In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is today, and of the millions of voices silenced by that horrific period in history, I thought I most post poems by two poets who lived through the Shoah and wrote about it in their work.
The first poem is by Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), the German-Swedish poet who escaped with her elderly mother from Germany for Sweden just before the Nazi regime planned send her to a concentration camp, and who would later receive the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work, which, as she noted, like she herself, "represent[ed] the tragedy of the Jewish people." One might also say that Sachs' poetry represents survival and witness in the face of unspeakable horror, and beauty and memory in response to racist, anti-Semitic and fascist attempts at cultural and human erasure.
Second, I selected a poem by Paul Celan (1920-1970), one of the truly original and transformative poets writing in German, who was born in Bukovina, a region of Romania that had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and studied there and in France. Once Germany conquered Romania from the Soviets, who had seized it earlier in World War II, the occupying German forces forced his and family first into a ghetto, and then, the complicit governor of Bukovina had the Jewish residents deported to a camp, where his parents died. Celan worked in a labor camp until the Soviets liberated it in 1944. Much of his poetry, whether overtly or not, concerns the fate of the Jewish people, and interrogates (the German) language (itself).
Sachs:
Celan:
The first poem is by Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), the German-Swedish poet who escaped with her elderly mother from Germany for Sweden just before the Nazi regime planned send her to a concentration camp, and who would later receive the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work, which, as she noted, like she herself, "represent[ed] the tragedy of the Jewish people." One might also say that Sachs' poetry represents survival and witness in the face of unspeakable horror, and beauty and memory in response to racist, anti-Semitic and fascist attempts at cultural and human erasure.
Second, I selected a poem by Paul Celan (1920-1970), one of the truly original and transformative poets writing in German, who was born in Bukovina, a region of Romania that had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and studied there and in France. Once Germany conquered Romania from the Soviets, who had seized it earlier in World War II, the occupying German forces forced his and family first into a ghetto, and then, the complicit governor of Bukovina had the Jewish residents deported to a camp, where his parents died. Celan worked in a labor camp until the Soviets liberated it in 1944. Much of his poetry, whether overtly or not, concerns the fate of the Jewish people, and interrogates (the German) language (itself).
Sachs:
Celan:
And lastly, a second poem by Celan, dedicated to Sachs, in which he speaks of their culturally and spiritually shared, though materially different experiences, in the Shoah.
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