Marked: Poems of the Holocaust by Stephen Herz is probably one of the best
poetic introductions to the Holocaust. In language that is clear and
resonant, Herz tells us what we need to know in images and lines that we will
not soon forget.
POEMS
Morgen Früh
Do you know how one says never
in camp slang? Morgen früh:
tomorrow morning.
—Primo
Levi
Will you wake on a plank of wood
with six others,
wash your face in your morning coffee,
and go to work in the mud?
Tomorrow morning.
Will you go to the latrine when
they tell you,
or be shot at roll call
because you did it in your pants?
Tomorrow morning.
Tomorrow morning
the boils and pus and lice
will be gone,
the blue tattoo will fade from your wrist,
the green dye will fade from your eyes,
the sweet singed smell
will fade from your nostrils.
Tomorrow morning
they’ll give you back your ovaries,
give you back your children,
give you back your old wool coat
with the yellow star,
and you’ll give them back
the paper cement bag
stuffed under your dress.
Tomorrow morning
you’ll run a comb
through your long black hair,
tie it with a bright red ribbon,
and someone will smile and say:
Good
morning,
Lena.
Tomorrow morning
there’ll be no more ashes
to fill the swamp
to dump in the river
to fertilize the fields. No more ashes
to spread on the paths like gravel
under the boots of the SS.
Tomorrow
morning.
Tomorrow
morning.
Morgen
früh.
Whatever
You
Can
Carry
Twenty-nine storerooms
were
burned
before
the liberation
of Auschwitz.
In the six that remained
they
discovered
348,820
men’s
suits,
836,255
women’s coats, more than seven tons of human hair and even 13,964
carpets.
—Michael
Berenbaum: The World Must Know
“You will work in the factory, work in
the fields, you will be resettled in the East,
bring whatever you can carry.”
So our dresses, shirts, suits, underwear,
bedsheets, featherbeds, pillows,
tablecloths,
towels, we carried.
We carried our hairbrushes, handbrushes,
toothbrushes, shoe daubers, scissors, mirrors,
safety razors. Forks, spoons, knives,
pots, saucepans, tea strainers, potato
peelers, can openers we carried. We carried
umbrellas, sunglasses, soap, toothpaste,
shoe polish. We carried our photographs.
We carried milk powder, talc,
baby food.
We carried our sewing machines. We carried
rugs, medical instruments,
the baby’s pram.
Jewelry we carried,
sewn in our shoes, sewn in our corsets,
hidden in our bodies.
We carried loaves of bread, bottles of wine,
schnapps, cocoa, chocolate, jars of marmalade,
cans of fish. Wigs, prayer shawls, tiny
Torahs, skullcaps, phylacteries
we carried.
Warm winter coats in the heat of summer
we carried. On our coats, our suits,
our dresses, we carried our yellow stars.
On our baggage in bold letters, our addresses,
our names we carried.
We carried our lives.
Shot (excerpt)
shot in the synagogue
shot up against the wall in the headlights
of the truck
shot in the farmyard by the dung heap
shot in the hospital, the maternity ward
shot in the city, the town, the shtetl
shot in their houses, in the streets,
in the market square
shot in the cemetery
shot in the warehouse after machine-gun muzzles
were pushed through holes in the walls
shot in the roundups trying to escape
shot in bed
shot in their cribs
shot in the air, the baby thrown over its
mother’s head
shot because they stole a potato
shot because they were betrayed for a kilo of sugar
shot because they weren’t wearing the yellow star
shot because they were wearing the yellow star
shot by the Einsatzgruppen
shot by the Reserve Battalion of the German
Order Police
shot by the Gestapo Firing Squad
shot by the Waffen SS and the Higher SS
shot by the Hiwis-Ukrainian, Latvian,
and
Lithuanian volunteers
shot by the Hungarian Fascist Nyilas,
the Arrow Cross
shot by the Polish police and Polish partisans
shot by the Croatian Ustasa
shot by the Romanian army, police, gendarmerie,
border guard, civilians, and
the Iron Guard
shot by the Wehrmacht
shot by old men in the German Home Guard
shot by young boys in the Hitler Youth
shot in Aktion after Aktion as if it was
“more or less our daily bread”
shot in the search-and-destroy mission,
the
Jew
Hunt
shot in the “harvest festival,”
the Erntefest
shot in order to make the northern Lublin district
judenrein
shot in Zhitomir, Poniatowa, Józefów,
Trawniki
shot in Lomazy, Parczew, Bialystok,
Kharkov
shot in Bialowieza, Luków, Riga, Poltava
shot in Międzyrzec, Khorol, Kremenstshug
shot in Slutsk, Bobruisk, Mogilev, Vinnitsa
shot in Odessa, Lvov, Kolmyja, Minsk, Rovno
shot in Majdanek and Brest-Litovsk
shot in Neu Sandau and Tarnopol and Rohatin
shot in Dnepropetrovsk
shot in Kovno, Pinsk, Berdichev, Tarnów
shot in Kamenets-Podolski
shot in Krakow, Szczebrzeszyn, Siauliai
shot in Stolin, Kielce, Lutsk, Serokomla
shot in Drogobych, Luga, Delatyn
shot in the Warsaw Ghetto
shot in the ravine of Babi Yar
shot in Bilgoraj, Nadvornaya, Stanislawów
shot in David Grodek, Janów Podlesia
shot near Zamosc
INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN HERZ
You were fifteen that
day
And I, a Jew born in
America in 1929,
the same year you were
born, Anne
am in my sixty-eighth
year.
I was elated when the
poem was published. Around the same time, I started working towards my Master's degree in
English and joined a poetry writing class. One of our first assignments was to write a poem on
Thanksgiving. So, remembering as a kid hearing Hitler shouting on the Philco and my
grandfather showing me pictures of the Nazi Swastika flying from the windows of his former home in
Oppenheim, Germany, and saying "I'll never go back, that Hitler's worse than the Kaiser . . ."
So I decided to put that into my Thanksgiving poem and to show my family in conversation
at the Thanksgiving dinner table in 1938, a few weeks after the pogrom in
Germany and Austria called Kristallnacht—the night of the broken
glass—which was considered the start of what we now call the Holocaust or
Shoah. I called my poem Thanksgiving, 1938. Here's my grandfather's voice in the poem:
"What do you think
about the synagogues
burning? All those
synagogues, all those
Torahs, all that glass
breaking in the stores.
Next thing they'll be
burning Jews.
I wrote my brother:
'Ludwig, get out of
Oppenheim, get out of
Germany,
before soon you won't
anymore be able.'
So, what do you think?
asks my grandfather.
"It'll pass, I
think it'll pass,
it usually does,"
says my father.
"Do you think you can pass me some dark,
"Do you think you can pass me some dark,
and some white?" I
ask.
A short time after I got my degree, I made a trip to Poland with a couple of my
college professors. We went through all the major killing centers—Belzec,
Chelmno, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor—it was mind-boggling. On
returning, I continued researching everything I could about the Holocaust, spent
several weeks at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, and also
became a sort of ersatz member of the Child Holocaust Survivors of Connecticut. Even though I felt sort of strange not being a survivor, they
welcomed me with open arms. I found a survivor who was telling her story
to mostly schools—she asked me to join her and read some of my poems—I did,
and it worked out swell—I became sort of her Greek (or Jewish)
chorus, interspersing my poems with her poignant story of survival—her name is Anita Schorr, and I wrote a poem about her—it's called MARKED—which also became the title
of my latest book of Holocaust poems. Here's the first stanza:
at nine
you wore the yellow
star,
the Star of David
that marked you Jew,
marked you for Auschwitz
where you lost your name
for a number
71569
WTH: Has how you write about the Holocaust changed since you began
writing these poems?
WTH: What struck us
immediately was how many of the poems seem like found poems. The
first poem in the book of course is titled "Found Poem," but many of
the poems that follow also appear to be "found," given that they are based on
statements made by Adolph Hitler, German soldiers, and survivors. Can you talk about your
process of
transforming existing materials into poems?
SH: I've been doing
this—writing these poems for so long now—I don't even think about using found
material on the Holocaust if it
helps to give some meaning to the unfolding history of this dark bloody
time—but maybe a few
of my readers' responses might answer this question better than I
can:
"I admire your
cleverness with words, lists, names . . . your focus on detail, your sense of
history, makes this material importantly new . . . it feels like history
distilled."
"You have brought
many new dimensions to a worked over subject—reworking Reich orders,
excerpting quotes from Nazi propaganda of the time, and basically anchoring
everything you write in the bitter reality of history is a brilliant stroke. Most Holocaust reflections are personal and not communal as is yours. Most do not gather up the shards of glass from Kristallnacht and surround their art with them. You do, and because of this, and because of the
voice that you adopt as a sincere and
horrified student of all the horrors, your poems stand out as a collection that
is actually designed to make the reader never forget."
WTH: Please
tell us about your decision to apparently remove yourself from so many of the
poems.
SH: Sorry, I really can't
answer this question—I wasn't conscious that I was removing myself from my
poems. Take, for example, a poem I wrote on looking at a picture of
children on the eve of their deportation from Westerbork in
Holland. Here are some of the final stanzas from that poem:
And then it hits you
that this
Westerbork is the same
place where
Anne Frank and her
family would
leave in the last
transport
for Auschwitz, leave
only months
after the children in
this picture
were deported. Was there
a similar
picture somewhere of
Anne Frank?
Look: in the back row,
that chubby
boy in the sailor suit
is pulling
his mouth apart, hamming
it up:
a class clown just like
you were
back in 1944, the year
this picture
was taken, the year you
graduated
from Ravinia Grammar
School,
the year you remember
thinking
Hitler and Goering were
some kind of
comedy act, like Abbot
and Costello.
WTH: For us, one of the
remarkable things about your book is that it is not only a book of poetry, it
is also a historical document, even a history perhaps. We can see teachers
using it as the initial text in a course on the Holocaust itself or on
Holocaust literature. Was this your intention?
SH: Thanks, you're right on
here. A short time after I got my degree, I made a trip to Poland with a couple of my college professors. We went through all the major killing centers—Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor—it was mind-boggling. On returning, I continued researching everything I could about the Holocaust, spent several weeks at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, and also became a sort of ersatz member of the Child Holocaust Survivors of Connecticut. Even though I felt sort of strange not being a survivor, they welcomed me with open arms. I found a survivor who was telling her story to mostly schools—she asked me to join her and read some of my poems—I did, and it worked out swell—I became sort of her Greek (or Jewish) chorus, interspersing my poems with her poignant story of survival—her name is Anita Schorr, and I wrote a poem about her—it's called MARKED—which also became the title of my latest book of Holocaust poems. Here's the first stanza:
at nine
you wore the yellow star,
the Star of David
that marked you Jew,
marked you for Auschwitz
where you lost your name
for a number
71569
WTH: Has how you write about the Holocaust changed since you began writing these poems?
WTH: And a related question: Whom do you see as
the audience for your book?
SH: Hmm, I haven't thought
about that—I guess I would say everyone and everybody, with a special
emphasis on making these poems available to the younger generation.
WTH: Can you tell us about the writers who have
influenced you, especially in regard to your use of poetry as history, and
history as poetry?
SH: I was asked a similar
question not too long ago that appeared in a book called Poets Bookshelf
II: Contemporary Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art. Here's what I said:
Walt Whitman, Leaves
of Grass
Allen Ginsberg Howl (also
"Kaddish")
Mary Oliver, New
and Selected Poems
Gary Snyder, Turtle
Island
Primo Levi, Survival
in Auschwitz
Anne Frank, The
Diary of a Young Girl
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Martin Gilbert, The
Holocaust
Looking up at my
bookshelf at shelf after shelf of books on the Holocaust, I find it hard to make
a list—but I suppose if I were to pick just one, it would be Primo Levi's Survival
in Auschwitz, which is for me a remarkable, moving and memorable prose poem.
But how can I leave out
William Carlos Williams, Richard Hugo, Donald Hall, Philip Levine, Yusef
Komunyakaa, Gerald Stern, Mark Doty, Thomas Lux, Galway Kinnel, Pablo Neruda,
Yehuda Amichai, Stanley Kunitz, Hayden Carruth. etc, etc.?
WTH: Besides visiting the camps and killing centers and
interviewing survivors (and even a former Nazi boy soldier) . . . before
immersing yourself in the extensive literature and history and poetry
of the Shoah, is there anything
else that you can think of that influenced you as you wrote your
poems?
SH: Yes, one thing I still
keep going back to again and again, and that's Claude
Lanzmann's powerful 9½ hour documentary film Shoah. Instead
of all those pictures of piles of bodies and historical
footage, what Lanzmann gave me (or, I should say gives us) is a
profound, moving, and insightful look into the mind-set of so
many of the killers, victims, and even the bystanders—and he does
so by visiting the crime scenes.
WTH: You have two very very
long, one might call List Poems, "Shot" and "The Shooting
Never Stops." Each line in these poems starts with the word
"Shot." What can you tell us about these poems?
SH: Well, first of all I
would like to quote a few eye-opening words by the writer David Denby
who recently said: "Roughly as many
Jews were killed by bullets as gas in the Holocaust,
a fact not widely known to this day."
So, there's nothing much
to tell you—but I can, I hope, show you in these long poems some of the many
many shots from the killers. Here's a small example:
shot in bed
shot in their cribs
shot in the air, the
baby thrown over its
mother's head
shot because they stole
a potato
shot because they were
betrayed for a kilo of sugar
shot because they
weren't wearing the yellow star
shot because they were
wearing the yellow star
I would also like to
mention how these "Shot" poems have made an indelible impression on
several classes of students in the Middle Schools—for example, kids would
stand in a long long line, each with a big sign in bold letters that said
SHOT—then each of them would take a turn and read a line from the
Shot poem and flip their sign down
shot after their eyes
were gouged out because they
refused to undress
(shot sign is flipped
down)
shot after being driven
into the grave and made to
lie down on top of those who had been
shot before them"
(shot sign is flipped
down)
And so, on and on down
the long line of students being, one might say, felled by the shots.
It was very
startling and moving, to say the least.
__________________________________________
Stephen Herz's poems have been widely
published. He's a winner of the New England Poet's Daniel Varoujan Prize. This
collection—Marked—is the culmination of two chapbooks, a volume of
poems—Whatever You Can Carry—and many new poems that cover the years of this
dark, bloody time of death and destruction and evil we call the Holocaust or
Shoah. Several schools and universities have adopted Herz's poems as part of
their Holocaust studies curricula. Mr. Herz lives in Westport, CT and New York
City.
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