Polish and Hungarian Poets on the Holocaust

When discussing Holocaust poetry two names usually spring to mind: Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs. There is, however, a large corpus of poems on the subject from two eastern European countries, both of which had large Jewish communities before the Second World War: Poland and Hungary. In what follows I shall discuss the best poetry on the Holocaust from both countries, excluding that written in Yiddish.

Poland

The Holocaust was a subject for most Polish poets after the war. Outrage over the mass killings of Polish Jews was voiced by Antoni Słonimski (1895–1976), who spent the war in exile in England and France, the non-Jewish Władysław Broniewski (1897–1962), whose wife Maria died in Auschwitz, and Tadeusz Różewicz (1921–2014), who was a soldier in the Home Army during the German occupation. There are also a few poems written by Tadeusz Borowski (1922–51) in Auschwitz. His 'objective', detached short stories were translated into many languages, including English,¹ his prose being superior to his verse. Borowski probably suffered from survivor's guilt, and, though he made a career as a journalist in communist Poland, he committed suicide six years after the liberation.

Tadeusz Różewicz visited the Auschwitz camp in 1948 after it had been turned into a museum, and his visit resulted in two short but powerful poems, 'Warkoczyk' ('Pigtail') and 'Rzeź chłopców' ('The Massacre of the Boys'),² which deal with the murder of young girls and boys by the Nazis, focusing on the most contemptible facet of the genocide: it was not only defenceless civilians who were killed but children, innocent of any possible crime against the Third Reich. The only reason for murdering them was racial hatred.

Różewicz himself had a Jewish background (his mother was a convert to Catholicism), but I do not think this influenced his laconic, minimalistic poetry on the war and the Holocaust. Others who had survived the German occupation in hiding such as Mieczysław Jastrun (1903–83) held a different, more tragic view. While Jastrun made references to the Holocaust in several poems, perhaps the most subjective lines occur in a poem of his published in the slim collection Gorący popioły ('Hot Ashes'):

About those times of fire and ashesDry annals of history will speakAnd nobody will ever knowHow did death tasteFor those who were led to their execution.³

Another witness of those times of 'fire and ashes' was Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004). As a Lithuanian citizen in occupied Warsaw his life was perhaps in less danger than Poles of military age, but while he had a job helping out in the National Library, he also edited an illegal anthology, Pieśń niepodległa ('Independent Song') in 1942. This anthology contains patriotic and anti-fascist poems, but it pays only scant attention to the tragedy of the Polish Jews, at that time already squeezed into ghettos and being selectively eliminated. Miłosz, nonetheless, soon became one of the most outspoken Polish poets of the Holocaust thanks to two powerful pieces of poetry: 'Campo dei Fiori' and 'Biedny chrześcijanin patrzy na getto' ('A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto').

Both poems stress individual responsibility for events affecting society. 'Campo dei Fiori' shows Miłosz the historicist as well as the outsider: the burning of Giordano Bruno at the stake in Rome strangely resembles a funfair in the immediate neighbourhood of the Warsaw ghetto during Easter week 1943, when on the other side of the wall SS troops and their Ukrainian and Latvian helpers were crushing the ghetto uprising. The unifying elements in the story of the Italian heretic burnt by the Inquisition and the Jews burnt by the Nazis is fire and the indifference of the Romans and the Christian Poles to the fate of those of a different faith. The poem starts with a description of the square in Rome, which has not changed much since Bruno's execution, and goes on in the first person singular:

I thought of the Campo dei FioriIn...