From: Hell Broke Loose: Poems on the Holocaust by Warren Gaston
“There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing,
not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.”
Paul Celan*
(1920-1970)
The mind within my fingers suffers,
I write in the language of my systematic assassins,
Deutsche, guttural, full of phlegm.
I had no better lexikon to state my case against them
than the bundled words they used to murder me,
than the vokabular my neighbors spoke when
teaching math or brewing beer or making love
or inquiring into the nature of being and time.
I tried to learn another tongue to disturb their sleep,
to alert their children to bone ash on windowsills
and blood smeared on doors.
For a time I set aside my pen waiting for a dictionary,
a catalogue of neutral words
that did not bite the hand that wrote them.
The postman arrived each day with no book.
I wrote my poems in the language
babies Adolph H. and Adolph E. learned
while suckling on their mothers’ breasts.
Skillfully,
I held their milk black** tongues
up to the mirror so they could see
the shadow that they drank.
Concealed among Schiller’s lovely nouns and verbs,
a syntax of condemnation slipped from my poet’s pen.
I, like Odysseus’*** sailors clinging to the blinded Cyclops’ sheep,
reversed the tale and entered the monster’s mental cave.
“Did you do these unspeakable things?”
the judge in Jerusalem asked Adolf E.
“No!” the defiant Adolf answered,
“I am Nobody. I just obeyed Somebody’s orders.”
My name is Somebody now,
I shout into echoing “Sieg Heils“. .
I am the poet of the murdered nameless dead.
I write the silent wails of those whose words
were taken with their breath.
The glossary that lit the flesh-kiln fires now lights my torch,
not to burn,
but to pierce the insufferable smoke-enshrouded Teutonic dark.
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*The Jewish poet Paul Celan lost both parents in the Holocaust and he was forced to work
for the Nazis in labor camps. He was shaken to the core by the Holocaust, yet wrote out of
his horror and pain in the language that managed the atrocity: German. He felt conflicted in
this use but it was his language and as a poet he could not refuse to write.
**First line from Celan’s poem Todesfugue::“Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night” –
***Referring to the Cyclops scene in Homer’s Odyssey where the hero hides his men among the
blinded monster’s sheep as they leave the cave. Safely on board their ship, Odysseus cries out
“My name is Nobody” when the Cyclops asks him to identify himself.