O the Chimneys (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Leonie Sachs
- First Published: 1946
- Type of Work: Meditation
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry, Meditation
- Subjects: Suffering, Murder or homicide, 1940’s, World War II, 1930’s, Jews or Jewish life, Death or dying, Bible, biblical imagery, or biblical symbolism, Nazism or Nazis, Martyrs or martyrdom, Life and death, Germany or German people, Holocaust, Jewish, Concentration camps, Smoke
The Poem
A free-verse poem of twenty lines originally in German and divided into four stanzas, “O the Chimneys” is a meditation on the Nazi death machine that destroyed six million Jewish people in the Holocaust. The chimneys of the title refer to those ovens built to incinerate the bodies of concentration camp victims killed in gas chambers.
Throughout the poem, the Nazi death camps are called “abodes of death” that are “devised.” That is, they are technologically planned and scientifically administered for destruction. This statement conveys with chilling...
[The entire page is 1101 words long]
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