Writing ‘Menorah’ It is daunting to be asked to write about something as terrible and as significant as the Holocaust. It is even more daunting, perhaps, for someone who is not a Jew. It was my greatest concern, in becoming Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, to succeed in this task, wherever else I might fail during my year of office. I have read widely about the Holocaust. The period holds special interest for me and I have considered for years how it came about and tried to understand its implications for the survivors and for the rest of us. I am also familiar to an extent with the Middle East, having studied Arabic at university, and am concerned at the intractability of the region’s problems. Why ‘Menorah’ I felt that it would not be possible even to touch on the most important of the issues raised by the Holocaust in a single poem. The facts, the personal horror, the events leading up to it, the impact today – there is simply too much. The question I faced was how to extend the work. I thought of writing a triptych, but was concerned that this has more associations with the Christian church than with Judaism and that even three poems would not be enough. I then thought of the menorah, the seven-branched candlestick or lamp used ceremonially by Jews (not the nine-branched one of Hanukkah). The imagery of the menorah, with six of its branches being lit from the seventh, the shamash, fitted exactly with what I had in mind. So, ‘Menorah’ it was and I could use seven poems. Six Million and One In thinking about how to meet this challenge, I began by planning a poem about one victim, a child. I wanted to say Kaddish, the Hebrew Prayer for the Dead, for all victims and felt I could do so best by writing about one person. This was the first poem I wrote, though it sits later in the sequence. I wanted to convey the terror of sudden dislocation and the breaking up of families, as well as the horrific objectification of those sent to the death camps. I hope I have not offended by including some Yiddish, which has always seemed to me the most lively of tongues, contrasting strongly with the death I am describing. Also, I apologise for including a phrase from Kaddish, but feel that belonged here. ‘For ever, for ever.’ has particular significance in a year when it has been found that 60% of people under 35 in Britain have not heard of Auschwitz. The tone is intended to be one of loss and remembrance, of incantation almost. Childish and skipping in tempo at first, but slowing into stillness. From the Book of Numbers It was not enough to talk about one victim, however evocatively. I wanted to see that one death in the context of all the others, so set out to write this poem. It struck me that what the Nazis had done had been a census as ambitious as that of the accounting in the Old Testament Book of Numbers, except that instead of gathering the living, they were gathering the about-to-die. I chose to speak only of the six main death camps (like the snuffing of the six main lights of the Menorah) rather than continuing the roll call of camps. There were so many. Apart from a certain amount of rounding for rhythmic reasons, the numbers in the poem are as correct as my sources allowed. For my part, I did not gladly omit even a single victim. The numbers are still being adjusted upwards as more is understood about the Holocaust. If you find them difficult to believe or to come to terms with, that is to your credit. I apologise to the many other groups whose relatives died in the camps (the Poles, the Russian prisoners, the intellectuals, the gypsies, the homosexuals and so on) who are not included in these counts or the poem. This is not a sequence about all of Nazism’s crimes. The tone I aimed at in this poem was a cold, objective one, such as might have been used at the Nuremberg trials. Shoah If the Holocaust were the only genocide, there might not have been a reason to write ‘Shoah’. However, it was not the first and certainly has not been the last. I’ve tried to deal with the role of language and above all of propaganda in the treatment of the Jews in Germany in the Thirties. I wanted to record the Nazis’ manipulation of opinion and exploitation of existing anti-Semitism in the de-humanisation process. The slide into ever-greater cruelty was swift, but it was a planned and graded process and one we should be wary of allowing to repeat. Genocide still occurs, but the world is learning to react against it more quickly. The tone I aimed at was one of inevitability, combined with an accelerating pace to the ultimate horror. Appel Having worked my way through the death poems of the sequence, I wanted to do justice to the survivors in this year when Liberation and the Survivors form the theme. Like most poems in the sequence, this one makes use of repetition. Here this is to echo the repeated calls to Appel, where the guards weeded out the weaker prisoners for death. Fritsch was deputy to the commander of Auschwitz and boasted to new prisoners about how little time they had. The tone is grim determination to live for any of several reasons, but ultimately for the one, to tell the tale for those who don’t survive.
Tattoo I also wanted to write about the problem for survivors of living with their experiences and their loss of health, family and years from their lives. The tattooed number on the left forearm is a powerful symbol of their human will to survive, but is also a reminder of how their humanity was denied and of the experiences they went through. The tone is flat, practical. The tattoo and what it represents is a fact that must be lived with and accommodated into today’s reality. Testimony This poem seeks to represent the dilemma of the survivors. How do they come to terms with their memories, how can they live normal lives, unless they forget ? Unless they remember and bear witness, how do they fulfil their duty to the dead and to the future ? The double burden is a terrible one. For many, dealing with the memories is not a process that can be debated, but something that tears them apart. I have chosen, as with the earlier Six Million and One, to represent all individuals by one. The tone is ambivalent. There is no resolution, either way. Shamash The final poem is one of hope. It expands its vision to include us all, Jew and non-Jew, speaks of our shared humanity and fallibility and looks to the dead of the Holocaust to remind us that we make our world the place it is. The poem draws out the symbolism of the menorah, a candlestick that like the Jewish and the human races is made from the one block. The tone is an incantation. Afterthought I have been struggling to make sense of the Holocaust to myself, looking for and mulling over meanings. In my research for the writing, I refreshed my existing knowledge of the Nazi phenomenon. In doing so, I uncovered things new to me that shocked even though I had expected to find them. The business-like effort to increase the efficiency of the death camps, to increase the throughput of the ovens, shocks with its coldness. The extent to which the system forced the co-operation of those it was oppressing shocks with its cynicism. Above all, the testimony of how individual Germans killed individual Jews, pulling the trigger of a gun pointed at a naked and helpless man, woman or child, shocks. It shocks because this was not madness but a mad form of sanity, in us all if we allow it. The poem sequence began with the distinctness of the Jewish race, which meant the evil of the Holocaust could be focused. It ends with the fact that we are all members of the human race, again connected by common descent. Whatever else the Holocaust says, it reminds us that in such times it is our broader connection, to the human race, that matters and that ‘humanity’ has another meaning, beyond being human. Don Barnard
Birmingham Poet Laureate December 2004 To read Don Barnard's poem 'Menorah' please click the link at the top right of this page>>> | 
