Judging Meaning: The Author and the Reader in Holocaust

Judging Meaning: The Author and the Reader in Holocaust

In Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust, the poet transforms Holocaust survivor testimony (and occasionally the testimony of Nazis) into a series of narratives in poetic form. Chief among the tools at Reznikoff’s disposal is the reference to meaning which exists outside of the text; dramatic irony in particular provides space for the reader to recognize and understand the implications of the poem’s narrative without explicit explanation. Reznikoff also utilizes simple, matter-of-fact language which casts the events of the Holocaust in unambiguous terms as well as poetic language derived from testimony to depict the poignant and horrifying scenes in language that is natural and real—yet it is simultaneously poetically expressive in a way that does not dispute the testimony’s status as truth. Ultimately, these tools allow Reznikoff to present the Holocaust clearly and without judgment, which places the reader in a position to determine poetic and political meaning for themselves. It is worth noting that Reznikoff’s work as an author of this poem is in tension with his poetic aim; in order to present historical truths objectively, he must compose the poem with as little of his own direction as possible, but in order to select the most representative or meaningful narratives, he must exercise a strong authorial hand in guiding the voice and tone of the poem. The result is a space which the reader must navigate themselves, determining the role of author and objectivity on their own.

The plain language of Holocaust extends from diction to tone—the speaker of the poem is always strictly factual and never accusatory. This in part stems from the nature of Reznikoff’s sources, which as courtroom testimony represent a form of communication which aspires to be free of emotional accusations. This methodology serves to locate the reader fundamentally near the experiences of the Holocaust—as Todd Carmody attests, “We can only know the Holocaust by reliving the experiences of survivors” (100). As Reznikoff did not write the poem per se but chose the selected testimonies to shape into a poem, we can consider him as having a form of authorial agency over the content and especially style of the poem. Then Reznikoff’s choice of testimony as poetry denotes that the factual tone of Holocaust is intentional and serves a purpose—namely, that Reznikoff allows the real world to speak more or less for itself. Equally important is the manner in which reading a poem created from survivor testimony is altered compared to reading a conventionally-written poem. The foreknowledge of the poem’s basic truth changes the reader’s approach to the poem itself; it is no longer a series of words with meaning reflected by the poet’s reality but as close to an objective document of the world outside the poet’s individual reality. This provides another reason for Reznikoff’s focus on objectivity and testimony—Reznikoff himself did not experience it, yet Holocaust is principally concerned with the experiences of the Holocaust. As a result, to remain objective, he must include the words of those who did experience the death camps with as much fidelity as possible. The reader, then, is unable to argue against the image Reznikoff creates because it is “real.”

A key element of Holocaust’s ability to present intensely personal experiences while still adopting an objective tone stems from Reznikoff’s careful editing. Part of this formal element is due to the nature of using testimony to produce the poem—the emphasis in testimony lies on an objective tone and a careful monitoring of the difference between opinion and fact. In Holocaust, the poet's devotion to objective representation and an emphasis on facts over opinions creates a sense of authority, as even without the knowledge of the testimonial sources, a reader would be able to sense the striving for an objective tone. But it is not only the testimonial nature that contributes to this aspect of the poem’s presentation. Throughout the poem, the identity of the speaker is elusive—thanks to Reznikoff’s editing, there is no “I” to be found, only third-person statements that rely heavily on factual statements only. The lack of an identifiable speaker casts the Holocaust as an event which did not happen to one person—it happened to too many people to consider. This, unlike the testimony-driven objectivity, is an element of Holocaust for which Reznikoff is directly responsible. Reznikoff edits out practically all instance of first-person pronouns; Todd Carmody points out that “[w]hen the first-person ‘I’ does appear, it is always spoken by a Nazi” (91). The result of the lack of pronouns is that Holocaust is simultaneously deeply personal (as the reader encounters the personal experiences of Holocaust survivors and victims) while also being completely impersonal (as the reader knows the names of literally no one in the poem, and the most defining characteristic of any of the people depicted is the way they die). The lack of names also aligns each of the experiences described in the poem into one overarching experience of the Holocaust. Carmody’s observation about the use of “I” by Nazis reveals an interesting dichotomy—Jews are united under one voice, suggesting a sense of innate community, while Nazis are defined by themselves, placing their individual identity over the lives of others. By establishing the Jewish voices as united and the Nazi voices as self-centered, Reznikoff implicitly depicts matters of political identity in simple moral terms, but without casting explicit judgment, inviting the reader to decide for themselves.

Reznikoff, by means of this careful method of editing, manages to create a poem which describes the things which took place in the Holocaust while also illustrating the kind of things which took place in the Holocaust—he is tackling an impossibly large experience, and so some of Holocaust must be representative of what he cannot portray with the objectivity that testimony allows him to. Nevertheless, Holocaust is representative but not symbolic—the events depicted in the poem literally happened and cannot be considered as anything but historical fact, even though they may represent intellectual and emotional experiences for the reader that transcend what lies strictly on the page and create meaning beyond what is explicitly written. Accessing that meaning creates an opportunity for the reader to recognize the gap between the stories presented in Holocaust and the real life issues of morality which complicate understanding of the Holocaust outside of the poem. The reader’s experience includes recognizing that space between the narratives and matters of moral judgment as well as determining for themselves what needs to be addressed that is not explicitly addressed by the poem itself. This act of meaning construction lies in the hands of the reader, even as Reznikoff carefully curates what components of truth the reader has to construct meaning with.

In order to fully appreciate Reznikoff’s commitment to providing an objective narrative of the Holocaust without assigning blame, it is worth considering the most moralistic passage in the poem. Early in the poem, the speaker describes a priest who helps Jews resist and hide from the Nazis. The priest explains the reason for his decision to help Jews, though he himself was not Jewish: “‘On this road there once was a Jew / brought down by robbers / and he who helped him was not a Jew. / The God I worship told me: / “Go and do as he did!”’” (5). This marks the only explicit statement about morality in Holocaust, and it is notably from outside the binary of Jews and Nazis. The message of the priest’s story is straightforward enough to easily comprehend: people should help one another, regardless of faith. It is a simple message of unity as human beings, and it appears because it is such an obvious counterpoint to the motivation of those who orchestrated the Holocaust. But Holocaust is not about resistance or about morality—it is about the suffering that millions of Jews experienced at the hands of the Nazis. This priest’s story appears early in the poem, and he never appears again; the reader never returns to this figure concerned with morality. His commitment to helping Jews is communicated by testimony, but it does not change the death and suffering that will compose the rest of the poem. This is as clear a statement as Reznikoff makes about the role of moralizing in Holocaust: it is nice, and no one will protest against it, but it is ineffectual. It is also worth noting that the priest makes a gesture toward adopting Jews into his community by helping them, but he also draws a dividing line between them: it is “[t]he God I worship” that guides him to help, specifically not the God of the Jews. Even in his attempt at uniting people, the priest’s attention is consumed by how he differs from the Jews (ostensibly by faith, the only thing that separates him from them). This represents the willingness of non-Jews to claim a part in supporting the Jews (or at least condemning the Nazis) even while carefully demarcating the ways Jews are different. But these moralizing voices are meaningless—Reznikoff is far more concerned with the complex question of truth and the construction of meaning than with matters of blame and righteousness.

The voices of non-Jews in Holocaust are few, but they stand out as markedly different from the bulk of the poem thanks to Reznikoff’s editing. The chapter “Research” begins with testimony like the rest of the poem, but it is testimony from a Nazi. It begins, “We are the civilized— / Aryans; / and do not always kill those condemned to death / merely because they are Jews / as the less civilized might: / we use them to benefit science / like rats or mice” (9). The irony here is palpable—the speaker proclaims they are civilized because they treat Jews like rats when the reader just as easily condemns the Nazis as inhumane for the contents of Holocaust. This is an especially jarring passage for several reasons. First, it substitutes a Nazi voice for the unspecified Jewish voice the reader has experienced thus far. To hear the testimony of the perpetrators nestled amongst the testimony of victims highlights the vast gulf of experience between the two. The Jewish voices the reader is used to hearing are concerned with survival and the facts of the Holocaust; this Nazi voice is concerned with notions of civilization. But for the reader, overwhelmed with narratives of death and hopelessness, the question of a civilization’s nobility is unthinkable—as a result, Reznikoff allows his reader to recognize the inhumane thinking of the Nazis on its own terms.

This attention paid—or not paid, in this case—reveals the second way in which this passage disorients the reader: the poem is careful not to proclaim any values as important, but the speaking Nazi considers civilization deeply important, not to mention the values associated with matters of civilization. He also seems to perceive a moral issue of waste—it would be wasteful to kill Jews without using them first. Such issues are not mentioned by the Jewish speakers in Holocaust. The gulf between Nazi concerns and Jewish concerns highlights the difference in their situations historically, revealing the different roles they played in the Holocaust for the reader terms at once certain and unevaluated. The final aspect of this passage which is perhaps the most troubling comes at the end of the section; the speaker has mentioned actions taken “for the good of the German air force,” “for the good of the German navy,” and “all for the good of the German army,” followed by the proclamation, “Heil Hitler!” (9). It is one thing to recognize the dedication of Nazi soldiers through the eyes of Jewish survivors, noting the inhuman cruelty they carry out; recognizing the humanity of those Nazi soldiers and registering those twisted values as belonging to a person who would still pledge loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi cause years after the Holocaust is entirely another experience. To a Holocaust survivor, a Nazi saluting Hitler during court testimony would be a sickening reminder that the perpetrators of the Holocaust evaded justice. This passage forces the reader to confront that fact, which becomes all the more challenging when paired with the notion that justice in the Holocaust is so complicated it may be impossible.

The poem begins with accounts of deportations, and these accounts depict the lack of information Jews had about the intentions and methods of the encroaching Nazis. Reznikoff’s edited testimony reads: “‘To the police station at once. / But you are going to come back right away,’ the policeman added” (3). The policeman’s statement is innocuous enough—it merely communicates instructions and a reassurance. But to Reznikoff’s reader, this statement has a treacherous double meaning. The reader knows that there is no part of the Nazi plan which allows the Jews to “come back right away,” steeping the very first lines of Holocaust in dramatic irony. The reader’s knowledge immediately creates an emotional response; they grow concerned for the Jews who did not know they would not be returning home because the reader knows that this represents the beginning of the end. By relying on the reader’s response to information that lies outside the poem, Reznikoff forces the reader to bring their own mental and emotional processes to bear on the events of the Holocaust. This is another compounding factor which compels the reader to create their own meaning in the poem.

It is important to note that in this same passage, Reznikoff generates emotion without directly invoking the death camps, the cruelty of the Nazis, or the pain and suffering of the Jews. This simple act encourages the reader to watch for further inconsistencies in Nazi speech and reality carefully and sympathetically. By establishing the voice of an authority figure we know to be dishonest at the beginning of the poem, Reznikoff sets the reader into a mental space where they are inclined to distrust voices of German authority, as well as one in which they anticipate the tragedy that befalls the Jews. To accomplish this by speaking around what the reader already knows requires Reznikoff to select testimony which states what happened during the Holocaust without judgment. As a result, the most shocking and visceral acts throughout Holocaust are described matter-of-factly without any emotional element. This decision allows Reznikoff to present the events of the Holocaust as objectively as it may be deemed possible while still clearly (and often implicitly) illustrating the moral issues at the heart of the poem’s events. Like a lawyer, Reznikoff selects what testimony will evoke emotion and morality will hewing closely to an objective approach to documenting experience.

The role of the reader to consider and determine meaning is guided by Reznikoff’s use of simple language which gestures to meaning outside of the text. Dramatic irony and matter-of-fact presentation are often at their most effective in Holocaust when they simply rely on the reader’s knowledge rather than the poem’s narrative. One scene describes Jews arriving at a work camp, the passage ended with the phrase, “They were in Treblinka” (38). A similar passage later in the poem ends, “‘In a little while you will be going over there,’ / and pointed to the furnaces. / They were in Auschwitz” (68). Both passages rely on the weight of the final lines: “They were in [a well-known death camp].” Reznikoff does not select testimony for these portions of the poem which describe the historical significances of Treblinka or Auschwitz, nor does he select testimony which dramatically identifies those death camps as being especially horrifying. Rather, he relies on the reader’s knowledge—or at least, their assumed knowledge—that more people died in Auschwitz than in any world event in human history, including the dropping of the atomic bombs. Further, the language which Reznikoff selects is simple—so simple, in fact, that a child might have spoken it: “They were in Auschwitz.” Stating such a momentous and tragic fact without any emotion serves two functions: first, it removes the concept of blame from the equation, and second, it allows the reader to determine the significance of such an event. Because there is no attribution of fault in the statement, the reader is left to ask and answer the question of blame themselves. As a result, the simple statement “They were in Auschwitz” implies a legacy of wrongdoing which the reader is left to consider and evaluate.

While “They were in Auschwitz” is devoid of blame, it is also devoid of direct meaning. Such a simple statement lacks overt emotion—if the reader is to determine the meaning of arriving in Auschwitz, then they cannot claim that Reznikoff (or those whose testimony he used) has an anti-German agenda. More importantly, it asserts that Holocaust’s goal is to chronicle the Holocaust, not to determine matters of justice—that is the role of the courts from which he sampled testimony. In this way, Reznikoff allows the trials of the Nazis to be held by anyone who reads Holocaust, with the role of survivor experience, blame, and both poetic and political meaning left to the reader themselves. It is worth noting that the first Jews arriving to these death camps (and many that followed) would not have known the significance of the name Auschwitz the way a modern reader does, so dramatic irony serves to deepen the experience of reading Holocaust by allowing the reader to sympathize with the nameless speaker of the poem. Of note is the fact that the reader can sympathize with the speaker of the poem, but cannot empathize with them—Reznikoff’s construction of Holocaust precludes the reader from being able to experience the Holocaust rather than consider the experiences of the Holocaust.

The non-threatening nature of the above quoted lines extends in function to provide additional implied meaning. The quotation about the furnaces in the camp is stated so matter-of-factly that the reader can almost miss the meaning of the words: “‘In a little while you will be going over there,’ / and pointed to the furnaces.” Dramatic irony again looms large here; the statement would likely be heard by the Jews new to the camp that they would soon be working with the furnaces, but the reader knows that they will be incinerated. But the statement does not have the appearance of an omen of death—it instead masks the ensuing oblivion in simple language. This represents the lack of knowledge that Jews arriving at the camps experienced, a process which Reznikoff depicts again and again in order to communicate the fear of being given incomplete or inaccurate information when one’s life is on the line. The reader, especially attuned to the disparity between stated meaning (both in the poem and from Nazis) and actual meaning (particularly what is known outside of the text), recognizes these moments and feels sympathetically connected to the threatened Jews. In this way, Reznikoff presents the Holocaust through his poetry for a reader who can consider but not inhabit the experience.

In a later passage, after some Jews have begun to hide from the Nazis who worked to round them up, the poet explains that while some have hidden, “many went to the square named; / for they really believed they would be resettled: / surely the Germans would not kill healthy people fit for work” (13). Dramatic irony is again rich in this passage—the reader is aware that those who went without suspicion to be “resettled” were actually sent to death camps. A form of sympathetic anxiety is likely to be induced in the reader; the phrase “for they really believed” emphasizes this sense of information tragically unknown to these people. This is compounded by the last line of the section: “surely the Germans would not kill healthy people fit for work,” a statement which is so obviously untrue from the reader’s perspective that the “surely” preceding it only serves to make the dramatic irony more tragic (while simultaneously utilizing simple enough language to make the dramatic irony accessible to any reader). Should the reader somehow be unaware of the reality of this statement, Reznikoff has structured several of the chapters around the massacres of Jews who were either able to work or were in the act of working. These narratives provide a subtext wherein the people in the poem lacked information when they experienced the story depicted which is complicated by the knowledge they would possess by the time they related the story as testimony; the reader is hyperaware of this subtext and determines the meaning of knowledge in the context of the Holocaust—they are likely to find that knowledge does not help one survive, but that it does change meaning.

The effect of dramatic irony in passages like this one is reinforced by the simplicity of the language used to describe events. In the passage quoted above, only one of the words in the lines quoted above are more than two syllables, and only that same word— “resettlement”—would need to be explained to a child. By utilizing such simple language from the available testimony, Reznikoff refuses to allow Holocaust to become an affair for the educated. As a result, anyone could read and understand the poem. This manner of universal understanding is quite opposite the situation of the Holocaust itself, wherein even the educated and well-connected could not understand the actions leading to the death camps. This contradiction highlights for the reader the notion that information could not protect the victims of the Holocaust. It is no coincidence that Reznikoff uses accessible language; to bar anyone from learning the experience of the Holocaust would be to deny the victims of the Holocaust the legacy of a world event that must never happen again.

The matter-of-fact testimony Reznikoff uses often reflects poetic forms. In one particularly disturbing passage, a survivor describes the damage done to buildings as well as to children: “In the ghetto, corpses of men, women, and children / were left in the streets; / the doors of the houses stood open, / windows smashed; / and everywhere / shoes, stocking, jackets and coats, hats and caps. / At the corner of one house lay a baby, / skull crushed / and the wall of the house spattered with its brain and blood” (28). There is no emotion apparent in this passage; the accounting of various articles of clothing merits more description than the slaughtered baby, providing the reader with a sharp shock of juxtaposed images of negligible and harrowing images, both of which are described as part of the scene. Such a comparison highlights both the emotional weight of the dead baby and the lack of emotion with which it is described; because the poem does not invest the baby with explicit emotional meaning, it creates a tension by refusing to reflect the obvious emotional weight of a slaughtered infant. As a result, the discord between the reader’s perceived meaning and the poem’s refusal to anoint meaning drives the reader further into sensing the pain and emotional meaning of the dead baby.

Despite the fact that this passage is especially emotionally difficult, it is not unique for that in Holocaust. The laundry list of shattered bodies, children and otherwise, all delivered in emotionless tones, is continuous; these serve to highlight the commonness of such destruction and to ironically emphasize how heartbreaking such scenes are. Reznikoff also manages to transform the testimony into poetic forms: “windows smashed” follows the same grammatical format as “skull crushed” a few lines later, both images related back to the structure of the house. This juxtaposition downplays the violence against the baby by comparing it to property damage, deemphasizing the moral component of human violence. It also establishes the baby’s lifeless body as being fundamentally similar to a ravaged house: both are broken, unliving things which the Nazis destroyed. These associated meanings resemble poetic devices, but are constructed from the testimony of Holocaust survivors, indicating that Reznikoff’s careful selection of this testimony signals a concept vital to Holocaust—real life does not just inspire art, it becomes art when an artist depicts it. Further, deemphasized moral and emotional elements of the poem highlight for the reader their own emotional responses, inviting the reader to evaluate the Holocaust in light of their experience of Holocaust as a document.

Another passage in which the language of testimony evokes poetic language comes in a description of people loaded onto trains. “When the rear doors were opened, / those inside were standing like statues: / there had been no room to fall / or even bend. / Among the dead, families were to be seen / holding each other by the hand, / hands tightly clasped / so that those who threw out the dead / had trouble parting them” (31). Here, the description of the dead on the trains is marked by rhetorical devices; “standing like statues” provides a simile which is effective in showing the lifelessness of those who died on the trains—a simile which Reznikoff did not write, but which he carefully selected for the poem. The effect of this figurative language is more complex than displaying lifelessness, however; it applies images of life to the dead, who still stand in the train cars, even as they are as lifeless as statues. Similarly, “those inside” does not initially communicate that the Jews on the train are dead, so the “standing like statues” provides a mixed image which blurs the line between life and death. This is a literary expression of the experience of the death camps, where life and death are scarcely different. The phrase “there had been no room to fall / or even bend” suggests resistance in the sense that falling or bending would be to fail to resist against the Nazis, but the indication that “there had been no room” to do so displaces the question of resistance. The Jews had little ability to effectively fight back against a national armed force, casting their fate in a light of lack of control.

The second sentence in this selection describes families holding hands tightly, and here the poetic imagery is deeply rich. Families joined together in death is one of the key promises of most religions, several sects of Judaism included, so this image is a corrupted presentation of a question of faith. Such an image shows the reader a familiar and heartwarming image—families joined together in an eternal way—in a disturbing manner, portraying the way families were destroyed by the events of the Holocaust and the promise of faith went unfulfilled. This illustration of destroyed families is at once representative—representing the idea of a family joined despite the Holocaust—and not symbolic, as it is an event which factually occurred and cannot be considered as anything but objectively historical. This tension between symbolic and literal truth draws the reader into recognizing that the events of Holocaust are both factual and deeply imbued with meaning outside of the text. This complicates the matter of relating to the stories in the poem, and prevents the reader from attempting to empathize, an act which is fundamentally impossible.

In the same passage, Reznikoff deliberately selects passive voice to mask that the Nazis are responsible for the scene being described. It is not “Nazis” who removed the corpses from the train, but simply, “those who threw out the dead.” This appeals once again to a sense of dramatic irony—the reader knows that it was Nazis who pried frozen families apart, but Reznikoff includes only that their role was to remove bodies. By relying on the reader to process and attribute blame, Reznikoff casts the Holocaust in the light of an event to be processed and understood without focusing on blame, which draws critical attention away from the victims. Notably, the people who are the point of view in this passage are the Nazis—it is through their eyes that we learn about the difficulty of separating the dead family members. This challenges the reader to consider the scene not from the perspective of the Jews, but to see the victims of the Holocaust as dead bodies which present a problem. This is an exercise of objectivity in which Reznikoff’s dedication to objectivity pushes the reader to consider the value of that objectivity—the reader is likely to be frustrated by the refusal to simply place blame on the perpetrators of the Holocaust and evaluate things for themselves. It is, then, Reznikoff’s responsibility to maintain objectivity, and the reader’s responsibility to shun that objectivity and create a meaningful stance for themselves.

Notably, the same passage deindividualizes the Nazis removing bodies from the train in the same way that Holocaust depersonalizes its speakers throughout the poem. Here, the focus is not on who did what, but on the representative meaning of the things which took place. The final lines in this selection, “those who threw out the dead / had trouble parting them,” uses further metaphorical language to describe the scene in a fashion simultaneously devoid of sensationalism or blame yet rich with poetic meaning. While the workers who removed the stiffened dead from the train literally struggled to separate the joined family members, they also had trouble splitting the family apart—even the cruel treatment which ended the lives of so many families could not sever the emotional ties which joined them. Again, Reznikoff’s selection of testimony becomes an act of authorship as he chooses voices and stories which poetically present an objective history of the Holocaust.

As so much of Holocaust turns on historical fact, there is little room for surprise in the poem. Nevertheless, Reznikoff uses testimony which subverts the reader’s expectation, particularly in depicting the lies that Nazis told about Jews’ safety. In one such passage, a Nazi says, “‘What a pity / to bury such beauty in the earth. / Go! / But don’t look backwards. / There is the street to the boulevard. / Follow that’” (23). When the young girl to whom the Nazi is speaking begins to follow the instructions, the speaker calmly explains that “the officer took out his revolver / and shot her in the back” (23). In this story, the reader is forced to decide whether to believe that the Nazi truly will allow the young girl to survive—this section is early enough in the poem that the reader may conceivably believe the Nazi could be telling the truth; the reader is not yet far enough in the poem to distrust any shred of hope, depending on their experience. But whether the reader is fooled by this scene, there is still an element of surprise—more often than not, the Nazis in the poem’s stories simply enact violence without a false promise of safety. So even though the poem’s subject is historical fact, Reznikoff presents it as fundamentally surprising, shifting the reader’s experience from absorption of the text to participation, gauging what elements of the real world are believable or unbelievable (regardless of their factual truth). This experience for the reader is reflective of the experience Jews would have had during the Holocaust—they would have struggled to believe that such things could really be happening, even as they happened all around them. The element of surprise in the poem paradoxically reveals that even a poem about established facts can seem unbelievable, representing the manner of cognitive dissonance that was common for victims of the Holocaust.

Also notable in this passage is the simple, unemotional use of language which invites the reader to determine the emotional impact of the girl’s death. The speaker might easily have described the memory of the girl falling dead after being shot or the emotion they felt while watching the revolver be drawn, but rather, they simply say he “shot her in the back,” and the passage ends. Such direct and unemotional language presents the reader with an image and refuses to comment upon it—it is strictly for the reader to experience the scene, register an emotion, and determine the meaning on their own. Many readers may struggle to find a meaning beyond finding someone to blame, which in turn replicates another experience Jews would have underwent during the Holocaust; the difficulty of finding meaning is a core experience to understanding the Holocaust, so far as one is able to understand the Holocaust at all. This further raises the question of deriving meaning from the study of history at all; to read Holocaust as a document which considers and applies blame is to fundamentally misunderstand the poem and to misunderstand the study of history, the goal of which is not to act as a world court but to gather the truest understanding of events possible. To read Holocaust, then, is to engage with the process of gathering and writing history, complete with the moral conundrums that an objective approach to unthinkable acts must face and reconcile.

Another element of Holocaust which contributes to the simplicity of style of the poem is the use of single grammatical clauses in each line. “All money and whatever valuables they had / were to be handed in at the door marked ‘Valuables’ / and women and girls were to go to the ‘hairdressers’ / who with one or two strokes / cut off their hair / and this was to be put into large bags and used for mats— / nothing lost or wasted!” (29). Here, each line serves a single grammatical purpose—to incrementally progress the sentence it constructs—in a simple, straightforward way. Even when Reznikoff samples testimony with complex sentence structure, like the above passage, the lines break the sentence up into easily digestible pieces that keep the pace of the poem fairly constant. Because the content of this constant stream of testimony depicts human depravity, the reader is left trying to process an unending parade of pain and suffering. This is an exhausting experience, leading the reader to question whether it is possible for further pain to follow, but of course it continues until the poem’s end. This suggests to the reader the constant stream of horrors experienced by Holocaust victims and survivors, recreated in poetic form to provide the reader with a sympathetic (but certainly not empathetic) link to the experience of the Holocaust. This accomplishes the documentary goal of Holocaust; the narratives of survivors provide the doorway to perceiving the Holocaust in the most accurate sense possible.

Although the passage quoted above does not evoke the suffering of Jews at its most extreme, it does contain a troubling internalization of Nazi thinking. The phrase “nothing lost or wasted!” appears outside of quotation marks in the poem, indicating that the testimony offered was not a direct quotation of the Nazis, but something indicated by a Jew who survived the death camps. In this case, the Nazi ethic that no part of the Jews—not even their physical bodies—could go without being used has been internalized by the survivor. This simple line reveals that the victims of the death camps were victimized not just physically but also psychologically in ways which were not deliberately designed to harm them. Surely, the psychological manipulation employed by Nazis (such as Nazis lying to Jews about their safety before harming or killing them, as in the previously discussed passage) were intentional, but Jews internalizing the values of Nazis is a manner of suffering that was not part of the German design. This brief line reveals an entire dimension of Jewish suffering that is rarely addressed in considerations of Holocaust studies; even apart from the countless measures to destroy the Jewish population, there was internal damage done which was never engineered but occurred nonetheless. This kind of Jewish suffering reveals that even without intention, Nazis did grievous harm to the Jewish population, but more importantly, it forces the reader to consider an element of oppression which is not easy to represent. This internalized oppression resists easy categorization as a form of psychological torment, but it reveals the ways in which Jews were unable to rely even on their internal resistance to Nazi violence. Reznikoff replicates this internalization by burying the notion of internalized Nazi ethics in simple language without overt attention called to it. Just as it would have been easy for Jews to not register their internalized Nazi statements, it is easy for the reader to miss the idea that the speaker has adopted the “nothing lost or wasted” mindset, replicating the experience of those in death camps.

Another passage which reveals unspoken meaning from simple phrasing comes from a description of the schedule at work camps. The speaker tells the reader that “The day’s routine began, in the summer, at four in the morning; / in the winter at six” (46). This statement reveals a counter-intuitive truth: there were Jews who survived the horrors of the death camps for long enough to learn the seasonal schedules of the camps. To read Holocaust is to confront the endless stream of deaths—nameless deaths, senseless deaths, too many deaths to remember. It seems from reading the poem that everyone who entered a camp died of starvation, cold, or massacre; this passage suddenly reminds the reader that the testimony was provided by someone who lived through all of the death surrounding them. It challenges the reader to consider what it must have been like to live in such conditions, constantly threatened by death, for season after season, potentially year after year. By selecting testimony which at least momentarily reminds the reader that there were survivors, Reznikoff casts the horrors of the death camps in a different light—one which does not allow the reader to summarize the Holocaust without confronting the pain of the living as well. To face the full variety of Holocaust experiences in this poem is to grasp the inability to cleanly express or understand the truths of the event. Reznikoff constructs the poem using the precise testimony which portrays why his painstaking effort to document the Holocaust is necessary to responsibly conceptualize the experiences of survivors and victims.

Another effect of working with the pain of survivors is that the reader must consider a more complex portrait of how death camps functioned. To be alive for months or years in a death camp would require great cunning and luck; it would also force these survivors to witness the horrors of the camps for months or years. For the reader, who may be emotionally exhausted by reading the spare poems in Holocaust, it is practically impossible to imagine the horrors on the page lasting for longer than the duration of the book. The disparity between the poem’s suggested experience and the reader’s experience highlights for the reader their inability to experience what the Holocaust survivors experienced. The manner of delivery of the statement about the schedules is also devoid of evaluation. It is not that four in the morning is a punishing time to arise for manual labor—the speaker has no apparent emotion about the time. Rather, reflecting the testimonial nature of the text, the speaker is conveying information without judgment, allowing the reader to determine for themselves what it means to be forced to work on the schedule described. It is deemed self-evident that such a schedule would tax anyone, and all the more disturbing that Jews were killed for not being able to sustain it without proper food or sleep. Again, it is the role of the reader to consider and judge the events of Holocaust, and not Reznikoff’s.

Through Holocaust, Reznikoff creates a documentary experience of the Holocaust, one which transports the reader through unimaginable events with such unflinching simplicity that they cannot be doubted. By presenting such events in unambiguous ways with language which reaches to meaning outside of the poem itself, Reznikoff places the impetus for creation and processing of meaning on the reader, whose role it becomes to consider and determine the role of blame in the poem. The use of testimony allows Reznikoff to pursue this goal with practically unimpeachable veracity—he can rightfully claim that Holocaust is as true as a poem as are court proceedings in international courts. The space left to the reader, then, is less interpretive than with more conventionally composed poetry, deriving meaning from what is not in the text.

Yet Reznikoff also refuses to ask the question of blame, thus allowing the reader to come to their own conclusions about one of the defining events of world history. This space for the reader to consider and evaluate on their own poses a manner of rhetorical question—the reader can determine culpability for themselves, but does that question actually challenge a stance on the Holocaust? The poem may not declare that Nazis are monsters, but it does not provide any evidence to the reader that the Holocaust was anything but an unimaginable tragedy consciously orchestrated by thousands. The reader must have agency, but that agency only serves as a tool to allow the reader to come to the only possible conclusion of Holocaust. And paradoxically, despite Reznikoff’s insistence on the reader’s agency and freedom from guidance by an author, he maintains a firm authorial hand at the helm of Holocaust. The sources from which he draws number thousands of pages, but Reznikoff’s poetic exploration of the Holocaust does not reach 100 pages—this indicates that his editorial decisions are precise and selective enough to represent his intentions (so long as the court records support it as true) in the same way that an author constructs meaning from potentially available phrases in a given language. Reznikoff’s authorial identity refuses easy explanation, casting the testimonial voices as the apparent author of the text, further placing an impetus on the reader to connect with the Jewish voices on their own terms, which is the only way to effectively learn about the Holocaust.

This doorway to learning about the Holocaust is a delicate balance, one which Reznikoff manages with less apparent effort than that required for the task. It is impossible for the reader to empathize with survivors of the Holocaust (assuming they are not themselves a Holocaust survivor), and Reznikoff is careful to keep the reader from empathy. Much of the distance created by using language devoid of apparent emotion to describe wholly emotional moments prevents the reader from fully situating themselves in the mindsets of Holocaust survivors, and the lack of authoritative voice assigning blame serves to remind the reader that even the poem’s Jewish author is less interested in questions of responsibility than remembering the people whom the Holocaust affected. The reader is, however, allowed to feel sympathy for the suffering of those whose narratives compose Holocaust. This is the exercise of the poem—to present the Holocaust with honesty and responsibility, and to allow the reader to determine what an honest, responsible presentation of the Holocaust looks like. Reznikoff places the events of the Holocaust in close proximity to the reader, and “[p]roximity to the suffering of others, [Marie] Syrkin implies, inevitably produces proximity to historical truth” (Carmody 96). By documenting the most striking tragedy of human history through the objective lens of testimony, Reznikoff permanently preserves both a window to the past and a platform for the present to consider and construct meaning.

 

 

Works Cited

Carmody, Todd. “The Banality of the Document: Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust and Ineloquent Empathy.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 32, no. 1, 2008, pp. 86–110. Project Muse.

Reznikoff, Charles. Holocaust. Black Sparrow Books, 1975.