My friend posted this poem on her blog and it absolutely blew me away. Not just by how effortless Anthony Hecht is able to make the sestina seem, but also with the choice of form and subject matter. Sestinas imply a sense of precise order in the world, while the Holocaust implies the opposite. And yet the combination seems so natural, even necessary.

Song of Yolek

—Anthony Hecht

Wir haben ein Gesetz,
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben.

The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail. It doesn’t matter where to,
Just so you’re weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.

You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home:
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.

The fifth of August, 1942.
It was the morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.

How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn’t a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.

We’re approaching August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They all were forced to take that terrible walk.

Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you’re sitting down to a meal.

Today is Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust Remembrence Day. It is also the end of the semester, so it's hard not to look back and reflect on the last months since having traveled to Poland, my experiences writing two human rights papers, and keeping this journal.
The original idea behind keeping an online journal was to allow it to be fluid... so that I could easily go back and edit or add to journal entries I already made and also so that people could comment and respond to them. I liked the idea of allowing discussion to occur, and hopefully to provoke it. I've been writing in online journals since 1998/1999, so it's a format that I'm comfortable with and knew that I would be likely to use on a regular basis. I did take advantage of being able to go back and add to entries, although not as much discussion occurred as I would have liked.
Of course, I also didn't post to this journal as much as I had planned to. Originally I envisioned a place where I could continually reflect on my experiences encountering this material on a more personal level, especially how my perspective continued to evolve-- I assumed it would-- as time passed since traveling to Poland. I was right on that, and I wish that I had written down more of my experience as time passed. But it's not too late, and even though I may no longer keep this journal for class, I plan to continue posting here as I continue my human rights education and (hopefully, eventually) travel back to Holocaust sites in Europe.

Instead of turning in an actual hardcopy of my journal, I turned in a blank hand-bound book. The idea definitely came out of reading about Rachel Whiteread's memorial, and wanting to find a solution to turning in a blog more creative than printing out all of the entries. To me, a blank book directly reflects the conversations we had in class about absence, and was inspired by Whiteread's ability to make an ordinary object a little shocking, different. Every book I've bound in the past was always made with the intention of being filled, but this one wasn't. It is tied shut with the frayed ends of burlap, in order to make it impossible (or at least difficult) to open.

I'm looking forward to continuing to keep this journal, and I hope that I will always have something to write here. I've discovered the importance in my own life in preserving Holocaust memory, and I plan to continue to reflect personally, and hopefully instigate discussion, on the issues surrounding the Holocaust and preserving the memory for the future.

I finally-- finally!-- uploaded photographs from Poland. (Still unsorted/untagged/not rotated etc, but uploaded.)

Photographs: Poland, 2007

While writing my paper on Children's holocaust literature, I've begun to read through books on Holocaust literature as a whole, and wish I had the time to read them completely before returning them to the library. Here's a list, mostly for my own reference (and summer reading):

Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust - Bigsby
Imagining the Holocaust - Schwartz
Holocaust Fiction - Vice
The Holocaust Novel - Sicher
Holocaust Literature of the Second Generation - Grimwood
The Holocaust and Text - ed. Leak and Paizis

from my personal journal:

( rereading Number the Stars & the Devil's Arithmetic )

Holocaust Survivors Mark Krakow Ghetto Anniversary
Schindler Jews to Meet for Commemoration in Krakow

Hundreds of Jewish Holocaust survivors, from several countries, marched from the Krakow ghetto to Plaszow to commemorate 65 years since the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto.

While it was interesting to read about the commemoration of an important anniversary, the fact that both of these articles prominently features the fact that many of these survivors were Schindler Jews very much reinforces what Cole says in Selling the Holocaust, that to many Americans, what is portrayed in Schindler's List is synonymous with the Holocaust itself. It was interesting to have watched the film on this anniversary, then to read these articles later that evening.

Tracing the Ripples that Flow from Violence

Choreographer Aviva Giesmar, the child of a Holocaust survivor, examines the generational effects of violence and genocide through her production "Line of Descent."

While monuments and other permanent forms of art are the more common forms of representing the Holocaust and its lasting effects, it is clear that performance, also-- even the more abstract forms of performance-- can convey these messages.

A Slavery Museum Negotiate the Treacherous Route to Funding

While a National Slavery Museum has been proposed, and a site for the future museum chosen, it has become a difficult battle for the museum to gain enough funding to begin construction. Only about $50 million of a $200 million project has been raised so far.

It wasn't until reading The Texture of Memory that it hit me how many memorials to the Holocaust the United States has, and the National Holocaust Museum is obviously an important and successful addition to the Mall in DC. While I think these are important, it both saddened and angered me to immediately see a comparison between the two-- that, as a country, we can so easily find funding to commemorate a tragedy removed from us, and yet we can't raise enough to preserve the memory of a tragedy in which we were culpable.

Nintendo Not Blocking Release of Holocasut Game

Although the New York Times reported that Nintendo would not be releasing a Holocaust-themed video game, "Imagination is the Only Escape," in the United States, Nintendo says that they have not yet discussed this at all. The game is meant to be educational, and was never designed to cause controversy.

I found this article a couple days after I first skimmed through Selling the Holocaust. At first, I was offended by the idea of the Holocaust being a video game, and to me it seemed like an callous way to use the memory of a tragedy. After reading more about the game, it seemed no different than using the Holocaust as the topic for a film, in many ways... but when and how is that appropriate? What are the boundaries of taste and appropriate use of a memory, and are there even any boundaries that can be agreed on?

Stolen Suffering

In an Op-Ed piece for the NYT, the author responds to the recent revelation that a Holocaust memoir was false, comparing it with other such incidents and arguing that adopting the suffering of another is a far worse crime than simply embellishing your own, as James Frey famously did a few years ago.

I very much agreed with this article, and thought that the connections that the author drew between the fabrication of a Holocaust memoir and other memoirs was extremely apt-- the connection to "Love and Consequences," especially, which was revealed to be fake around the same time. While in "Love and Consequences," in which the 'memoirist' claimed to have been raised by a foster mother and become a gang member, the subject matter is different, the crime of claiming suffering you did not experience is very much the same.

Conductor in LA Revives Lost Music of Holocaust

A Los Angeles Opera conductor has started a program called "Recovered Voices" that focuses on performing the almost-lost music of the Holocaust.

One of the things that hit me most on our trip to Poland was learning about the artist output of the Jews in the ghettos and even in the camps-- that even the harshest conditions can't stop creative people from using their talents. A program like this not only helps to preserve obscure works of art, but brings awareness of the holocaust and less well known aspects of life in the camps.

Israeli's Use of 'Holocaust' Has Fallout

The Israeli Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Vilani, used the term 'holocaust' to refer to the death toll in Gaza, inciting a very critical reaction to the use of the word.

This article is an interesting statement on the connotation that words can have. Even though 'holocaust' is not directly a term that refers to the Holocaust, the word has become so synonymous with the events that occurred during WWII that it can hardly be used without referring to them.

Struggling to Squelch an Internet Rumor

Thanks to the Internet, a rumor has been circling that the University of Kentucky has dropped its course on the Holocaust, and the professors have received angry emails in protest of the 'decision' that never occurred.

The whole incident is an interesting statement about our society, both in the fact that the Internet allows false information to be spread and believed so easily, and in the fact that the Holocaust automatically stirs such strong reactions in people. As Americans, from a country that was affected, but never directly, by the Holocaust, and even rejected Jewish refugees during WWII, we are extremely passionate about preserving the memory of what happened.

Holocaust Classes are Seldom Easy on Children

In response to the announcement by Sarkozy that Holocaust education will be mandated for fifth-graders, and the protests that erupted in its wake, the author gives her own account of Holocaust education in Hebrew school, as well as examples from other sources that illustrate how, for decades, children have been exposed to material somewhat over their heads.

I was excited to find this article, since the first, about Sarkozy's announcement, had made me wonder about several things that Dominus addresses here. The question raised, coming away from this article, becomes: if this is how these children, years later, respond to their early education, is it something that has to be changed? Clearly it isn't easy, but is it better than leaving them ignorant until they are "old enough"?