This is a brief introduction to three poems generated by the Holocaust–the mass slaughter of European civilians, especially Jews, by Hitler’s Nazi regime before and during World War II (Merriam-Webster).
Oppression and resistance are among literature’s many themes. Perhaps the most terrible example of state-based oppression—you could call it state-based terrorism—in modern history is the Holocaust—the enslavement and extermination by the Nazi regime of approximately six million Jewish people, many in the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and Treblinka. Hitler established the first of what became death camps in 1936 at Sachsenhausen. Following the defeat of Germany and her allies in the Second World War, the Allied forces liberated the camps in 1945. Camp officers and the German bureaucracy had tried unsuccessfully to conceal the extent of their crimes. Arthur Cohen named the Holocaust the tremendum (the fearful or monstrous thing), and wrote: “The tremendum transforms everything that went before into distance and remoteness, as though an earthquake had overturned the centre of a world” (The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust, 1981). According to George Steiner, the violence of the “Final Solution” administered by Hitler’s henchman Hermann Göring—the attempted extermination of a whole people—leads to silence, because it “lies outside speech as outside reason.”
Many brave souls have nevertheless tried to understand the Holocaust and the factors that led up to it. Historians and movie-makers, novelists and documentary-makers, psychologists and philosophers have all tried to make sense of so much cruelty and suffering. The passage of time has if anything increased people’s efforts to understand. First published in 2000, E. L. Doctorow’s philosophical novel, City of God, is an example. Can you think of other recent examples of Holocaust literature, history, films or discussions?
Perhaps the leading motive for continuing to investigate the Holocaust through so many media has been an urgent wish to forestall a recurrence by understanding the causes. Another motive has been that of searching out a grain of comfort for what happened—people have tried to reconcile the horror with their shattered faith in humanity or in God. Thirdly, the Holocaust says much, more than we want to hear, about human beings’ capacity for both doing and suffering evil. Fourthly, victims who lost children and parents, wives and husbands, brothers and sisters in the death camps, or their own health, dignity or self-esteem, have sought since 1945 both to express their anguish and to protest against tyranny and prejudice. Some of these motives are evident in the poems discussed below.
Our purpose in reading these powerful poems is to understand and empathise with Holocaust victims. Since the poems arose from the writers’ first-hand experience, they embody the unbreakable connection between poetry and real life.
“Pigtail” by Tadeusz Rózewicz
The renowned Polish poet and playwright Tadeusz Rózewicz evidently wrote “Pigtail” after a visit in 1948 to the museum at Auschwitz. During the War Rózewicz fought the Nazi occupation as a member of the Polish resistance. The Gestapo murdered his brother, who also participated in the resistance movement, in 1944. Rózewicz’s poetry as a whole exemplifies the debilitated and despairing attitudes that tend to appear in literature following a major war. It deals with human existence as a struggle against nothingness, and contains a sensitive ethical dimension.
Pigtail [Translated by Adam Czerniawski]
When all the women in the transport
had their heads shaved
four workmen with brooms made of birch twigs
swept up
and gathered up the hair 5
Behind clean glass
the stiff hair lies
of those suffocated in gas chambers
there are pins and side combs
in this hair 10
The hair is not shot through with light
is not parted by the breeze
is not touched by any hand
or rain or lips 15
In huge chests
clouds of dry hair
of those suffocated
and a faded plait
a pigtail with a ribbon 20
pulled at school
by naughty boys. (The Museum, Auschwitz 1948)
Which features make the power of “Pigtail” obvious even in translation? I suggest the following, but you may have more to add:
- Simplicity of vocabulary and grammar: many of the words are ordinary and mundane: “brooms,” “swept up,” “pins and side combs,” “a pigtail with a ribbon,” “naughty boys”. The understated, even deadpan, language creates a context that makes the elements of danger and tragedy more shocking: “When all the women in the transport/ had their heads shaved…”
- Focus on the detailed, the concrete and the particular: vast emotional and ethical dimensions emerge from a narrow focus on details. Normalcy contrasts with murderous threat: “four workmen with brooms made of birch twigs.” Descriptions of and references to a concrete item, hair, unify the poem. There’s a very great deal of it. “In huge chest/ clouds of dry hair” reveals the number of women who died, but the mass finally reduces to a single object, the “pigtail” of the title. The reader realises with a deeper shock that little girls were among those slain. The pigtail proves the reality of the individual child.
- Contrast between the dead hair and the living, feeling people to whom it once belonged The pigtail and the whole mass of “stiff” hair is preserved “[b]ehind clean glass” in the sterility and immobility of death. The owners have all been “suffocated in gas chambers” but the “pins and side combs” suggest that some of the dead women were young and filled with life–that they loved being alive. Yet now their hair will never again be “shot through with light”; and they will never know the joy of feeling the breeze in their hair, or the touch of a human hand, or the rain, or a lover’s kiss. Finally, the contrast built up between young lives, indeed children’s lives, and their premature deaths is strengthened by recognition that the pigtail is of the kind that “naughty boys” pull at school.
“Pigtail” uses few poetic devices. We can analyse associations of the metaphor, “clouds of dry hair” (this hair is under glass; it will never again be under clouds). We can point to the moving repetition of “is not parted…is not touched,” but overall this is a modern poem that doesn’t strive to be “literary” in a self-conscious way. Yet it makes the horror it describes immediate and real. “Pigtail” invites the reader to remember, to grieve for the women and girls, to understand and to share in their loss. Rózewicz’s poem stays with the crime and the tragedy, with the raw emotion. It offers no comfort, does not reflect or philosophise. It contains no warning or admonition that such horrors must at all costs be avoided in the future. Perhaps such a warning is too obvious to be spoken. More ominously, it may be because such atrocities have always been, and it seems will continue to be, part of human history. (More recent genocides come to mind, such as the killing by Bosnian Serb forces of more than 8,000 Bosnian Moslem men and boys in the town of Srebrenica in 1995.)
“Shemá” by Primo Levi
Levi (1919-1987) was an Italian industrial chemist in Turin, arrested by the Nazis after participating in the anti-Fascist resistance movement and transported to Auschwitz in 1944. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camps alive. His experience in the death camp and his circuitous journey by train back to Turin were the basis of his renowned memoirs, If This Is a Man, written in 1947, but not widely distributed until 1958, and The Reawakening.
Shemá (1958) [Translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann]
You who live secure
In your warm houses,
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man, 5
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman, 10
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
Consider that this has been: 15
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house,
When you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise. 20
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
Like “Pigtail,” “Shemá” functions as poetry partly through its simplicity of vocabulary and syntax, although it has an added dimension of intensity. For me the simplest, most intense line is: “Who dies at a yes or a no.” The poem’s title derives from the Jewish prayer, “Hear [i.e. Shemá] O Israel, the Lord our God is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9; 11:13-21). The title emphasises the moral imperative to hear about and commemorate the suffering of Jewish people. Commemoration is the tribute that those who are living comfortable lives with their families owe to the victims of atrocities perpetrated by Nazis and others. “Shemá” demonstrates the power of poetry to awaken consciences, to broaden and deepen our awareness, and to embody heart-felt protest.
It takes the form of a powerful encounter between a first-person speaker, an “I,” and a “you,” i.e. readers whom the opening four lines define as living peacefully in a post-war world. “You” is the first word in the first paragraph, while the command, “Consider,” is the basis of what follows. Thus the poem hinges on the simplicity of two words: “You…Consider.”
The second paragraph demands that the reader “Consider whether this is a man….” and “Consider whether this is a woman….” Stark evocations of the fear and humiliation of the Auschwitz prisoners follow in each case. Introducing the third stanza, the third “Consider” insists that the reader never forget. Like the Torah, the divine law delivered to Moses and repeated ritually in Jewish households, the reader is urged to engrave these terrible realities on his or her heart. A refusal will activate the speaker’s curse on the reader’s own health and family life. Few poems are so intense and personal.
“Shemá” derives its power from everyday vocabulary and from simple repetitions that are sometimes counter-pointed. For example, “You who live secure…Who return at evening to find” counterpoints “Who labours in the mud/ Who knows no peace…” Repetition of “When” in stanza three is similar. Moving contrasts are also developed:
- Between the readers’ “warm houses” and “Hot food” and the cold wombs of the Auschwitz women.
- Between the readers’ “secure” lives and “friendly” family and the Auschwitz men who know “no peace.”
- Between the readers’ enjoyment of “hot food” and the men’s fighting “for a crust of bread.”
The only “poetic device” is the simple, powerful simile that describes the women: “Eyes empty and womb cold/ As a frog in winter.”
“Death Fugue” by Paul Celan
Wikipedia states: “Paul Celan is widely considered one of the finest European lyric poets of his time and one of the most profound, innovative and original poets of the twentieth century.” Originally Paul Antschel, Celan was born in 1920 into a Jewish German-speaking household in Romania. A committed socialist, he enrolled as a medical student in France in 1939, but soon returned home to study literature and languages. Following the takeover of his country by the Nazis and right-leaning Romanians in July 1941, Celan went on writing poetry in the ghetto. His parents were deported in June 1942, and later died—his father from typhus, and his mother was probably shot after being worked to exhaustion in a labour camp. Celan himself was deported to a labour camp and remained there until February 1944, when the advance of the Russian army forced the Nazis to abandon the camps. An early version of “Death Fugue,” which became Celan’s most celebrated poem, circulated soon afterwards. After wandering to Bucharest and Vienna, Celan settled in Paris in 1948. He committed suicide by drowning in the Seine in April 1970.
Death Fugue (1944,1980) [Translated by Michael Hamburger]
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night.
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes 5
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night 10
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined 15
He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown 20
we drink and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air 25
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue 30
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete 35
your ashen hair Shulamith
In defining a musical “fugue,” The Oxford Companion to Music states:
“Counterpoint, or the interweaving of melodic strands, is the essence of the fugue.” The strands are called Voices, and in the fugue they exist in a fixed number. Each Voice enters the composition with a scrap of melody called “Subject” until at last all are singing. “Fuga” (Italian) means “flight.” “The idea seems to be that the opening of the composition gives the idea of each Voice as it enters chasing the preceding one, which flies before it.”
This aptly describes the forward movement of “Death Fugue,” which in spite of its repetitions is never static. Examples of Subjects might be “we drink…”; “he writes”; “your golden hair Margarete”; “your ashen hair Shulamith”. One commentator affirms: “The incessant, rhythmical repetitions and variations of phrases evoke a nightmare more devastating than any forthright description could.” The interweaving of the repeated verbal strands, i .e. Voices, produces the “nightmare.”
One Voice creates the cultivated German officer, who “writes” and is tender enough to love a golden-haired “Margarete.” The Voice goes on to reveal that this man is “death”—“death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue/ he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true.” (This line is particularly poignant if we remember the fate of Celan’s mother.) A second Voice evokes the Jewish prisoners, forced by the “master” to dig graves for their own people, and finally for themselves. It is almost unbelievable that “the master from Germany,” a lover himself and the product of a great civilisation, has become so totally desensitised to the atrocities that he commits. Like Levi, therefore, Celan reminds readers of our ethical responsibility to remain awake, and in fact actively to resist injustices. How analogous to the German officer are those of us who live in comfort while taking no action to oppose human rights abuses, poverty and slavery? How responsive are we to the brutal realities of our contemporary world?
The fugue form of Celan’s poem captures a further horror: “It was common practice in Nazi concentration camps to order one group of prisoners to play or sing nostalgic tunes while others dug graves or were executed” (Miroslav Volf). The references to digging a grave “in the breezes” and to granting a grave “in the air” therefore embody the insane cruelty of combining music with murder.
Finally, the Voices of “Death Fugue” juxtapose “your golden hair Margarete” with “your ashen hair Shulamith.” In Goethe’s great play, Faust, Margarete is the lover and ultimately the redeemer of Faust. Shulamith is the name of the female lover in the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible. The two names therefore contrast the two European cultural traditions of German and Jew, and are a further reminder of the accomplishments of both cultures. The names stand especially for German and Jewish women. Margarete’s hair remains “golden,” but Shulamith’s is “ashen”: she has lost her youth through suffering; and her body been burned to ashes in the death camps’ ovens.
“Death Fugue” is a highly evocative poem, and the above interpretation barely touches the surface. You may want to consider some of the deeper meanings for yourself. Here are some questions to get you started:
- “Black milk” is a metaphor, almost an oxymoron. What are some of its connotations?
- “He plays with the serpents”: presumably the serpents are a symbol. What are some of the serpent’s meanings or associations?
- What bitter contrasts (and perhaps hope?) are suggested by lines 25-28?: “He calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise in the air/ then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined”
Conclusion
I hope that our study of this dark and tragic poetry has made two points.
The first is that poetry can powerfully affect our thoughts and feelings. If you’re not convinced, I recommend that you read further Holocaust poems, such as Elie Wiesel’s “Never Shall I Forget” and Charles Reznikoff’s “Holocaust VIII, Children.”
The second point is that poetry is founded in and directly speaks human experience. The poets’ words and images call upon our feelings and imagination as a means to broaden and deepen our understanding both of other people and of ourselves.