british holocaust poetry: songs of experience a pseudo-people welded together by hereditary criminality....The annihilation of
Jewryisnolosstohumanity,butjustasusefulascapitalpunishment.’^21
It is thus inevitable that a study of Holocaust poetry should centre on writing
by Jewish authors. A sense of personal identification with Jewish victims of the
Holocaust might even be said to characterize post-war Jewish ethnicity in Britain.
The poet Dannie Abse expressed this in his poem, ‘The White Balloon’: ‘Auschwitz
made me|more of a Jew than Moses did.’^22 We might expect a difference between
poems by Jewish and by non-Jewish authors, who were and are not threatened in
the same way, or at least in the reception of their writing by Jewish and non-Jewish
readers. The context for our response to the English Protestant poet Geoffrey Hill
is different from the context of responses to the British-German poets of Jewish
descent Michael Hamburger or Karen Gershon. That difference goes some way
to explain the controversy over the use of Holocaust imagery by Sylvia Plath, an
Anglo-American of German Protestant descent.
British poetry finds itself in a peculiar situationvis-`a-visthe Holocaust.^23 The
authenticity of personal testimony is highly regarded in Holocaust literature.^24 Yet,
apart from deportation and slave labour camps in the occupied Channel Islands or
the bombing of civilian populations, there and on the mainland, the major Nazi
atrocities did not take place on British soil. They were directly witnessed by few
people who were or who became British. A notable exception is the British writer
Mervyn Peake, who was present at the liberation of Belsen as a war artist. He wrote
about the inadequacy of his immediate reaction of using aesthetics as a shield from
the merciless reality, in his poem ‘The Consumptive, Belsen 1945’.^25 There are
notable British Holocaust prose memoirs by Kitty Hart-Moxon, Hugo Gryn, and
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, all survivors of Auschwitz (and there have been attempts to
re-create Holocaust experience in fiction written at second hand by, for instance,
(^21) Joseph Goebbels, quoted in Michael R. Marrus,The Holocaust in History(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1993), 24–5.
(^22) Dannie Abse, ‘The White Balloon’, inSelected Poems(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 209–10;
compare this with his earlier ‘Red Balloon’ (p. 40). Elaine Feinstein also stated that she really became
a Jew and her sense of security was exploded ‘once and for all’ when she learned about the Holocaust
(Feinstein, ‘Elaine Feinstein Writes’, inThe Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets: Eleven
British Writers, ed. Jenni Couzyn (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1985), 114).
(^23) The situation in 1992 was discussed by Jon Harris, ‘An Elegy for Myself: British Poetry and the
Holocaust’, 24 English, 41 (1992), 213–33. Harris appends a list of Holocaust poetry.
This is partly because of the continuance of Holocaustdenial perpetrated bypseudo-historians
like David Irving, but patiently challenged by researchers such as Deborah Lipstadt. As I prepared this
paper in November 2005, Irving was being prosecuted in Austria for the crime, and a leading German
Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel, had been extradited from Canada to go on trial in Germany for racial ̈
hatred. 25
Mervyn Peake, ‘The Consumptive, Belsen 1945’, in Alan Sinclair (ed.),The War Decade: An
Anthology of the 1940s(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 268–9. The importance of that experience
to Peake’s fictional writing has been widely discussed; see e.g. Alice Mills, ‘Holocaust Peake’,Peake
Studies, 5/4 (1998), 28–42.