gifted poets fluent in English and Romani, who could have suggested suitable texts.
Surprisingly, shockingly, there is no poem to represent the thousands of compulsorily sterilised Afro-Germans and the interned African colonial soldiers who fought on the side of the Allies. At least one of the poems of Senegalese Leopold Séder Senghar, written during his internment at Frontstalag 230 and published in Hosties Noires, would have been fitting in an anthology of such breadth. Hopefully, a second edition of this Anthology will address this.
There is, however, much to praise in this book. In the words of the Italian Nelo Risi, the poets in this anthology speak for the silenced millions. This wide-ranging collection of poems is a heart wrenching tragic testimony to the traumatic suffering of those who died in the Holocaust, and to the spirit of those who survived.
Janna Eliot,
writer and translator
Arc Publications www.arcpublications.co.uk
amazon and other online booksellers
This multilingual anthology evokes a landscape of breathtaking horror, inhabited by ghosts. A world of wolves howling as an angel carries off the sun, and dead spirits stream like smoke through empty air. Spring is blind. Hills shake with awful laughter. Clocks dare not strike the hour. In a trilingual land, silence is the fourth language - the silence that rips wounds open.
The moon reveals the shadow of a drowned boy. Pine trees blink their eyelashes in a forest full of cries. A woman begs a passerby for stars. A dead soul kisses a bud at his own grave, and asks a mourner to do the same, so that the virtual caress can be exchanged. A poet vows to return as a yellow star, to remind the world of Auschwitz.
The poems, mainly shown in their original language with English translation, are often heightened by the mixing of the cataclysmic with the mundane. A prisoner stumbling forward on a death march, nostalgically recalls the annual making of plum jam. A bus conductor punches a hole in the conscience of his passengers.
And there are trains. So many trains, crammed with Jews. Roma, homosexuals, political prisoners, the handicapped, the mentally ill.
Jerzy Ogórek z Będzina, an 11 year old Jewish boy in the Krakow ghetto, imagines travelling on one such train, asking "where is it going?" And he gives himself the answer – Auschwitz. An anonymous Romani poet in the camp's Gypsy lager begs to be allowed to remain asleep and to dream, so that no one will know of his suffering – there is "no more fire, no joy, no laughter." In THE THREE REFUGEES, Jan Campert describes the impression a trio of exhausted strangers at Amsterdam Station made on him in 1941. Gathering up their strength, the group leave the platform and go out into the sunshine of the wartime city, not knowing what their fate will be. Two years later Jan Campert was interned for helping Jews escape to Belgium. He died in Neuengamme Concentration Camp.
In an imaginary postcard, Mircea Lacatus, a Romani poet from Transylvania, gives a satirical view of prisoner life. He notes that the food is good, though sparse, and the guards don't beat the interned when they fall down.
Abraham Sutzkever, from Lithuania, expresses the anguish of the parents of a newborn, a splinter of sunset. The birth contravened the laws of the Vilnius ghetto, and the baby was discovered and murdered by the Nazis.
The French Communist politician, Maurice Honel , describes the brutal minutiae of camp life, the teeth-chattering cold.... in the circus of crematoria. Fosty, an artist, imprisoned in Buchenwald because of his involvement in the Belgian Resistance, describes how a magical glade is invaded by accursed axemen who turn the pastoral scene into a charnel house. A French Resistance member, Charlotte Serre, uses short phrases to paint vivid images of lice, blows, whips, rollcall, and the watchtower that turns and turns like a carousel. In a powerful poem from Ravensbrück, Catherine Roux, another member of the French Resistance , writes how after a brutal strip search, her defiant pride in France. her civilised country, clothes her in love and makes her feel like a queen.
Irena Bobowska, a member of the Polish Resistance, a wheelchair user jailed for editing an underground newspaper, tells how memories of music transform her desolate prison surroundings into a sunfilled garden.
Estonian Jaan Kaplinsky asks in his accusatory savage poem, "how long can we stand here, how long believing that life is beautiful?"
Alfred Schmidt-Sas, awaiting beheading for spreading anti-fascist material, writes a brave and stoical piece about the luminous blaze of hopes or fears, the strange lightness of life so close to death.
Responding to a series of photographs taken in Brussels, 1943, Hugo Claus wrote the Dutch poem EVERY SUMMER REBECCA LIVED AMONG US. Rebecca, the Gypsy, with her oiled hair, skilfully reading palms, was unable to predict her own future. Terechtgesteld. Executed.
András Mezei, Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust, has written a painfully vivid scene of a Hungarian Jew, who, about to be shot, recognises a neighbour in the firing squad, and yells out, "Gustav! Aim straight between the eyes!"
In a mystical piece, Lithuanian Matilda Olkinaité, shot by collaborators in 1941, writes, "death bade me sing my final hymn, and death bade me dance my final dance,"
Yukiko Sugihara, wife of the wartime Japanese consul in Kaunus, Lithuania, describes her husband tossing and turning at night. He was desperately trying to figure out how to acquire more transit visas for refugees who were hoping to escape Europe via Japan.
DANCING GYPSY by Stanislav Smelyansky, is an ironically charming short verse in which a Gypsy invites a soldier to put away his gun and watch him dance, The Russian poem is in complete contrast to Smelyansky's GUILTY, a vicious accusation of the world at large, in which he roars, "you blame Hess, I blame you!"
In CLOSED TRAINS, Takis Varvitsiosis from Thessaloniki grieves for his Jewish countrymen as they are transported away. In a similar vein, Greek Yorgos Ioannou reveals how he is always waiting for the train from Krakow to bring back his deported Jewish neighbours. Every time he hears a creak on the stairs, he goes out to check if they have returned, then paints sunflowers to mask his disappointment.
Many poems describe the emptiness of days bereft of friends and family, the anguish of surviving alone with memories.
Romanian Paul Celan, who later drowned himself in the Seine, mourns for the mother who was shot before her hair could turn white and whose heart was torn by lead. The Dutch Chawwa Wijnberg is shown album photographs of murdered relations , the nervous smoke from her mother's cigarette evoking other smoke.
In ENCOUNTER, a delicate, moving piece, Norwegian Gunvor Hofmo grieves for her Jewish friend murdered and burnt with thousands of others. She hears her best friend's voice in the evening rain as the birds sing a dirge.
TO THE TWICE MURDERED MEN by André Sarcq is a harrowing tribute to the homosexual victims of the Holocaust, demanding recognition for their atrocious suffering . He dedicates his poem to the "homosexuals massacred by the nazis. inside and outside the camps."
SILENCE is Rita Gabbai-Simantov's heartbreaking Ladino lament for a lost Saloniki neighbourhood of Sephardic Jews. Ida Gerhardt, a Dutch poet who saw her Jewish friends being taken away, never to return, sums up the guilt of the innocent. About to lay flowers at Anne Frank's statue in Utrecht, she imagines the statue coming to life, rejecting the floral tribute. Ed Hoornik,also writing in Dutch, was arrested for publishing illegal literature, and expresses his lifelong trauma as "the survivor, the dead one who didn't die, the dog howling at the moon."
In SIXTY YEARS LATER, Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, sent from Lithuania's Vilna ghetto to Kaiserwald forced labour camp, recounts in Yiddish how she and her friends entertained children in the camp, explaining the inability of the Lord to rescue them. "God, too, wore a yellow star, How then could He save His children?" In SOMETIMES A HUNGER GRIPS ME, she relates the fearful hunger pangs of a well fed survivor... "there is bread in my house, more than enough. Then why the sudden ravenous hunger call? Probably, so I should not forget - "
In IT COULD BE, Rajzel Zychlinski dramatically expresses her shock when she believes she sees Dr. Mengele in a Tel Aviv cafe. the awful hallucination awakening dreadful gasfilled memories.
In a powerful short poem, Ceija Stojka , the well known Romani Austrian painter and writer, writes "auschwitz is my overcoat, bergen-belsen my dress and ravensbruck my vest. what is there to fear?" Another Romani poet, Hungarian József Choli Daróczi, says that God the Gypsy was orphaned at the gate of the Gypsy camp, and as a Gypsy, failed to find a manger and a roof. He observes, as do others in this collection, that God was powerless to save His people.
Renowned Dutch historian, Jacques Presser, writes a beautifully understated poem of a returned man who grows lovely roses. Despite the gardener's outward serenity, his traumatic memories cause his hands to violently tremble at sudden noises. Another Dutchman, Maurits Mok in THE FACE OF GOD AFTER AUSCHWITZ, tells it like it is. Surviving his parents and his sister who were murdered in Dachau, he scorns those who turn spit into prayers.
Mariella Mehr, the well-known Swiss Yenish author, was one of the victims of the Kinder der Landstrasse project, which decreed that Yenish children should be forcibly removed from their Swiss Yenish Traveller families. Her poem has a folkloric feel, in which dead children are covered with almond blossom, and wild herbs and mint are placed on the forehead of a corpse. The poem has a stark epilogue. To all Roma, Sinti and Yenish, for all Jewish women and men, for yesterday's murdered and for those of tomorrow.
THEY ALL WENT, by Bosnian Flory Jagoda, is an evocative Ladino lament about absence and deletion in a destroyed neighbourhood. There are no grannies, hair coiled in a bun, no roses, no cradles, no tambourines, And the poet, now living in America , asks, "where did they go?"
"It is seven hundred and fifty miles to Sobibor – I worked it out one evening with a map," observes Bert Voeten in THE TRAIN. Dutch husband of a Jewish survivor, his savage poem combines the horror of his wife's wartime train journey with a comfortably warm contemporary commute. "They should have gassed them all," a Dutch salesman casually comments.
"I often dream of Auschwitz nowadays," writes Boris Slutsky, recalling in Russian the walk from the station to concentration camp. The prisoners are greeted by a flying swan, which turns out to be smoke from the crematorium.
Yael Globerman's SECOND GENERATION expresses the ever present undercurrent of past persecution. The Israeli born daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors displays her transgenerational trauma while eating plum cake. "I hear something deep roaring and surging; There's a sea underneath the foundations of home."
Philomena Franz is a Sinti Auschwitz survivor, whose bleak piece WHEN I WAS A CHILD, describes how in her youth, she saw stones as flowers, but scarred by her memories, now sees flowers as stones.
Israeli Nitsa Dori writes a striking poem in Ladino. "Tell us no more train stories,.. you have passed on all your grief, let us weep for you with tears of love."
It seems sacrilegious to criticize such a moving, important work, but it maybe could have done with a bit more editing. On three occasions, the word Gypsy is written with a lower case "g", a serious oversight in a volume of such sensitivity. The introduction states that the Nazis intended to exterminate whole communities and whole languages, such as Yiddish, Ladino, and Romani. Therefore some examples of the Romani language would have been welcome. The compilers admit they lacked the relevant knowledge to source such poems, but an online search of Romani Organisations would have put them in touch with gifted poets fluent in English and Romani, who could have suggested suitable texts.
Surprisingly, shockingly, there is no poem to represent the thousands of compulsorily sterilised Afro-Germans and the interned African colonial soldiers who fought on the side of the Allies. At least one of the poems of Senegalese Leopold Séder Senghar, written during his internment at Frontstalag 230 and published in Hosties Noires, would have been fitting in an anthology of such breadth. Hopefully, a second edition of this Anthology will address this.
There is, however, much to praise in this book. In the words of the Italian Nelo Risi, the poets in this anthology speak for the silenced millions. This wide-ranging collection of poems is a heart wrenching tragic testimony to the traumatic suffering of those who died in the Holocaust, and to the spirit of those who survived.
Janna Eliot,
writer and translator
February 16, 2021
Beautiful and heartbreaking poetry from those caught up in the Holocaust. Many poems include their original versions as well as English translations.
December 30, 2021
Am I really qualified to judge this?
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews