Holocaust Poetry

The author's mother's 1938 autograph book filled with inscriptions from family and friends is the inspiration for a collection of narrative poems about life in Nazi Germany for a Jewish family trying to escape the horrors.

The year of goodbyes : a true story of friendship, family, and farewells
By:  Debbie Levy
New York : Disney-Hyperion Books, c2010.
Reading Level 5.8

A meditation on a woman's hat once on display in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

Who was the woman who wore the hat?
By:  Nancy Patz
New York : Dutton Books, 2003.
Reading Level 3.2



The power of verse to encompass a topic of mammoth scope and render it into painstakingly personal detail is keenly demonstrated in this absorbing and well thought-out anthology of grief. Sixty-two poets of different ages, citizenships and perspectives make their voices heard. There is Primo Levi on being an Auschwitz survivor; Randall Jarrell speaks in the voice of a death-camp worker. There are poems that have no need for complexity of form or vocabulary. Poets from Eastern and Western Europe, Russia, Israel and the U.S. declare the simple truths that propel the reader through the eight parts of this collection, each section a stage marked with a title of forewarning, beginning with ``Alienation'' and ``Persecution,'' on to ``Lessons'' and, finally, ``God.'' We learn what was left of the body--smoke, empty shoes, ``a faded plait/ a pigtail with a ribbon''--and we uncover what was freed of the poet's mind--rage, testimony, legacy.

Holocaust poetry
Compiled and Introduced by Hilda Schiff
New York : St. Martin's Press, 1995.
Reading Level AD

 

 A selection of children's poems and drawings reflecting their surroundings in Terezin Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia from 1942 to 1944.

I never saw another butterfly : children's drawings and poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944
FollettBound Sewn Expanded 2nd ed. / by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  xxii, 106 p. : col. ill. ; 27 cm.
Young Adult



The Last Lullaby is the culmination of Aaron Kramer's fifty years devoted to translating poetry spawned by the Holocaust. The full horror of the genocide and the sublime spirit of those who resisted are given voice on these pages. These poets -- originally writing in Yiddish -- speak from the ghettos, way-stations, death camps, and partisan forests.<P>Placing each group in its historic and literary content with comprehensive introductory essays, Professor Kramer presents works mostly unavailable in English -- until now. For the very first time, readers can become familiar with poets who experienced the horrors of the ghettos and the death camps and survived: Soviet poets; American poets who were forever transformed by the Holocaust. Kramer also introduces the 1944 Terezin opera Der Kaiser yon Atlantis.<P>The Last Lullaby is a testament to the richness of a half-annihilated language that, in the pain of its survivors, was made more beautiful than ever before. Unlike most other current translators,Kramer insists on maintaining the music of the original Yiddish, the often "folkish" cadence and rhyme which, he believes, are a precious part of these poems' legacy.

The last lullaby : poetry from the Holocaust 
Publisher's Hardcover, 1st ed. xix, 256 p. : ill ; 24 cm.
Young Adult