Holocaust Literature

1. Holocaust Literature English I Honors

2. Excerpt from The Diary of Anne Frank • It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all of my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I heard the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heaves, I think that it will all come right, that his cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

3. Excerpt from Elie Wiesel’s Night • Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreathes of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. • Never shall I forget the flames which consumed my faith forever. • Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.

4. Excerpt One from Mein Kampf • Culturally, he [the Jew] contaminates art, literature, the theater, makes a mockery of natural feeling, overthrows all concepts of beauty and sublimity, of the noble and the good, and instead drags men down into the sphere of his own base nature…Here he stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.

5. Excerpt Two from Mein Kamph • With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim or ruining the hated white race…himself rising to be its master.

6. “Frozen Jews” by AvromSutzkever Have you seen, in fields of snow, frozen Jews, row on row? Blue marble forms lying, not breathing, not dying. Somewhere a flicker of a frozen soul - glint of fish in an icy swell. All brood. Speech and silence are one. Night snow encases the sun. A smile glows immobile from a rose lip's chill. Baby and mother, side by side. Odd that her nipple's dried. Fist, fixed in ice, of a naked old man: the power's undone in his hand. I've sampled death in all guises. Nothing surprises. Yet a frost in July in this heat - a crazy assault in the street. I and blue carrion, face to face. Frozen Jews in a snowy space. Marble shrouds my skin. Words ebb. Light grows thin. I'm frozen, I'm rooted in place like the naked old man enfeebled by ice.

7. “The Swastika Poems” by William Heyen They appeared, overnight, on our steps, like frost stars on our windows, their strict crooked arms pointing this way and that, scare- crows, skeletons, limbs akimbo. My father cursed in his other tongue and scraped them off, or painted them over. My mother bit her lips. This was all a wonder, and is: how that sign came to be a star flashing above our house when I dreamed how the star’s bone-white light first ordered me to follow, how the light began like the oak’s leaves in autumn to yellow, how the star now sometimes softens the whole sky with its twelve sides, how the pen moves with it, how the heart beats with it, how the eyes remember

8. “The Butterfly” by Pavel Friedman I never saw another butterfly . . The last, the very last, so richly, brightly, dazzling yellow. Perhaps if the sun's tears sing against a white stone . . . Such, such a yellow Is carried lightly `way up high. It went away I'm sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye. For seven weeks I've lived in here, Penned up inside this ghetto, But I have found my people here. The dandelions call to me, And the white chestnut candles in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don't live here in the ghetto.

9. “To the Onlookers” by William Heyen When our backs are turned, when someone stares at us, we feel them. You who watched the killing, and did nothing, still feel the eyes of those dead on your bodies. How many see you as you pick a violet? How many oak branches twist into hands begging for help? How many memories congeal in the sun's evening blood? O the unsung cradlesongs in the dove's nightcries– so many would have loved their own stars in the night skies, but now only the old well can do it for them. You did not murder, but looked on, you, who could have been changed into light.

10. “The Hair: Jacob Korman’s Story” By William Heyen Ten kilometers from Warsaw, I arrived in Rembertowwhere hundreds of Jews had lived until the wheel turned: Judenrein. You think they let themselves be taken? They would not fill the trucks. Men were shot trying to pull guns from the guards' hands. and hands of dead women clutched hair, hair of SS guards, blood-patched hair everywhere, a veltmithor, a field of hair.

11. “Riddle” by William Heyen From Belsen a crate of gold teeth, from Dachau a mountain of shoes, from Auschwitz a skin lampshade. Who killed the Jews? Not I, cries the typist, not I, cries the engineer, not I, cries Adolf Eichmann, not I, cries Albert Speer. My friend Fritz Nova lost his father a petty official had to choose. My friend Lou Abrahms lost his brother. Who killed the Jews? David Nova swallowed gas, Hyman Abrahms was beaten and starved. Some men signed their papers, and some stood guard, and some herded them in, and some dropped the pellets, and some spread the ashes, and some hosed the walls, and some planted the wheat, and some poured the steel, and some cleared the rails, and some raised the cattle. Some smelled the smoke, some just heard the news. Were they Germans? Were they Nazis? Were they human? Who killed the Jews? The stars will remember the gold, the sun will remember the shoes, the moon will remember the skin. But who killed the Jews?