The HyperTexts’ feature on Holocaust poetry is a good thing, and a necessary thing.

The Holocaust poses a great challenge to poetry, as to human existence altogether. As Charles Fishman writes in "Conservation," it "crushes all norms."

One response is to say, like the well-known critic Theodor Adorno, that after Auschwitz there can’t be poetry at all. In the light of Rilke’s statement that the task of the poet is to praise, one can understand this reaction. Yet it isn’t the answer. For poetry to fall silent after Auschwitz is just another way of completing the work of the murderers.

There is also the impulse to look away from the details of what was done to human beings. There’s even a moral justification for that impulse. As one Jewish annalist of an earlier age said in refusing to record the details of pogroms, these things should not be told because they deface the Divine Image in humanity. Some of this feeling can be found in the work of Paul Celan, who, despite his role as witness, deals with the subject for the most part only allusively. There is real danger in contemplating these horrors.

And yet in the end we do have to look. Recent experience has shown that we do have to keep on remembering, making it real and present, insofar as language can do so. For if we don’t force ourselves to contemplate what it really was like, we begin to build a wall between ourselves and it. The Holocaust becomes equated with other things, it becomes an available metaphor, a metaphor that can even be used against its survivors in their desperate self-defense. The State of Israel, founded partly as a gesture of atonement, can be called into question. Those who have no use for human rights except to fashion accusations against those who are trying to uphold them, can apply for the sympathies of a world that has forgotten. We need the voices of poetry to help us remember.

Some great voices are gathered here. There is Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor, whose words testify to the persistence of human dignity, and who has become a voice of conscience in his adopted country. The American-born Charles Fishman’s enterprise, on the other hand, is one of evocation and reconstruction, deeply felt. Jerzy Ficowski gives us the voice of Polish Christian conscience. Besides giving us her own testimony of survival and reconstruction, Yala Korwin has translated Ficowski and several unknown ghetto poets, poets who wrote amid the destruction as it was going on, and who did not survive. To me these poems are the most moving of all. But all these testimonies, direct and indirect, are vital. While we can mourn these things together, while we can face together the suffering and the loss, we have not lost the hope of renewal.