Holocaust Poetry HOLOCAUST, SHO'AH, HURBAN

Was the widespread state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish, it was called "the final solution to the Jewish question" In 1930

Response to the fascist regime Foreshadowed the impending disaster

During the War

Recording direct memories of persecution Poems written in concentration camps were memorized or suppressed

Later poetry

Genre that is still being written today Gave voice to previously unrepresented marginalized groups WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN PUNTI DI DISCUSSIONE Wystan Hugh Auden (February 21, 1907 to September 29, 1973) was an English and American poet. He was born in York, in an English middle-class family. He was interested in literature, especially Nordic mythology, but also in music and psychology . Auden's poems are known for their style and technical achievements, their interactions with politics, morals, love and religion, and their diversity in tone, form and content. He studied at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk, and then, in 1925, at the University of Oxford, where he founded a literary circle which today bears his name ("Auden Circle"), along with other brilliant students, including Cecil Day Lewis. , Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. Refugee Blues "Refugee Blues" was first published in 1939, on the eve of World War II. It imitated the plight of Jewish refugees who were forced to flee from Nazi Germany but could not find refuge elsewhere. As this poem does, it raises broader questions about isolation, loneliness, and exile. It shows the pain and suffering of being forced to leave their homes and unable to find a safe and secure place in a world of violence and uncertainty. In this period thousands of refugees fled to natural countries such as the United States and Switzerland. Many of them are persecuted Jews. In particular, many people fled from "Kristallnacht" or "Night of Broken Glass", in which coordinated actions resulted in the destruction of Jewish businesses and houses. Among them, 400 Jews were killed and more than 30,000 were Take to the concentration camps.

The main themes are : Anti-Semitism and Complicity in Prejudice and Exile and Loneliness (The poem is written in the form of a blues song - it is in 3-lines stanzas with 4-beats to each line, it takes a single, said main theme and makes variations on it and leads to a powerful finale). Let’s say there are ten million people in this city. Some are living in mansions; some are living in slums. But there’s nowhere for us to live, my dear, there’s nowhere for us to live. We used to belong to a nation, and we thought it was beautiful. If you look in the atlas, you’ll see it. But we can’t go there anymore, my dear, we can’t go there anymore. An old yew tree grows outside the village church. Every spring, it blossoms again. But our old passports don’t blossom in the spring, my dear, they don’t blossom in the spring. The immigration official slammed his fist down on the table and shouted, “If you don’t have a passport, then you’re legally dead.” But we’re still living, my dear, we’re still living. I went to a committee for help and they told me to take a seat—then told me to wait until next year. But where will we go right now, my dear, where will we go right now? I went to a political rally where the speaker said: “If we let the refugees enter our country, they’ll take our food.” He was talking about you and me, my dear, he was talking about you and me. I thought I heard thunder in the sky. It was Hitler above Europe, saying, “They must die.” He was talking about you and me, my dear, he was talking about you and me. I saw a poodle wearing a jacket fastened with a brooch. I saw a door open to let a cat in. But these were not German Jews, my dear, they weren’t German Jews. I stood on the pier down at the harbor. I saw the fish swimming there—and they looked free enough. They were only ten feet away from me, my dear, only ten feet away. I went for a walk in the woods and saw birds in the trees. They don’t care about the politicians; they sang freely. They weren’t human beings, my dear, they weren’t human beings. In my dream, I saw a building a thousand stories tall. It had a thousand windows and a thousand doors. But not one of them belonged to us, my dear, not one belonged to us. I stood in a big field in the falling snow, while ten thousand soldiers marched back and forth, looking for us, my dear, looking for us. Ian McEwan

Born in 1948. 1975 he pubblished his first collection of short stories.

He wrote a couple of plays where he talked about how

men oppress women, the way systems excludes individuals,...

Black dogs he tells about greter social and political awareness though he tried to preserve that rather mysterious element he regards so important in fiction. Black Dogs

It deals with the aftermath of the Nazism in Europe and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 influenced those who saw communism as a way out for society. The main characters are: Bernard June Jeremy Jeremy lost his parents at the age of eight and from that moment he tries to replace them. Their life has changed after an accident that gives the work its name: June was attacked by two black dogs who were seen as the evil of the universe. From that moment she feels a divine sense within her and a duty to resist the force of evil of those dogs. Anthony Hecht

Hecht was born in New York City in 1923 by German-Jews parents

He decided to become a poet, after struggling in school, even though he didn't have his parent's support

In 1944, Hecht was drafted into the 97th Infantry Division and was sent to the battlefields in Europe.

On April 23, 1945, Hecht's division helped liberate Flossenbürg concentration camp "The place, the suffering, the prisoners' accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking."

These memories caused him to have a nervous breakdown in 1959

He died on October 20, 2004

Flossenbürg concentration camp THE HARD HOURS

"I was appointed to interview French prisoners, in the hope of securing evidence against those who ran the camp. Later, when some of these were captured, I presented them with the charges leveled against them, in an attempt to get to the bottom of what was done and who was responsible"

Rites and Cermonies This poem is divided into four movements and it evokes Eliot's "Four Quartets" It juxtaposes personal testimony in the form of prayer to formal diction and structure. The poem examines the persecutions and atrocities of the Holocaust It is twenty years now, Father. I have come home. But in the camps, one can look through a huge square Window, like an aquarium upon a room I saw it on their belts. A young one, The size of my livingroom filled with human hair. dead, Others have shoes, or valises Left there on purpose to get us used Made honestly of cardboard, which once contained to the sight Pills, fresh diapers. When we first moved in. Helmet This is one of the placesNever explained. (33-40) spilled off, head Blond and boyish and bloody. I was scared that night. Are the vents in the ceiling, Father, to let the spirit depart And the sign was there, The sign of the child, the grave, We are crowded in here, naked, female and male.An old man i worship and loss, saying a prayer. And now we start Gunpowder heavy as pollen in winter To panic, to claw at each other, to wail air, An iron cross. (25 – 32) As the rubber-edged door closes on the chance and choice. He is saying a prayer for all whom this room shall kill.“ I cried unto the Lord God with my voice, And he has heard m out His holy hill. (57 – 64) Thomas Keneally

Born in Sydney in 1935. He is an Australian novelist ,playwright and essayist.

best known for his non- fiction novel Schindler's Ark which won the Booker Prize in 1982. How all started?

Poldek Pfefferberg a Holocaust survivor and Schindlerjude

"who by zeal and persistence caused this book to be written." "it was the fact that you couldn't say where opportunism ended and altruism began. And I like the subversive fact that the spirit breatheth where it will. That is, that good will emerge from the most unlikely places" Schindler's Ark

Oskar Schindler joined Nazi Party in 1939. He secured the lease of a formerly Jewish- owned enamelware factory (known as Emalia). By 1942 nearly half of the workers at the expanded plant were Jewish., considered as "cheap labour"

1943 Plaszow work camp opened under Amon Goth. He created a camp for his Jewish workers, where they were free of the abuses suffered at Plaszow. his concern for them was not purely financial.

He successfully move his factory to Brnenec. He composed what is known as Schindler's List. In the camp they were manufacturing munitions that were rigged to fail

May 8 1945, the war ended and he fled the county the next day. He went bankrupt and he spent the rest of his life supported by donations from Schindlerjuden Sitografia

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Hecht 2. https://www.academia.edu/5192733/Trauma_and_Prayer_in_Anthony_Hechts_The_Hard_Hours 3. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anthony-hecht 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Keneally#Early_life 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler%27s_Ark 6. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oskar-Schindler 7. Only Connect... New Directions, From the Early Romantic Age to the Present Age (Terza Edizione) 8. https://theconversation.com/holocaust-poetry-and-the-reclamation-of-many-identities-130429 9. https://www.britannica.com/event/Holocaust 10. https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/w-h-auden/refugee- blues#:~:text=%E2%80%9CRefugee%20Blues%E2%80%9D%20was%20written%20by,isolation%2C %20loneliness%2C%20and%20exile. 11. https://www.skuola.net/letteratura-inglese-1800-1900/auden-refugee-blues-analysis.html Thanks for the attention

Made by Camilla Andreuzzi, Giulia Accettulli, Alessandro DiMuccio, Maria Cristina Pineda and Maria Elisabetta Lucci