Counting the Lost
Gail Peck
Main Street Rag
ISBN: 978-1-59948-317-7

Reviewer: Alice Osborn


          We may know intellectually about the Holocaust’s casualties and its horror: in twelve years, six million Jews killed. But with numbers so vast, it’s hard to identify with the individuals separated and eventually slaughtered by the Nazi regime. This is when poetry is necessary to remind us of this unspeakable twentieth century evil. In Counting the Lost, Peck uses ekphrastic poems to communicate the Holocaust’s impact on women and children. Via the art of German sculptor Ernst Barlach and German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz, along with the photographs of Robert Capa and Margaret Bourke-White, we experience the nightmare through the subjects’ eyes. Peck also wrote an entire section of poems based on the children’s artwork, which survived the Terezin Concentration Camp.

          While most of Peck’s poems emerge from the complementary art, embodying classic ekphrastic form, some of the strongest poems in this collection are those that reference Peck’s own personal experiences of living in Berlin a decade after the war. Both “The Goblets” and “Alchemy” take as their focus a preserved German artifact, integrating it into the poem’s narrative.

          Peck frequently uses images of hands and palms extended upward, which some might interpret as a gesture of hope, others as one of surrender. In the second stanza of “Alchemy,” the candlestick harkens back to a time before Dresden was forever locked in memory as the burned city.

When Dresden was bombed, the factories
would come tumbling down. Hard to believe
anyone survived when looking at that famous photograph,
the life-size sculpture Güte—The Goodness—
angelic figure in profile, still intact,
shoulders bent slightly forward, folds
of a robe draped to the tip of one hand,
the palm upward—We had no way to surrender.

          Peck’s violent stepfather is the antagonist in several poems, such as “In Berlin, 1957-1960,” quoted below. On a much smaller scale, he personifies the war whose many victims are women and children. In this case, the victims are the poet’s family: her mother and her sisters.

Where’s my boots, my goddam belt, my stepfather
yelled, and mother’s mice feet scurried to find them.
Go out and play, she told me. Kids were bouncing
a ball against a wall, but I knew nothing of their
language except eins, zwei, drei. Later, I’d go
to American school where I’d refuse to learn
the guttural sounds. Where the boys
drew Swastikas on their desks.

          Sound is another dominant presence in Peck’s poems. Voice, or lack of voice, drives “One, For Praise,” about the stepfather’s glory days as a paratrooper and his last days in a V.A. Hospital.

He lied about his age
to join up—the 101st Airborne,
Screaming Eagles, worked his way
to Sergeant’s stripes, and led us three girls
onto fields where jets flew over.
Yes Sir, we answered at attention
knowing not to question.
When finally he sat in the V.A. Hospital
in that locked unit for people who
don’t know where they are,
we could speak our piece.
He nodded while that caged parrot
in the waiting area said, Hello, Hello,
and sparrows came to the window’s ledge.

          The prose poem, “A Song,” makes good use of onomatopoeic imagery when describing how Jews included music as one of the many things lost or forsaken during the Holocaust. Peck uses language that makes this loss palpable, highly accessible to the reader, by considering how her physician-friend Bill would have fared without his beloved harmonica.

I’m reading about the Holocaust, how the Jews slowly gave up everything—first their businesses, their cars, then their pets, radios, Victrolas, and musical instruments. When I picture a man turning in his harmonica I think of my friend, Bill, whose harmonica is like his right hand, one of his doctor hands he greets patients with, hand feeling for lumps here and there.

          The poems in this collection which are responses to wartime photographs are the most memorable and horrifying as they depict actual people who probably died shortly after their images were captured. Peck’s stark portrayals give a human face to the war as these photographs could be of any child we might see out on the playground or holding his/her mother’s hand in a store.

          In “Mania Halef,” quoted in full below, we vividly see the little girl’s satin ribbon in her hair as a reminder of normalcy before she becomes an inevitable casualty.

With those bangs and watchful eyes,
she looks like a doll, standing in a sunsuit,
wearing anklets, slippers, and holding
a smaller doll. I am trying to guess
the color of the satin ribbon
in her hair—I can tell it’s satin
by the sheen. When she is seven
she’ll be killed at Babi Yar, one of 33,771 Jews.
I don’t know what she was wearing
that September day before they told her
to strip and lie in a ravine, or if her parents
whispered her name, or if when it was over
she lay, as the caption states some did,
on the body of her mother.

          The Holocaust poisoned ordinary objects such as a girl’s satin ribbon and baby strollers. Peck’s images—as displayed, for example, in “Prams at Auschwitz,” quoted in full below—remind us of the much larger horror.

One hundred hundred wheels
brought from all of the city streets—
Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz…
Satin linings now wet with snow
hold no cry, no lullaby or rattles.
Tops that opened and closed.
Here come some more
with shiny chrome
pushed into the store room.
Outside the crematorium,
a checkered one with fringe
turned over in the mud.
Wind sometimes sets those
upside down wheels spinning.

          Gail Peck never flinches from the full horror of the Holocaust, imagining individual voices breaking free from the drawings, sculptures, and photographs that inspire her poems. Her questions demonstrate the senselessness of the Holocaust; consider, for example, the conclusion to "Tower of Mothers": “Who will come gather him, wash/ his body, comb his hair?” Questions offer a way for the poet to ask God “why” without collapsing into overt sentimentality. Peck’s use of repetitive imagery and her employment of wartime art as a source of so many of her poems help create a structure or container for the disturbing subject matter. Counting the Lost and other works of art that explore and recall the Holocaust are important for us, urging us not to forget the grave mistakes of our past, how we ultimately live in a precarious world: any of us could suffer a tragic fate.