WAR LITERATURE FINAL ESSAY

THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST

Syed Abdul Rafay (S2021-094)

The Jewish holocaust moved the human history from the inside. It’s one of the most
prominent events in modern history, affecting millions alive and millions to come. During the
Second World War, the German Reich initiated Jewish extermination all across Europe. With
the success of Nazi conquests in Europe during the initial years of the war, the anti-Semite
regime started to grow stronger across the continent.
The Jewish population all across Europe was in danger, they were captured and murdered in
cold blood. What was their crime? What had they done? Was it’s the religion they were born
into? Was it their race? Was any of this in their control to fix? The Jews were forced to live in
concentration camps, some of them fled, some hid in plain sight, pretending to be Christians.
Some 9 million Jews were the ones affected, two thirds of which murdered by the Nazis and
their brutal allies. With such a large population affected, we find tons of literature written by
the holocaust victims. Most of it in the form of personal diaries and letters used for
communications. These diaries and letters contained poems and narrations of the events
taking place around the authors.
One of the most prominent poets of the holocaust is Alexander Kimel, he was one of the one
hundred out of ten thousand who survived the Rohatyn Ghetto. In his poems he wrote about
his early adult years spent in the ghetto. He saw fear, death, devastation, hopelessness along
with the tragedy of losing his loved ones. In his poem ‘I cannot forget’ he talks about the
trauma he has and how he can’t stop himself from remembering everything he saw and went
through during the five years of living in the ghetto. He talks about what he saw by the end of
the killings, how families were divided, how there were rivers of blood, how the Nazis had
brutally taken thousands of innocent lives. His writings show the fear, the trauma he felt. He
says:
“Do I want to remember, the creation of hell?
The shouts of the Raiders, enjoying the hunt.
Cries of the wounded, begging for life.
Faces of mothers carved with pain.
Hiding Children, dripping with fear.
No, I don’t want to remember, but how can I forget?” (kimel)

From his writings we can see what the survivors went through, they had to live through the
devastation and couldn’t get the escape even through death, and they had to carry the burden
of trauma on their shoulders for the rest of their lives.

One important theme that we can find in writings of holocaust poets and writers is them
looking at their traumatic past through the present. Everything that’s happening in their lives
after the events of the holocaust, they use them to reflect their past. It again tells us about how
strong the trauma is, and how hard it is for them to have an escape. An Auschwitz survivor
Ceceline Klien wrote her memoir Sentenced to Live, it reflects on how she felt after she was
liberated from Auschwitz and returned to her normal life. She says:
“A survivor will go to a party and feel alone.
A survivor appears quiet but is screaming within.
A survivor will make large weddings, with many guests,
but the ones she wants most will never arrive.
A survivor will go to a funeral and cry, not for the
  deceased, but for the ones that were never buried.” (Klien)

Klien’s writings show how these people who were once ‘normal’, are eternally damaged the
experiences they went through changed them completely and brought out a very different
version of themselves. We can see how even when the victims are liberated, they have very
little or no desire to live. Is surviving even living? Can someone who’s been through so muc,
stay sane? Can they go back to their normal lives? Will anything ever go back to where it was
before the war? Their writings reflect how the lives after surviving such an atrocity aren’t
worth living. They feel that escaping their feelings is only possible through death, and death
only. We can see how they have no motivation to live anymore. The trauma haunts them day
and night. Most of war survivors have trouble sleeping because they have post-traumatic
stress disorder. Tons of holocaust survivors ended up committing suicide. They are mainly
just surviving through life and not living it.
When we talk about the literature related to the Jewish, one name pops into everyone’s
minds. The little girl from Frankfurt, Germany who had to leave her house and escape to
Amsterdam, Netherlands, Anne Frank. Anne Frank is one of the most discussed victim of the
holocaust. The kept daily diaries of what she and her family went through during the two
years of hiding from the Nazis. Her diaries tell the tales of the Jewish experiences through a
fourteen years old girl’s lens. Its shows what the innocent girl felt. She writes:
“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all 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.” (Frank)
We can see how she has something to linger on to, a thin thread to hold on to sanity, to
normalcy. Her innocence can be seen when she says she still believes that everyone is still
good at heart. She can’t understand how can the oppressors be so cruel, how is there no
humanity left in them? A child cannot understand what her mistake is. What has she done to
deserve even the slightest of cruelty she has been experiencing? She later passed away at the
age of sixteen.
We can’t help but think about the fact that wars are often fought for power, for land and for
the personal interests of the ones with authority. The innocent civilian who cares not more
than proving food on the table for his family by working day and night has nothing to do with
the demons of the ones who rule them. Yet they are the ones who suffer the most. The rulers
are mostly sitting in their palaces comfortably while their citizens are the ones giving up their
lives, their women getting raped and their children displaced. What is their sin? All they want
is to carry on with their lives, they have no interests in winning or losing wars. No one wants
to lose all their belongings, their loved ones, their shelter and most importantly their lives. It’s
not their war to fight, why should they be the ones that suffer?
A very notable theme that we find in many of these writing is that of the detatchment and the
hope for a long awaited reunion. Many families were divided during the horrors of the
holocaust, some members passed away, some were taken prisoners and had to settle
elsewhere with no connection to their families. The one thing these victims could hold on to
was hope. The hope that they will one day be reunited with their families. The hope that they
will get to live their lives to their fullest and grow old watching their offsprings grow up.
Zofia Romanowicz was a Polish Jew who was separated from her family. In her poem ‘To
my little girl’, she talks about what she’ll do for her daughter after everything is over. She
hopes to see her again and go back to being a normal family. She writes:
“I’ll make a set of dishes for my little girl,
I think it will be lovely;
I’ll mold goblets,
I’ll turn plates,
I’ll paint it with wonders,
Suns, stars, birds –
                  How my little girl will clap her hands!” (Romanowicz)

Hope and regret are two feelings that go together. Victims often felt the regret of not being a
good son, a good father, a good friend when they had a chance. They hope to redeem
themselves after they are set free. After years of prolonged wars like the World War 2, in
comes despair. The victims have been through so much, they have seen so much blood and
killing, they eventually lose hope. But then again, it’s only hope that they linger on to.
Watching cities getting wiped out, hundreds and thousands of people who you once knew as
friends, family, neighbours, someone who used to work at the city library, the man who sang
for you on the radio, they are all torched in front of you, you have to live the rest of your live
with that sight stored somewhere deep inside your mind. What’s the point of having life?
In modern day we see many museums and memoirs have preserved the history of the
holocaust. Letters, poems, diaries, books and pictures have been kept to remind mankind of
how low it can fall. The fact that the holocaust began in the first place is mankind’s failure.
How did humans manage to hate a community to such an extent that they decided to wipe
them out of existence? The literature we read from the holocaust helps prevent such act of
brutality from happening again. But do we learn?

Bibliography
Frank, Anne. The Diaries of Anne Frank. 1947.

kimel, Alexander. i cannot forget. 1942.

Klien, Ceciline. Sentenced to live. 1983.

Romanowicz, Zofia. To my little girl. 1944.