MARKED: POEMS OF THE HOLOCAUST by Stephen Herz

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.

Here are two poems from the collection ("Morgen Früh" and "Whatever You Can Carry") and several stanzas from "Shot," followed by an interview with Mr. Herz regarding Marked, its genesis and intentions.   

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

WTH: Can you tell our readers what first moved you to write about the Holocaust?

SH: Many years ago after reading Anne Frank's poignant  diary I was tormented by her life and death—and I realized I was born the same year as Anne, 1929. And I recall thinking "What was I doing knocking around high school with a big black H on my chest that said Football, while Anne was wearing a yellow star that said Jood and was forced into hiding and deported to Auschwitz and to her death in Bergen-Belsen. So I decided to write a poem on what would have been Anne's sixty-fifth birthday—June 12, 1994. It was called You Were Fifteen That Day. The poem ended with the lines:

                                       

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,

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?

  

SH: I'm not sure it's changed, I would say it's grown, matured, as I became more aware of the magnitude of this bloody slaughter. I started out with a small chapbook of Holocaust poems, then another chapbook, then a full volume, and now an even more extensive 4th collection.

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?

  

SH: I'm not sure it's changed, I would say it's grown, matured, as I became more aware of the magnitude of this bloody slaughter. I started out with a small chapbook of Holocaust poems, then another chapbook, then a full volume, and now an even more extensive 4th collection.

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.

Marked is available from Amazon and New York Quarterly Books.