claire m. tylee
Bernice Rubens, D. M. Thomas, and Caryl Phillips).^26 However,we have no British
camp survivors who have written as eloquently of their suffering in either poetry or
prose as the German Jew Paul Celan, the French resistance fighter Charlotte Delbo,
the Italian scientist of Jewish descent Primo Levi, the Romanian Jew Dan Pagis, or
the Hungarian-Jewish teenager Elie Wiesel. Indeed, Harold Bloom has claimed that
whereas writers such as Celan, Wiesel, and Nelly Sachs ‘can touch the horror with
authority...British and American writers need to avoid it, as we have no warrant
for imagination in that most terrible of areas’.^27
We need to expand our notion of what constitutes Holocaust poetry beyond
such authoritative, first-hand witness of the camps if we are to include many of
the writings selected by Schiff. It may be that British poets cannot claim the close
personal responsibility felt by, for instance, the Russian Yevgeni Yevtushenko over
the massacre at Babii Yar—‘I am|each old man|here shot dead’^28 —or Bertolt
Brecht over the destruction of German culture, or the Pole, Tadeusz Ro ́ ̇zewicz,
at the museum in Auschwitz. That does not mean that British poets have felt
no responsibility to bear secondary witness. Quite the contrary. Nor was the
trauma of the Holocaust restricted to those who were confined on the Continent.
During the 1930s, Britain took in refugees. In particular, theKindertransportrescue
scheme brought 10,000 children to Britain in the last ten months before the War.
Novels, plays, and memoirs have been written about their experience of Nazism,
especially the traumatic loss of their parents and family in Europe, presenting that
as an integral part of Holocaust cruelty.^29 For JewishKinder-poets such as Karen
(^26) Kitty Hart,Return to Auschwitz(London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1981; 1st pub. asIAmAlive, 1961);
Hugo Gryn,Chasing Shadows(London: Penguin, 2001); Anita Lasker-Wallfisch,Inherit the Truth,
1939–1945(London: Giles de la Mare, 1996); Bernice Rubens,Brothers(London: Hamish Hamilton,
1983); D. M. Thomas,The White Hotel(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); Caryl Phillips,The Nature
of Blood(London: Faber, 1997). And see the study by Sue Vice,Holocaust Fiction(London: Routledge,
2000), for the controversy surrounding Thomas’s use of authentic Holocaust testimony in his novel. 27
Harold Bloom, quoted in Susan Gubar,Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never
Knew(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2003), 9. Despite Bloom’s opinion, the Jewish-
German poet Nelly Sachs spent the war in Sweden, so might be judged to have no more first-hand
authority than Litvinoff.
(^28) Yevgeni Yevtushenko, ‘Babii Yar’, trans. George Reavey, in Schiff (ed.),Holocaust Poetry,92–4.
(^29) That number was less than 1 percent of the 1.5 million Jewish children who were slaughtered by
the Nazis. There is now an extensive literature about theKindertransport, including Karen Gershon’s
ground-breaking collective memoir,We Came as Children(London: Gollancz, 1966); Lore Segal’s
autobiographical novel,Other People’s Houses(New York: New Press, 1991); fictional novels by
Anita Brookner,Latecomers(London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), and Caryl Phillips,Higher Ground(New
York: Viking, 1989); and Diane Samuels’s play,Kindertransport(London: Oberon, 1995); as well as
various documentary films. For longer bibliographies, see Peter Lawson, ‘Karen Gershon’, in S. Lillian
Kremer (ed.),Holocaust Literature:An Encyclopedia of Writers and their Works(London: Routledge,
2001), 415–19; and in the same book, Claire M. Tylee, ‘Diane Samuels’ (pp. 1082–5), and ‘Lore
Segal’ (pp. 1135–7). For a discussion of Gershon’s prose about refugee experience, see Christophe
Houswitschka, ‘ ‘‘What I was going to be I already was: a writer’’: Karen Gershon and the Collective
Memory of the Kindertransport’, in Ulrike Behlau and Bernhard Reitz (eds.),Jewish Women’s Writing
of the 1990s and beyond in Great Britain and the United States(Mainz: WVT, 2004), 73–85.