Shahzada Yaqoot         ENG. 355

The theme of the Week.                     Post-Holocaust Jewish Literature.

Holocaust was the systematic genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany to annihilate the Jewish population in German-occupied Europe.  This hate was rooted in their religious bigotry against the Jewish people. Some six million Jews were murdered between 1941 to 1945 by mass shootings and in gas chambers.  Jewish people were also held prisoners for forced labor in concentration camps.  Auschwitz-Birkenau was one such camp. 

This picture is of some of the survivors from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.The Auschwitz-Birkenau

https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about.html

Auschwitz-Birkenau was a concentration camp where European Jewish men, women, and children of all ages were brought.  They were first robbed of their  belongings, then subjected to forced labor, or killed by gas chambers with their dead bodies, then burnt. 

 “This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.”

“This way to the Gas, Ladies, and Gentlemen.” was the post-holocaust memoirs written by Tadeusz Borowski, a non-Jewish writer who was a prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau where he was subjected to hard work.  He later managed to become an orderly in a hospital.  He was later assigned to receive the Jewish people shipped in trains to bring them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He wrote, “This way to the Gas, Ladies, and Gentlemen, as his reminiscences of the horrible state of affairs of the arriving Jewish people in Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The heart-rending narrative describes how the Jewish men, women, and children were inhumanely packed in trains.  On arrival, they were robbed of all their possessions and then either subject to hard labor or sent directly to the gas chambers to be mercilessly murdered.  However, the deniers of the holocaust sometimes refute this eyewitness account by Tadeusz Borowski. Instead, the argument is that what happened to over 1.1 million bodies that were considered murdered. The question being, that the camp commandants could not handle such a large quantity of dead bodies.

https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/body-disposal/

Classroom Activity:

Research at least four more concentration camps and investigate the living conditions of those camps compared to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Write a 500-word review explaining why deniers of the holocaust think that the holocaust did not happen.

The role played by the Poets and writers.

The poets and writers, many prisoned in the concentration camps, observed their Jewish people.  These verses by Elie Wiesel are self-explanatory of the hopelessness even the writer relays.  He is witnessing the systematic murder, hard labor, burning of the children, and the shadow of death prevailing over the camp.  Paul Celan expressed similar emotions in his piece “Deathfugue,” where he also reiterates a metaphor of “Black Milk,” relating to the despair and spirit of death prevailing at the concentration cam

https://www.academia.edu/35405039/Jewish_Russian_Poets_Bearing_Witness_to_the_Shoah_1941_1946_Textual_Evidence_and_Preliminary_Conclusions

Classroom Activity:

Q 1. Research further of Elie Wiesel and determine how closely his poems resemble those of Paul Celan. For example, is the repetitive use of particular metaphors in their works coincidental or intentional?

Q-2 Why are the above verses framed between the barbed wires? What is the artist depicting here?

Twentieth-Century Jewish Poets and Writers

Many prominent Jewish poets and writers emerged in the post-holocaust era, who, despite the general public’s dislike, contributed writing on the affairs of the holocaust. For some, it was empirical, while others recognized it as their call to bring out the gruesome events of concentration camps for teaching history to the new generation.  Yehuda Amichai is one such poet who is globally applauded for this work.  He is a renegade who often challenges religious dogmas. For example, his work “God has pity of kindergarten children.” considers God selective in his mercies on the infants and little children, and not the grown-ups unless they are repentant and cry out for his help. He promotes the idea that people are better off solving their problems through love and empathy instead of depending upon a partial God who does not help those who deserve the most. 

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/country-7/Israel/20th_century_Jewish_poets.html

Classroom Activity: 

Q1.   Explain the metaphor that Yehuda Amichai uses in his poem “Tourist,” What concern he is relaying in pointing out to tourists putting up a sad face at the wailing wall and later laughing it loud in their rooms?