Conclusion

At the heart of this lesson, we presented the writings of four people, two of whom survived and two of whom were murdered by the Nazis.

For many survivors there is a nagging question of why they survived and others didn’t. Ovadia Baruch was an Auschwitz survivor from Saloniki, Greece, whose story was filmed by Yad Vashem in a captivating video made a few years before he died (a link to the video in YouTube is included in the “Selected Bibliography” below). At the end of the video, Ovadia points to pictures of famous Greek Rabbis and poignantly asks why he survived and others more deserving than him were murdered.

So, I have chosen to conclude this lesson with the musings of one poet who in the following two verses touches on aspects of the random fate of individuals in history and for this, I turn again to Wislawa Szymborska whom we met in the first lesson. The poem is called ”Could Have” and the opening two verses below force the reader to face the vagaries of fate in human affairs.

It could have happened.

It had to happen.

It happened earlier. Later.

Nearer. Farther off.

It happened, but not to you.

You were saved because you were the first.

You were saved because you were the last.

Alone. With others.

On the right. The left.

Because it was raining. Because of the shade.

Because the day was sunny.

In the next and final lesson of the course, we will present four poems, all written after the Holocaust. The subjects lined up will deal with the hardships of the suddenness of liberation and thoughts about human behaviour and evil in the unrolling of history.

Selected Bibliography

Holocaust Poetry

• Cytryn, Avraham, Youth Writing Behind the Walls (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005).
• Kertesz, Imre, Fatelessness (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).
• Metzger, Jackie, “Two Poets and a Dividing Wall”, in Yad Vashem’s Website, 2013.
• Schiff, Hilda, “Introduction”, in Schiff, Hilda (ed.), Holocaust Poetry (London: Fount, 1995), pp. xiii-xxiv.
• Volavkova, Hana (ed.), …I never saw another butterfly…: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 (Prague: Artia for Schocken, 1978).

Holocaust in General

• Berenbaum, Michael and Israel Gutman (ed,), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
• Gutman, Yisrael, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1982).
• Michman, Dan, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• May Your Memory Be Love – the Story of Ovadia Baruch