Marked: Poems of the Holocaust
Stephen Herz
NYQ Books
ISBN: 978-1-935520-79-5

Reviewer: Eric Paul Shaffer


          More of a mosaic than a mural, this book of poems is a relentless stream of pieces, jagged references to the mid-20^th century war that smashed what we once considered a civilization. Each entry is like a shard pressed into paper, the edges of the words pointing towards what they cannot fully convey, reflecting the many incomplete and unfinished lives of the time.

          Clearly, making poetry of such events is nearly impossible. The gruesome details are so numerous that the pieces frequently don’t occur as actual poems, but rather stand as entreaties prompting the reader to remember, evidence to freshly shock or another specific example of one more action of which you hoped humans weren’t capable. The pages are filled with lists, firsthand accounts recounted, edited, or imagined, catalogues, news reports, snapshots, “found poems,” quotes raw and naked. Yet, finally and gratifyingly, the individual entries in this book together project a singular and encompassing image of the Holocaust; the poem, you might say, is ultimately the book, rather than this or that individual piece.

          “Excursion Fares” was one piece of unexpected horror: “Someone had to pay for the Jews to ride in the boxcars// …So the Gestapo, Eichmann’s office,/ paid for one-way fares, group rate,/ guards were charged for the round-trip,/ children under ten rode for half-fare,/ children under four rode free.” The last line is chilling with its simultaneously cheerful and familiarly commercial language masking the dark reality of systematized extermination. The foregrounding of the economic boom of removing Jews from German society is starkly revealed. War, after all, because of and despite the murder and destruction involved, is fundamentally an economic enterprise. We might do well to remember that first whenever our nations contemplate making yet another declaration.

          The onslaught of pieces is so relentless that strange ironies occasionally intrude into Herz’s aesthetic process. In “Another SS Sport—Walking a Straight Line,” Herz presents a poem of twenty-two single-word lines: “your life depends on your walking straight in a straight line while SS bullets whizz by on both sides of the line.” The arrangement of words stacked in a thin line down the left margin of the page graphically and effectively emphasizes the bleak cruelty of the action, yet somehow the cleverness of the typography makes the poem seem weirdly playful. I’m not sure what to make of that. Unremitting grimness does not likely provide the events of the Holocaust their due and full respect, but I am also unnerved as a reader by the disturbing ambiguity in tone. Does the possible frivolity serve to make the grimness grimmer? Probably.

          In fact, throughout the book, the poems are often overwhelmed by their content. Many of the pieces are spare and nearly formulaic, and though poetry is sometimes rare within the cascade of details, striking lines certainly do appear. In “The Earth Heaving,” after describing a march of prisoners herded towards a mass grave, Herz surprises the reader when he reveals why the ground moves: “It’s a nightmare:/ bodies into a shallow grave/ they’re plowing,/ the earth heaving with the breath/ of those buried alive.” The idea that the dirt rises and falls with the struggles of those still alive beneath it effectively delivers an image in a poem that deeply disturbs me.

          In “S.S. St. Louis Sailing Off Florida Coast with Cargo of Unwanted,” Herz, writing in the voice of the denied, recalls the voyage of the St. Louis carrying refugees from Europe who are ultimately refused entry into the United States: “America, we can see the lights of Miami.// …America, you won’t let us land in America.// …America, have you forgotten/ Emma Lazarus’s words of hope on your/ Statue of Liberty?// …America, the lights of Miami are fading/ into yellow stars.” The anaphora of “America” recalls to me Allen Ginsberg’s poem of that title, and that, combined with the juxtaposition of city lights as the yellow stars that Jews were forced to sew and wear, drives the image forcefully enough to again crushingly indict the United States for its willful denial of and disengagement from the events in Europe.

          One of the best poems in the book is “From a Letter by Delbert Cooper, a Soldier with the U.S. 71st Infantry Division.” The soldier’s situation is appalling and all too familiar: “While we stood outside the truck,/ any number of them came up/ and touched us, as if they couldn’t/ believe we were actually there./ Some of them would try to kiss us even.” One would think that the scene could not get any worse, but Herz proceeds by providing a piercing image, and thereby makes a poem of the details: “One fellow felt that he should give me/ something. So, as he had nothing,/ he gave me his little yellow star/ that designates a Jew.” Then the line that tears the eyes: “I’ll send it to you [in] another letter.”

          I’m not sure whether it is important or not, or whether I am responsible or not, to know how much of this book is research and quotation and how much is Herz imaginatively recounting what he has encountered in books and interviews. In any case, blurring the lines between us and them, no matter to which “us and them” we refer, can only be positive when a writer like Herz attempts to repeatedly underscore the shared humanity of the people he writes about and the people reading the book. I’m convinced. These people are our people, and any lines we draw between any of us diminish all of us. The lines Herz draws from these events to us and our contemporary lives are meant to be connective, to draw us together amidst horror and in solidarity against future horrors, and they do just that.