This anthology embodies the best feature of the form, as it brings more voices to the public (ninety-three authors to be exact), and therefore champions lesser-known poets alongside established ones (such as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and Robert Desnos). To read a poem by eleven-year-old boy Jerzy Ogórek Z Będzina, written in the Kraków ghetto in 1942 in the same book as writing by Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs implies both equally deserve our time and attention. And they do. We also needed to read more poems by people from all persecuted groups, such as “So I Learn Life’s Greatest Art…” by disabled poet and Polish Resistant Irena Bobowska, executed in 1942, and “The Urns”, by Angela Fritzen, a journalist with Down’s syndrome. The latter, who was born in 1974, reflects several decades later on the tragic legacy of these dramatic events by writing about the history of people with Down’s syndrome. We also needed André Sarcq’s “To the Twice-Murdered Men (The Rag)”, for it is, as the editors state, “the only poem we know of that remembers gay men as victims of the Holocaust.” The presence of these authors in this anthology refuses further invisibilization or silencing.
Boase-Beier and de Vooght also managed to include nineteen languages, cited here by order of appearance: German, Lithuanian, Dutch, Yiddish, Polish, Romanian, French, Danish, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Estonian, Hungarian, Japanese, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Latvian, and Ladino. Some languages are necessarily more represented than others, but to even cover so many is a real accomplishment—one that will no doubt inspire others. Readers will also appreciate how open Boase-Beier and de Vooght are about the potential gaps in their work. Wherever representation could be seen as lacking, they did not merely acknowledge this fact but instead sought to include victims of Nazism in other ways. For instance, while they admit to not having been able to include poems in Romani, they did feature texts in memory of Sinti and Roma victims. They also voice an urgent call to fellow researchers, encouraging them to discover and publish even more poetry.
One of the great strengths of this anthology is that it questions the victims’ status of “the other”, as in Margarete Susman’s poem “We Wander” (translated from the German by Jean Boase-Beier):
In death we are the sameVictims of the Holocaust are not the Other in these lines, but rather the authors, the ones we listen to, the ones expressing emotions. This is central to contemporary debates about representation in literature: we need to hear the victims’ voices rather than speak for or over them. At a time when antisemitism is all too rampant, it’s important, for instance, to read Alfred Kerr’s poem “The Most Afflicted,” translated from the German by Jean Boase-Beier:
And only in life the Other.
Of all who are hated and harried and hurt The Jews get it worst, they are treated like dirt. And not for hatching political plots – But just for existing, more often than not.As Boase-Beier said in an interview last August, “while it is true that the main targets of Nazi genocide were Jewish people, there were many, many other victims.” In addition to texts honouring the memory of all the Jewish people who had to endure the worst, in this anthology real attention was given by the editors to the individual. To Boase-Beier and de Vooght, it is in fact this personal scale that defines Holocaust poetry: “Like all poetry, Holocaust poetry uses poetic means to create an impression, convey feeling, or to create such feeling in its readers. But it is responding to catastrophic and specific events. Thus it tends not to generalise, but to particularize.” Gunvor Hofmo’s “To One Who Used To Be,” translated from the Norwegian by Marian de Vooght, renders this attempt to particularize poignant:
The world is your eyes,
the world is your mouth.
Time and again I stand in it blind.
But you give me a moment’s sight.
This attention to both communities and individuals reasserts that however powerful the sense of belonging, a collective never completely absorbs a voice, which should therefore be given all the space it needs to sing. The editors were careful to give sufficient room to multifaceted identities, as well as to contrast tones and emotions:
If we had arranged the poems according to the persecuted group the poet or subject of the poem belongs to we might seem on the one hand to be labelling people (‘The Jews’, ‘Communists’, ‘The Disabled’, ‘Homosexuals’) and would on the other hand be failing to acknowledge their ambiguities, as well as the uniqueness of each poem as a reaction to the Holocaust. Nor would a division on the basis of language do justice to the identity of individual poets. Many poets are bi- or multilingual and many would identify with more than one culture or none at all.
This emphasis on individual voices also translates into structural choices: the poems (always appearing first in English translation, followed by the original texts) are presented after a short biography, which sometimes briefly explains some context. We therefore dive into the poem with some knowledge of the author and with the understanding that these biographies reflect the tragedy of genocide. The biography of Gertrud Kolmar, for instance, ends with the following words: “She suffered forced labour in an armaments factory, and was transported to Auschwitz in March 1943, but the place and date of her death are not known.” And when we read a poem simply signed “Anonymous”, rarely has this term been more painful to read. We know it was an individual voice, now forever unnamed, that sung the dissolution of the self through systemic victimisation:
My dearest girl, do not look,
So you need not see
How they treat a Roma
(translated from the German by Jean Boase-Beier)
The gaps in biographies are accompanied by accounts of how these poems reached us. Very often, they did so because of authors in extreme circumstances who were determined to hide them and later bring them to the world. We learn that Miklós Radnóti’s lifeless body was “found in a ditch and the poems recovered from his pockets”, and that Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim’s micrographic poems were saved “on a piece of paper rolled up under her tongue when the camp was liquidated”. This is another reason why any anthology of Holocaust poetry is an important addition to our literature: these poems’ relationship to the world is a precarious one. Far too many voices have forever disappeared despite their efforts to be heard. We absolutely must preserve and circulate the rare texts we have uncovered.
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This anthology will also prove invaluable to anyone interested in translation, particularly of poetry. Among other reasons, the editors note that they assembled this collection “to give voices to victims we may not have heard of” and “to show that there is more to Holocaust poetry than we suspected” but also “to show what happens when we translated such poetry.” Beyond offering English translations of poems from nineteen languages, the anthology explicitly engages with a wider reflection on translation by linking it with transmission and solidarity. Many poems have been translated not by one but two, or even three people, which is further evidence of a collaborative approach to translation. Even when translation is a solitary task, however, it is by definition a collaborative process relying on empathy: “It is about recognising someone else’s story, understanding the way the teller has chosen to tell it, and passing it on to others.”
The variety of languages reminds us both of the scale of the massacre and of the solidarity networks determined to fight it. The places where these poems were written, as well as the languages used, confirm that Resistants were active everywhere: they were French, Norwegian, Polish, Dutch, Greek. . . To have so many languages, and cultural influences, involved in a poetry anthology reminds us of the importance of international support. The tanka written by Yukiko Sugihara, who, as the wife of a consul in Lithuania, watched as her husband “issued numerous transit visas for people fleeing the Nazis, so they were able to escape via Japan,” are perfect examples of this. In just a few words, she manages to evoke migration, refugees, as well as the responsibilities of both individuals and states:
Fretting on visa decisions,
restlesss—
I hear my husband’s bed creak.
(translated from the Japanese by James Hadley and Nell Regan)
Alongside translation, multilingualism also plays a particular role in Holocaust poetry. As one might expect, many texts contain German words or sentences to refer to memories associated with either the war or before it. In Rajzel Zychlinski’s poem “It could be”, translated from the Yiddish by Jean Boase-Beier, we even hear how the very voice of nature takes on a haunting human tone, with
[…] the waves mimimcking
german, german, german - - -
Yet if we speak about languages, we must also speak of silence. Perhaps no other genre engages so deeply and profoundly with silence as poetry. (Consider the importance of blank space.) But such an absence proves even more acute with poetic material linked to persecution. The poems themselves regularly suggest that silence is the language of victims, but also of survivors and their descendants. Alejandra Pizarnik’s 1971 “Poem For the Father”, written from Argentina where her family escaped antisemitism, traces this process of soundless transmission:
Then, from absence’s highest tower
his song resonated in the opacity of what’s hidden
in the silent expanse
full of restless hollows like the words I write.
(translated from the Spanish by Cecilia Rossi)
In fact, silence itself is even made language in Tuvia Ruebner’s poem “A Postcard From Pressburg-Bratislava”, translated from the Hebrew by Rachel Tzvia Back:
Pressburg was a tri-lingual city. Its fourth language
is silence.
But if poetry is more about the transmission of emotions than it is about documenting history, then we need to dig deeper and question sounds. Repetition, as a writing technique, regularly appears throughout the book. In Tuvia Ruebner’s poem “Testimony”, translated from the Hebrew by Rachel Tzvia Back, the reiteration of the line “I exist in order to say” affirms that even when reduced to silence, poets have a duty to try and speak out, to try to name. Yet repetitions also help authors give new meaning to the language of their oppressors: the anaphora of “Hide” in Lizzy Sara May’s “Blue” may at first appear to be a simple consequence of the murderers’ strategy. But this imperative is said by someone fighting for survival—both their own and that of others. Poetry turns words of persecution into a reminder of solidarities, creating connections where war meant destruction. However, in these poems no repetition is ever purely hopeful. It may act as a bridge, or even as a prayer, but this prayer often is a supplication. There is perhaps no better example than the haunting refrain of “Where did they go?” in “They All Went”, a poem by Flory Jagoda and translated from Ladino by Anna Crowe.
These repetitions, as well as other work on sound like alliteration and rhyme, are all the more apparent given that most of the poems are quite short. That brevity reinforces the sense of loss and despair, as in “Tragedy,” a four-line poem by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger:
This is the worst: you pour yourself out
But no-one will know or care,
You give your whole self but have no doubt,
You’ll stream like smoke in the empty air.
(translated from the German by Jean Boase-Beier)
Rhythm is critical here. In the original, as in the translation, commas fracture this one-sentence poem, highlighting rhymes that reinforce the horror of what is being said as they mark out a short, accelerated, desperate breath, almost as if we heard the narrator’s last words. Whether or not we agree with those who say poetry is the most difficult genre to translate, it’s clear that all thirty-five translators involved in this project did a wonderful job passing on these stories to us, adding their own experience as readers of such texts.
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The historical scope of the anthology is also worth mentioning. Far from remaining focused on the years of the Second World War and their immediate aftermath, it is instead organized into three sections that vary in length but are equally important: “At the Beginning”, “Life in Ghettos, Camps, Prisons and the Outside World”, and “Life Afterwards.” And because the first section contains poems that “reveal fear and despair at the sign that something terrible was coming”, this anthology includes poems written not during the Second World War but before it, with the earliest dating from 1932. By also including poems written several decades after the Second World War had ended, the editors expand most people’s definition of what counts as “Holocaust Poetry” (that is, as Boase-Beier puts it, “poetry written in camps.”) They show how history is made, celebrating not only the tragic lucidity of early poets but also the courage and strength of the victims’ descendants.
At a time when people from various continents keep asking for more walls, more borders, more nationalism and exclusion, it is essential to remember that such tragedies do not happen overnight. Although we may choose not to acknowledge the signs around us, they are there. Why, then, don’t we act? Well, history, in that way, is very uninventive... We keep still. We today uncomfortably resemble the we in “World in Turmoil…”, written in 1933–34 by Alfred Kerr:
And if the devils took over the world,
no-one would try to intervene:
we don’t do that, we can’t do that!
That’s what they call diplomacy.
Even in cataclysmic times
‘Internal affairs’, they cry.
Some of them murder without a care
sanctified and above the law
The others whisper, and sit and stare.
(translated from the German by Jean Boase-Beier)
Let’s put it otherwise: if we keep tolerating antisemitism, antigypsyism, xenophobia, racism, homophobia, and ableism, especially from leaders of the world, then we will certainly not be allowed to act surprised when poets will blame us with the same powerful language Jewish writer Stanislav Smelyansky wields in the aptly named “Guilty!” (translated from the Russian by Veronika Krasnova):
Quiet anger, fury –
Where is my beloved people?
The world accused fascists –
I accuse the world.
