Poetry from the Camps

The poetry of the Holocaust includes the verse written in the ghettos and the camps by Jewish prisoners and the verse written after liberation by survivors and by the children of survivors. The substantial body of surviving wartime poetry, much of it in Yiddish but with substantial material in Hebrew, Polish, Czech, German, Hungarian and Romanian, is one of the principal literary sources on the experience of the killing as it was happening. The post-war poetry, by figures including Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Dan Pagis, Itzhak Katzenelson and Avrom Sutzkever, has produced one of the most substantial bodies of post-war European literary work on a single subject. The pages on individual writers (in the Survivor Voices and Memoirists section of this site) treat the major figures in detail. This page sets out the wider field.

The wartime poetry

The substantial wartime poetry was written under conditions where the act of writing was itself dangerous. Paper was scarce, the works could be confiscated, the writers were under constant threat of deportation and death. The substantial proportion of what was written was lost. What survived did so because it had been buried, smuggled out, memorised by surviving readers or hidden in the personal effects of the writers in ways that survived the camps’ final liquidations.

The principal substantial body of surviving wartime Holocaust poetry is in Yiddish. Itzhak Katzenelson, the pre-war Polish-Jewish poet and educator, wrote in the Warsaw ghetto and after his deportation to Vittel detention camp in occupied France his Dos lid funem oysgehargetn yidishn folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People), the most substantial single Holocaust poem; the manuscript was buried at Vittel before Katzenelson’s deportation to Auschwitz and his death there in May 1944, and was recovered after the war. Avrom Sutzkever, the Vilna ghetto poet and partisan, wrote substantially through the period 1941 to 1944 in the ghetto and in the partisan units in the surrounding forests; substantial portions of his ghetto and partisan poetry survived the war and were published in the post-war years.

The Hebrew, Czech and German wartime Holocaust poetry was substantially smaller in volume. The Theresienstadt camp produced substantial work in Czech and German by the camp’s substantial cohort of poets, including Hans Hofer, Ilse Weber and the children’s-magazine poetry of Vedem, the underground magazine produced by the boys of Home L417 in the camp from 1942 to 1944.

The post-war poetry

The substantial post-war Holocaust poetry was the work of survivors writing in the languages of their dispersion. Paul Celan, born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz in 1920, lost his parents in the Romanian deportations to Transnistria in 1942 and was himself imprisoned in a Romanian labour camp through the war; his post-war poetry, written in German and published from 1948 onwards, is substantially the most-cited body of post-Holocaust European verse. His Todesfuge (Death Fugue), written in 1944 to 1945 and published in 1948, is the most-anthologised single Holocaust poem. Nelly Sachs, the German-Jewish poet who escaped to Sweden in 1940 with the help of Selma Lagerlöf, wrote substantially through the post-war decades on Holocaust subjects; her work, in German throughout, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966.

Dan Pagis, born in Bukovina in 1930 and survivor of a Transnistria camp as a child, wrote in Hebrew through the post-war decades in Israel; his short poem Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car is one of the most-cited short Holocaust poems in any language. Avrom Sutzkever continued in Yiddish through the post-war decades, dying in 2010 at the age of ninety-six. Abba Kovner, the Vilna partisan and post-war Israeli poet, wrote substantially through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in Hebrew. Aharon Appelfeld and Yehuda Amichai both produced substantial bodies of post-Holocaust Hebrew verse.

The Adorno question

The substantial post-war argument about whether Holocaust poetry could legitimately exist took shape around the much-quoted statement by Theodor Adorno in his 1949 essay Cultural Criticism and Society, in which he wrote that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. Adorno himself substantially revised the position in his later writings, and the statement has been substantially over-read in the popular literature on the subject. The argument it represents is a real argument: whether the aesthetic shaping of the events of the killing into poetic form is in itself a betrayal of the events. The position taken by the poets named above, and by the substantial body of subsequent Holocaust poetry, has been that poetry is not betrayal but the form in which experience can be transmitted across the gap between the witness and the reader who was not there.

The wider field

The substantial post-war Holocaust poetry now constitutes one of the most-cited bodies of post-war European literary work. The principal anthologies include Hilda Schiff’s Holocaust Poetry (HarperCollins, 1995), Charles Fishman’s Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Time Being Books, 2007 revised edition), and Yala Korwin’s To Tell the Story: Poems of the Holocaust (Holocaust Library, 1987). The work of David Roskies, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Susan Gubar and others has produced the substantial body of academic literary criticism through which the field is now studied.

The poetry continues to be written. The third generation of post-Holocaust poets (the grandchildren of survivors) has produced substantial work in the 2000s and 2010s; the question of whether and how the descendants of survivors should write Holocaust poetry is the principal question the contemporary field is now addressing.

See also

Sources

  • Hilda Schiff (ed), Holocaust Poetry, HarperCollins, 1995
  • Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, Indiana University Press, 2003
  • Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, University of Chicago Press, 1980
  • David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture, Harvard University Press, 1984
  • John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, Yale University Press, 1995
  • Itzhak Katzenelson, The Song of the Murdered Jewish People, Hakibbutz Hameuchad / Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1980
  • Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, Spearman, 1967 (English translation including “Cultural Criticism and Society”)
  • Yad Vashem, “Holocaust Poetry” collection, https://www.yadvashem.org