claire m. tylee
could include the Nuremberg trials of 1945–6, the subject-matter of Holocaust
poetryalso includes the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. (So Schiff includes
Denise Levertov’s startling poem ‘During the Eichmann Trial’, but also Elaine
Feinstein‘s ‘Annus Mirabilis 1989’ when the Berlin Wall came down, as evidence
that anti-Semitism, that ‘old monster’, was still flourishing behind the Iron Curtain
in 1979.^18 ) By bringing to the surface of public consciousness what had been largely
concealed during the War and repressed afterwards, the kidnapping and trial of
Adolf Eichmann informed a new generation about Nazi war crimes and led to a
reconceptualization of the War in Europeand of ‘crimes against humanity’. In
particular, it drew attention away from theconcentrationcamps liberated by the
Allies in the West, such as Dachau and Belsen, which were horrific enough, to
the hiddenexterminationcamps that the Russians had liberated in the East, such
as Auschwitz. (Like the ghettos and labour camps, they were, of course, all death
camps.) Until then, the term ‘holocaust’ (from the Greek for ‘whole burnt offering’)
had been newly used to indicate fear of nuclear destruction; from then on it came
to imply genocide, especially the ‘Final Solution’ of eradicating Jews from Europe
by gassing and cremating them. Taking place in the new State of Israel, the trial
empowered Jews in the diaspora to investigate the nature of anti-Semitism and the
near eradication of European Jewry, particularly as they affected Britain.^19
Newhistoriesmadeclearthat,apartfrompoliticalopponents,theparticulartarget
of Nazism was people defined as Jewish, and therefore subhuman, to be exterm-
inated like vermin. Other groups were also systematically defined, persecuted, and
murdered, including Gypsies, homosexuals, political opponents, and people cat-
egorized as being deficient in various ways. Slavs were considered inferior, and were
shot or condemned to slow death through slave labour. However, if it is a feature of
Romany culture that the past should be forgotten, it is almost a defining feature of
Jewish culture that the past should be recorded.^20 Whereas we have next to no liter-
ature concerning the mass murder of at least 250,000 Gypsies in Europe, there has
been a huge effort to document the genocide of more than 6 million Jews (about two-
thirds of the European total), for which the Hebrew term Shoah (‘a terrible wind’)
hasbeenreservedbyJewsthemselves.Furthermore,asMichaelR.Marrusconcludes,
‘the Nazis’ assault upon Jewry differed from the campaigns against other peoples
and groups’, since Nazi ideology required the total extirpation of the Jews and of
their culture. He quotes Goebbels: ‘The Jews are no people like any other people, but
(^18) Levertov’s poem bears comparison with Primo Levi’s ‘For Adolf Eichmann’, in Haughton (ed.),
Second World War Poems, 146, and Michael Hamburger’s ‘In a Cold Season’, in Lawson (ed.),
Passionate Renewal, 117–20. See also Audrey Beecham, ‘Eichmann’, in Reilly (ed.),Virago Book of
Women’s War Poetry and Verse, 147.
(^19) See e.g. Gilbert,Holocaust and the Jewish Tragedy; Tony Kushner,The Holocaust and the Liberal
Imagination(Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and David Cesarani,Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind
(London: Heinemann, 1998).
(^20) See James E. Young, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Riggs (ed.),Reference Guide to Holocaust Literature
(London: St James’ Press, 2002), p. xxxi; and Clendinnen,Reading the Holocaust,6–8.