O pinion
Writing Poetry Helps Me Process the Holocaust’s Unspeakable Evils
BY MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT
NOT LONG AFTER the
gruesome reality of the Holocaust
had burst onto the world’s
consciousness, the philosopher
and social theorist Theodor
Adorno famously observed in
1949 that writing poetry after
Auschwitz was barbaric —
“nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu
schreiben, ist barbarisch.”
Less well known but equally
insightful was Adorno’s subse-
quent conclusion, expressed
in a 1966 radio address in
Germany, that Auschwitz itself
constituted nothing less than a
“relapse into barbarism.”
Adorno understood that
the Shoah’s calculated, system-
atic savagery was an absolute
deviation from the fundamental
norms of civilization and
civilized behavior. To be valid,
anything written or said about
the Holocaust, whether in
poetry or prose, must first and
foremost encapsulate and reflect
its barbaric essence. Aesthetic
sensitivities and considerations
must yield to the undeniable
absolute evil that sparked and
perpetrated the genocide of
European Jewry, requiring us
to absorb and try to come to
terms with the unprecedented,
the unfathomable and, above all,
the inexplicable.

Perhaps the most cogent
context for this inexorable
immersion into the unknown
was given by my late teacher
and mentor Elie Wiesel, who
explained in his essay “A Plea
for the Dead” that “Auschwitz
signifies not only the failure of
two thousand years of Christian
civilization, but also the defeat
of the intellect that wants to find
a Meaning — with a capital M
— in history. What Auschwitz
embodied had none.”
And yet, despite all these
flashing yellow lights, I, the son
of two survivors of Auschwitz
and Bergen-Belsen who was
born three years after the end
of World War II in the displaced
persons camp of Bergen-Belsen,
long ago turned to expressing
myself in poetry. Over the
decades I have tried to give voice
to the dead in my poems, to
comfort ghosts, and to provide
a memorial to the millions who
have none.

For me, conceptualizing my
poems is often simultaneously a
refuge and an escape. An escape
from the realm of conventional
human experience into a parallel
internal reality.

We need poems, songs and
parables. We need a Kafkaesque,
morbid language of dreams
and nightmares to be able
to penetrate the nocturnal
universe of Auschwitz and
Birkenau, of
Treblinka, Majdanek and Bergen-Belsen, of
Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and
Terezin, of the Warsaw Ghetto,
Transnistria and Babyn Yar.

A sparse inscription on a
Birkenau barrack wall forces us
to identify with its author without
knowing anything else about
him: ​“Andreas Rapaport — lived
sixteen years.” Aware that he was
about to die, a Jewish teenager
tried to leave a sign, a memory of
his existence on earth. Without
pathos, without self-pity, Andreas
Rapaport was the author of his
own eulogy, his own Kaddish:
Andreas Rapaport — lived sixteen
years. Andreas Rapaport —
abandoned, alone, afraid.

Andreas Rapaport — hungry,
in pain. Andreas Rapaport
— gas-filled lungs. Andreas
Rapaport — incinerated, black
smoke, ashes.

In “Under Your White
stars,” Avraham Sutzkever,
the Yiddish poet of the Vilna
Ghetto, wrote, “stretch out
to me Your white hand. My
words are tears that want to
rest in Your hand.” It is the
beginning of a monologue
addressed to God that never
turns into a dialogue because
there is no response. Against a
“murderous calm” that perme-
ated the precarious existence
of the ghetto’s inhabitants, the
narrator writes: “I run higher,
over rooftops, and I search:
Where are You? Where?”
The poems written by
Sutzkever and other poets
in the ghettos and even in
the Nazi death and concen-
tration camps were their
way of refusing to become
dehumanized, of defying their
oppressors and remaining sane
in a world gone mad.

Upon arrival at Auschwitz-
Birkenau on the night of Aug.

3-4, 1943, a little boy named
Benjamin was separated from
his mother and sent directly
into a gas chamber with his
father and grandparents.

Benjamin was
my half-brother. Even though my
mother rarely spoke about him,
I know that she thought of him
every day of her life. Since her
death in 1997, Benjamin has
continued to exist within me.

I see his face in my mind, try
to imagine his voice, his fear as
the gas chamber doors slammed
shut, his final tears. If I were to
forget him, he would disappear.

And I write about him so
that my grandchildren, and
their children and grandchil-
dren in turn, will remember
Benjamin as well. My poems
are my legacy to them. l
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is
associate executive vice president
and general counsel of the World
Jewish Congress and teaches
about the law of genocide at the
law schools of Columbia and
Cornell universities.

Calling Any Jewish Woman a ‘JAP’ is Offensive —
But Not for the Reason You Think
BY IVY HUMBARGER
THE TERM “Jewish American
Princess” has been debated
within Jewish communities for
as long as it has existed. Many
bemoan it for perpetuating
14 APRIL 15, 2021
sexism and negative stereo-
types of Jewish women, while
others have argued that despite
these origins, there’s a power in
embracing the moniker.

But as a Jew of Japanese
descent, I’m here to say the much
larger problem comes from the
acronym used in its place: JAP.

There needs to be a conversation
about the dangerous and violent
history of the racist slur “jap,”
and why Jewish people should
not want to co-opt this word.

For those unaware, “jap”
is a racial slur used against
Japanese people. World War
II-era America best showcases
the dangers of this hateful word.

As we all know, the war
brought much suffering to many
groups of people. And while
America claims to be the hero
that saved the world, the asser-
tion often ignores or justifies
its treatment of the Japanese.

In Japan, America dropped
devastating bombs on civilian
cities that resulted in 225,000
deaths, which is likely an under-
estimated count, according
to UCLA. Stateside, the U.S.

government deported Japanese
Americans — fellow citizens
— to Japan, as bargaining
chips to trade for American
prisoners. In 1942, the U.S.

government forcibly relocated
JEWISH EXPONENT
and incarcerated some 120,000
Japanese Americans, two-thirds
of whom were natural-born
citizens. These people were ripped
from their homes by the govern-
ment and placed in makeshift
internment camps in the desert
on the West Coast. They had no
trials and nobody to save them.

In 1942, Gen. John DeWitt,
commander of the Western
Defense Command, said, “A
Jap’s a Jap. It makes no difference
whether the Jap is a citizen or
not.” That same year, Col. Karl
Bendetsen of the Wartime Civil
Control Administration said, “I
am determined that if they have
one drop of Japanese blood in
them, they must go to camp.”
The homes and businesses
of Japanese Americans were
destroyed, looted and vandal-
ized. The word “japs” was
everywhere. Spray-painted on
homes, on the front page of
newspapers, on signs and posters.

People protested the presence of
Japanese people in America in
the streets and from the comfort
of their homes. Businesses put
up signs banning Japanese from
entering the premises, saying
“No japs allowed.”
These were innocent citizens,
many of whom came here for the
“American dream.” Like many
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