Sunday, April 27, 2014

Pilgrimage of poems: Burn me!

Yom HaShoah starts at sundown today and runs to sundown tomorrow. It’s the day set aside by the state of Israel to commemorating the nearly six million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s.

Nearly two hundred years ago, the German poet Heinrich Heine (as it happens, a Jew) wrote, “Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.” Freely translated, “Those who start by burning books end by burning people.” And there we have the entire history of the Holocaust. So I’ll give you two poems that speak to this.

We probably know Bertolt Brecht best as a dramatist, one of the bright lights of the brilliantly creative Weimar Republic in post-World War I Germany. But he wrote poetry as well, and here’s one that you should know:

“The Burning of the Books”

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the Burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power ,
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books
Always reported the truth ? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you!
Burn me!

Brecht left Germany shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, but he returned after the Second World War.

My second poem for the day comes from Primo Levi, whose work includes some of the most stunning writing I've ever encountered. Levi was a chemist who’d joined partisan forces near his native Torino and was caught by the Germans in 1943. He spent the next couple of years in Auschwitz. After the war it took him several months to make his way home, and he built a life as a chemist, husband, father and writer—essays, mostly, and poetry. But he never escaped; in 1987, aged 67, he committed suicide by throwing himself down the stairs of his family house.

He was extremely discouraged by the indifference of young people to whom he tried to explain the savagery of the Holocaust, and also worn out from caring for his aged mother and from the deprivations of Auschwitz. It is interesting to me that in every book of his I've read, he always refers to the camps by the German "lager". It's as though only the German word for a German invention was the right term.

The title of this poem refers to the opening word of a prayer that anchors morning and evening Jewish prayer services. “Shemà” means “hear”, or “listen”. The full opening line of the prayer is “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”

“Shemà”

You who live secure
In your warm houses,
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

When I posted Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar”, I included a quote from Anatoly Kuznetsov’s documentary novel about the massacre. It’s appropriate here, too, remembering the Holocaust.

"Let me emphasize again that I have not told about anything exceptional, but only about ordinary things that were part of a system; things that happened just yesterday, historically speaking, when people were exactly as they are today."




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