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Tag Archives: Kristallnacht

“Unholy Sonnet #9” by Mark Jarman

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

David Ben-Gurion, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Kristallnacht, Mark Jarman, Nazism, Poem, Poet, poetry, Unholy Sonnet, Unholy Sonnet #9, Writing

Ireland - Barbed Wire

Someone is always praying as the plane
Breaks up, and smoke and cold and darkness blow
Into the cabin. Praying as it happens,
Praying before it happens that it won’t.
Someone was praying that it never happen
Before the first window on Kristallnacht
Broke like a wine glass wrapped in bridal linen.
Before it was imagined, someone was praying
That it be unimaginable. And then,
The bolts blew off and people fell like bombs
Out of their names, out of the living sky.
Surely, someone was praying. And the prayer
Struck the blank face of earth, the ocean’s face,
The rockhard, rippled face of facelessness.

__________

“Unholy Sonnet #9” by Mark Jarman, pulled from his stunning collection Unholy Sonnets.

The picture was taken in New Ulm, Texas. Some other favorites from Jarman, who is not only one of the most profound lyric and narrative poets writing but also an occasional reader of this blog, are below:

  • “If I Were Paul” by Mark Jarman
  • “History” by Mark Jarman
  • “Outside” by Mark Jarman

Mark Jarman

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Survival In Auschwitz

08 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Auschwitz, concentration camps, death camps, Elie Weisel, Final Solution, free will, God, history, Hitler, Holocaust, Jews, Judaism, Kristallnacht, memoir, Nazis, Nazism, Primo Levi, Rabbi Akiva, religion, Shoah, Survival in Auschwitz, Writing

Holocaust Survivor Tattoos

“Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?

If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”

__________

From Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.

I tried but failed to find a full text of the book to post here. So pick up a copy for yourself. Just don’t start it late at night, because you won’t get to sleep.

While I believe Levi’s unflinching moral outrage and existential cynicism are legitimate, even admirable, I think they should be counterbalanced by Elie Weisel’s somber reflection that, “after Auschwitz, I did not lose faith in God. I lost faith in mankind.” These takes on the Holocaust are divergent ways of grappling with Rabbi Akiva’s paradoxical epigram that “all is foreseen by God, yet free will is given.”

Kristallnacht, the attacks which intensified the rabid persecutions leading to the Final Solution, broke out 75 years ago tomorrow. Something on which we should all spare at least a moment’s reflection in the next few days. The German novelist W. G. Sebald remarked, in a hyperbolic but effective line, that, “no serious person ever thinks about anything else but the Holocaust.”

The above shot is one of my favorite photos, now hanging in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, “Diaspora” by Frederic Brenner.

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