Home > Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity > Poetry

The Armenian genocide and the Holocaust produced some important and critically acclaimed poets. These poets bore witness to genocide and wrote about exile, grief, and moral outrage.

Poetry of the Armenian Genocide

Siamanto (Adom Yarjanian) was born in 1878 in Akn, Ottoman Empire (present-day Kemaliye, Turkey). He wrote a cycle of poems in Bloody News from My Friend (1909) that depict the atrocities of the 1909 massacre of the Armenians when converging Turkish political coalitions and local Turkish citizens killed about thirty thousand Armenians living in Adana province; this was a prologue to the Armenian Genocide of 1915. "The Dance," "Grief," "The Mulberry Tree," and "The Dagger" are graphic, realistic depictions of massacre, torture, and rape. Scholars consider Siamanto a ground-breaking poet because he preceded the British trench poets of World War I and refused to be ornamental, generic, or metaphysical in his writings. During the Armenian genocide, he was one of the 250 intellectuals and cultural leaders arrested in Constantinople on April 24, 1915, and later executed by the Ottoman government.

Along with Siamanto, Daniel Varoujan (1884–1915), was a leading voice of the new generation of western Armenian writers (Armenians of the Ottoman Empire). His early poems embody the recovery of Armenian myths, legends, and folklore that characterized the cultural revival of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. He was arrested by the Ottoman government on April 24, 1915, and later tortured and murdered on August 19. While he was in prison he wrote poems about Armenian agrarian life and a longing for the land. His poem "The Red Soil" depicts the culture of massacre Armenians were subjected to from the time of Sultan Abdul Hamid's massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s through the eve of the Armenian genocide.

Eghishe Charents (1897–1937) was born in Kars, then Russian Armenia (in present-day Turkey). His epiclike poem "Dantesque Legend" deals with his experience of the Armenian genocide during his participation in a resistance movement that took him into northeastern Turkey in order to rescue Armenians. Many other Charents poems deal with the trauma of the genocide.

Vahan Tekeyan (1878–1948), born in Constantinople, was in Cairo, Egypt, when the genocide commenced, and so escaped execution. His selected poems, Sacred Wrath (1983), include a number of finely controlled and often elliptically transformed poems of loss, exile, and grief: "On a Sonata by Beethoven" is a meditation on music and exile. "We Shall Say to God," " We Shall Forget," "There Are Boys," "To God," and "Scutari" are highly acclaimed poems about trauma and the meaning of suffering in the wake of genocide.

Poetry of the Holocaust

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish poets produced a range of important poems that bore direct witness to atrocity, to the aftermath of trauma, and to the metaphysical meaning of suffering. Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) was born into a wealthy family in Berlin. When the Nazis came to power, she barely escaped arrest, and fled to Sweden, where she lived for the rest of her life, writing and translating Swedish poetry. Her career as a poet flowered when she was in her fifties. In the House of Death (1947) deals with the suffering of the Jews and the overarching suffering of humanity. Eclipse of Stars (1949), And No One Knows Where to Go (1957), and Metamorphosis (1959) explore suffering, persecution, and exile. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1966.

Miklos Radnoti (1909–1944), a Hungarian Jew, was an avant-garde poet and editor before being deported and sent to labor camps in Yugoslavia. On a forced march back to Hungary with some three thousand men, he was shot. When his body was exhumed from a mass grave in 1946, his widow found a notebook full of poems in his pockets that included some of the most powerful poems written about the Holocaust: "Forced March," "Letter to My Wife," "Peace, Horror," "Picture Postcards," and "Seventh Ecologue."

Primo Levi (1919–1987) was born in Turin, Italy, and fought with the partisans in Italy until he was captured in 1944 and sent to the Bunz-Monowitz concentration camp. His professional training as a chemist helped him survive until the Russians liberated his camp in 1945. Although he is most well known for his works Survival in Auschwitz (1947) and The Drowned and the Saved (1986), Levi was also a poet. His poems bear an austerity and plain style that addresses the concentration camp experience with a unique rhetorical power that does not betray poetic texture. Levi's Collected Poems (1984) include "Shema," "For Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem," "Buna," and "Annunciation," among others. Levi, never able to overcome the psychological burden of his experiences, committed suicide in 1987.

Paul Celan (1920–1970) was born Paul Antschel in Bukovina, a German enclave of Romania, which was occupied by Romanian Fascists and Nazis in the early 1940s. His parents died in a concentration camp, but Celan—who was sent into forced labor—escaped to Paris in 1944 where he settled and continued to write poetry in German. His poems are written with an inventive dissonance that bears his tortured relationship to the perpetrator's language, thus defining him as a major and experimental poet. "Death Fugue," a poem that deals with concentration camp life, may be the most famous poem of the Holocaust. He committed suicide by drowning himself in the Seine in 1970. Selections from his nine books of poems appear in Poems of Paul Celan (1970). Other important poets of the Holocaust include Tadeusz Borowski (1922–1951), Dan Pagis (1930–1986), Abraham Sutzkever (1913–), and Gertrud Kolmar (1894–1943).

SEE ALSO Fiction

Peter Balakian