“Once there was Elźunia”
395
“Once there was Elźunia”: Approaching
Affect in Holocaust Literature
Gail Ivy Berlin
“There are two ways, one is to suffer; the other is to become a professor of the fact that another
suffers.”
—Kierkegaard, qtd. in Steiner 67
he encounter with literature of the Holocaust, saturated as it is with unfathomable grief, loss, terror, and death, presents its readers with difficulties
rare in literatures not dealing with the extreme. Specifically, usual academic
discourse lacks a register for addressing the intense emotions that Holocaust
narratives or poetry may generate. Indeed, in scholarly writing, affect and analysis
are regularly opposed. Historian Lucy Dawidowicz, writing in 1976, has observed
that “Jewish documents [. . .] have been received in an attitude of reverence for the
dead and respect for the survivors with the result that critical judgment and analysis
have been suspended lest they desecrate the memory of the Holocaust and its victims” (10). More recently, Howard Tinberg reports on the persistent difficulty of
moving students “from shock and incomprehension to analysis” in an undergraduate literature course (82). For his students, texts such as Maus (Spiegelman), Night
(Wiesel), and the Diary of Anne Frank are sacred ground, “objectified testimonies,
not to be tampered with” (87). A graduate student in my own class, The Holocaust
in Literature, expressed her intense discomfort with even discussing Holocaust
texts, perceiving the classroom as “a sacred place of remembrance and reverence.”
In her class journal responding to Elie Wiesel’s “A Plea for the Dead,” she wrote,
“I often feel I should only list quotations in these responses, to listen to the words
of the victims and survivors without interrupting. How dare I respond? How dare I
interpret? How could I have anything to add?”
T
Gail I v y Be r l i n is professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she also served
for a decade as department chair. In addition to Holocaust literature, her research focuses on Old and
Middle English literature and medieval women.
College English, Volume 74, Number 5, May 2012
Copyright © 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 395
2/23/12 12:05 PM
396
College English
Mirianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, editors of the 2004 MLA publication
Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (referred to here as the MLA guide), likewise note that there is a “disturbing tension between affect and analysis” (19). If we
are deeply shaken by a text, we cannot dissect it; if we are deeply engaged in textual
analysis, we cannot respond with full compassion. Indeed, a study by psychologist C.
Daniel Batson suggests that attention to textual detail may block empathy. In Batson’s
study, subjects were asked to listen to a broadcast account of a person in distress.
The group of subjects asked to focus on technical features of the broadcast reported
fewer feelings of compassion than did those subjects asked to imagine the situation
and feelings of the distressed person as they listened (qtd. in Nussbaum 331–32).
This fact is problematic for those of us engaged in the study of Holocaust literature. We wish to be responsive, to the fullest extent possible, to the plight of the
human beings whose words we read. But does compassion or the sense of standing
on sacred ground necessarily eclipse or stand in opposition to analysis? (Clearly,
analysis of the sacred is standard practice in fields such as art history, medieval studies, and religious studies.) Or, put in another way, is it necessary for sound analysis
to exclude the emotional? As Rita Felski notes, literary theory evinces “nervousness about literature’s awkward proximity to imagination, emotion, and other soft,
fuzzy, [sic] ideas” (59). Academe avoids the emotional, deeming it unprofessional,
unscientific, and naïve. If, in our effort to avoid emotion, to be professional and
objective, we attend to historical processes, to studies of memory and its flaws, to
theories of representation and theories of trauma, to language’s inability to express,
and to the lacuna at the heart of testimony that makes bearing witness impossible,
are we still able to consider and respond to the people living amidst and consumed
by the Holocaust?
The problem is well summed for history by Simone Gigliotti, who notes that
historians are able to rehearse the processes leading up to deportation in boxcars
and can detail the processes of extermination when victims stepped down from the
boxcars at the camps. But historians do not examine what happened in the boxcar
itself, passing over in silence the trauma that took place there. Among the concerns,
therefore, that she suggests instructors should consider is “the role of emotion in
narrative history” (34). Is there a place for emotion in the study of Holocaust literature? How should we approach literature that generates great emotion, and conveys
dreadful events in language that wounds as it is written, and wounds again as it is
read? What knowledge, what mental and emotional preparation is necessary in order
to manage the encounter with texts of the extreme? This article will be a preliminary
gesture toward answering these questions. I will begin by confronting a brief but
highly charged poem with various dispassionate literary techniques; move on to consider how scholars imagine empathy in relation to Holocaust literature; and conclude
with a reading of the poem, using it as a space that may foster both compassion and
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 396
2/23/12 12:05 PM
“Once there was Elźunia”
397
analysis, without viewing these as polar opposites. I argue for a reconsideration of
interpretive approaches to Holocaust literature and other literatures of trauma and
a frank acknowledgement of the emotional complexity that these texts generate, in
and of themselves and within the pedagogical situation.
Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a survivor, composer, and collector of Polish camp
songs, tells us of a song found toward the end of 1943 sewn into the pocket of a dead
child’s coat.1 The poem’s author was Elźunia, a little girl murdered in Majdanek
(Maidanek), a death camp near Lublin. She wrote,
Once there was Elźunia.
She is dying all alone,
Because her daddy is in Maidanek,
And in Auschwitz her mommy . . .2
(Była sobie raz Elźunia,
umierała sama,
Bo jej tatuś na Majdanku
W Oświȩcimiu mama . . .)3
The remaining song words, Kulisiewicz tells us, were covered in blood. At the
bottom of the card, Elźunia had written, “I sang with the melody of Na Woytusia z
popielnika iskereczka mruga [A Little Spark Is Twinkling on the Ash Grate],” a popular
Polish children’s song or lullaby, still sung today. Kulisiewicz provides no information
about how the song itself survived. Child survivor and memoirist Eva Hoffman, who
saw an exhibit at Majdanek that included a singing of Elźunia’s song, notes that the
child was nine years old. Hoffman records her reaction to this song: “I believe this
is the most piercing single verse I’ve ever heard and after all I have read, learned,
and absorbed about the Shoah, the fragment strikes me with a wholly penetrating,
unprepared sense of pity and sorrow.” She reports that others hearing the song and
reading the words were “similarly pierced” (152).
But what happens if we confront this song with some common literary techniques
or theoretical suppositions? Consider, for example, this injunction to undergraduates
in the humanities and social sciences from The Theory Toolbox, a popular introductory
text: “Theoretical point number 1, and the arrow that gives direction to the rest of
this book: Nothing should be accepted at face value; everything is suspect” (Nealon
and Giroux 6). Does the hermeneutics of suspicion provide an appropriate first approach to Elźunia’s poem? Or is it structured to deflect the possibility of emotional
engagement?4 Or consider Ranen Omer-Sherman’s words—written about another
poetic fragment, survivor Daniel Pagis’s “Written in Pencil”—telling us that the
“trope” of the child can too easily result in “sentimental images of vulnerability,”
and praising Pagis’s poem for “conveying horror [. . .] without shrillness or hysteria”
(309).5 What happens if such concerns are transferred to Elźunia’s poem? Should
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 397
2/23/12 12:05 PM
398
College English
Elźunia be studied as a trope? Should we consider whether she, as an author, has
appropriately conveyed the horror of her situation without hysteria? If she has, is
control of tone the primary virtue of the poem? Or consider the structuralist notion
of the “humanist fallacy,” which Terry Eagleton defines as “the naïve notion that
a literary text is just a kind of transcript of the living voice of a real man or woman
addressing us” (120). Certainly this applies to William Blake, as author of both “The
Tyger” and “The Lamb.” But in what way can we argue that a poem—sewn into
a pocket as one would safeguard a treasure and covered in blood—is not the sole
trace of a once-living voice, a life?6 In brief, usual scholarly approaches may often
grate against texts emerging from the Holocaust. The tools we possess are not well
calibrated for literature of the extreme. They block emotion.
Beyond the fact that affect and analysis do not easily mix is another problem:
affect itself makes us uncomfortable, is somehow suspect. Hoffman tells us about a
woman overcome with emotion at the same exhibit where she first heard Elźunia’s
song. The woman sat down and wailed in the midst of the exhibition. Hoffman
records for us her own thought process when encountering this display of emotion.
After considering whether the woman needed help and deciding that she did not,
Hoffman pondered why the woman might be wailing:
It appears to me that she is bringing attention to her extraordinary, her altogether
extravagant powers of empathy. It seems to me that she may be luxuriating in her
extremely commendable emotion. Certainly, her presentation, or exhibition of it, is
distracting, or distancing other visitors from the exhibit. It occurs to me that maybe
something unpleasant has happened to her on her trip and she is taking this perfect
occasion to express her unhappiness. Or that she is a dissatisfied young woman, and
that this is a perfect place in which to endow her dissatisfaction with a tragic tinge
and blend it with something indubitably significant. It also occurs to me that perhaps
I am being very unjust to her. But I don’t know. (153)
This public display of emotion is viewed with suspicion. It may be self-serving.
It may be a projection. It lacks proper proportion, and it merges personal sorrow
inappropriately with the victim’s tragedy. Hoffman’s suspicion here may well be
justified. But it also raises the question of what our attitude should be as we read and
teach. What state of mental and emotional preparedness should we in fact bring to
Elźunia’s four-line poetic fragment? What forms of empathy should we, as teachers,
support or curtail in our classrooms?
Imagining Empathy
Scholars within the field of literature fall into two groups concerning empathy: those
who view it as potentially and dangerously overwhelming, and those who view it as
insufficient or misdirected. In their MLA guide for teachers, Hirsch and Kacandes
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 398
2/23/12 12:05 PM
“Once there was Elźunia”
399
aim to protect students from overpowering emotion. They caution potential teachers
about how students should relate to the literature of victims and survivors. Students
are appropriately invited to become “‘co-witnesses’ to the traumas they encounter
through reading” (18). Following psychoanalyst and survivor Dori Laub, they warn
that listeners must “‘not become the victim’ lest they risk their own traumatization” (16). The MLA guide acknowledges that space must be built into the syllabus
to accommodate powerful emotion, but builds this space primarily out of class, in
journals. To further protect students, Hirsch and Kacandes recommend certain texts
that have the advantage of distancing the reader from events through various literary
techniques, as does Maus with its comic-book format.
In addition to worrying that students may be overwhelmed with emotion, Hirsch
and Kacandes worry that they may succumb to certain undesirable emotional reactions, particularly over-identifying with the victim (15). To guard against this, the
editors ask teachers to consider such questions as, “What will enable us to imagine
the extent of the atrocity even as we acknowledge our own distance from the event,
evading exploitation, appropriation, and trivialization? [. . .] What are acceptable
forms of identification, empathy, active listening?” (7). Although Hirsch and Kacandes
consider student identification with the victims to be “both powerful and dangerous,”
they caution that it “risks being appropriative and projective” (15). Their MLA guide
leans on Dominick LaCapra’s definitions and concerns to make this point:
Empathy itself, as an imaginative component not only of the historian’s craft but of
any responsive approach to the past or the other, raises knotty perplexities, for it is
difficult to see how one may be empathetic without intrusively arrogating to oneself
the victim’s experience or undergoing (whether consciously or unconsciously) surrogate victimage. (Hirsch and Kacandes 15)
Students, LaCapra suggests, must be protected from wounding emotions and must
be monitored to make sure their emotions do not transgress proper bounds. Empathy, viewed in this way, is a double-edged sword, something to be handled gingerly
rather than a state to be actively cultivated.
Other critics note that readers, rather than being overly sensitive to texts of
the extreme, may be insensitive or numb. Historian Carolyn Dean, in her study
The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust, examines various cultural narratives that
indicate “the recently perceived precariousness of empathy” (15). Although these
narratives may take a variety of forms, they argue most generally that representations
of suffering produce numbness, now to be regarded as “a new, highly self-conscious
narrative about the collective constriction of moral availability, if not empathy” (5).
According to this view, empathy is not readily available, and sham empathy would
be one mode of this restriction. As an example, Dean cites the concern of James E.
Young and Andrea Liss, among other scholars, regarding the identification cards in
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 399
2/23/12 12:05 PM
400
College English
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum used to encourage identification
with Holocaust victims and survivors. However, these scholars fear that such cards
encourage “lazy and false empathy in which we simply take the other’s place” (9).7
Dean also notes the work of Holocaust survivor Ruth Klüger, who is disturbed by
what Dean terms “pseudo-engagement,” a state in which an expression of concern
for the other is actually a mode of enjoying the self (9). Dean, elucidating Klüger’s
view, notes that this false form of empathy “entails obliterating boundaries between
self and other in order to take the victim’s place” (9). The notions of empathy that
Dean studies indicate a discomfort with and a guarding against what may be inappropriate forms of emotion.
The easiest way to solve the problem of “false empathy” is to adopt the terminology and practices of psychology, which regularly distinguish between identification, empathy, and compassion. According to psychologist Alfred Benjamin, author
of The Helping Interview, empathy means “feeling yourself into, or participating in,
the inner world of another while remaining yourself” (my emphasis).8 The empathetic
interviewer tries “to think and act and feel as if the life space of the other were his
very own,” but—and it is an important but—“empathy always involves two distinctly
separate selves; identification results in one” (49–51). To the extent that a clinical
interviewer identifies with an interviewee, she will be less effective in her role.
Martha C. Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics, likewise defines empathy
carefully in her majestic study Upheavals of Thought. She writes, “‘Empathy’ is often
used [. . .] to designate an imaginative reconstruction of another person’s experience,
without any particular evaluation of that experience” (301–2). In Nussbaum’s usage,
empathy is an act of imagination, neither good nor bad in and of itself. A torturer, to
the extent that he imagines the pain of another, is being empathetic (329). Nor does
empathy involve “fusing” with another. Nussbaum considers the process to be more
like that of method acting: “It involves a participatory enactment of the situation of
the sufferer but is always combined with the awareness that one is not oneself the
sufferer” (327). We cannot, then, “simply” take another’s place. Empathy is a skill
of imagining that must be carefully learned and that is easily blocked by “all kinds of
social barriers—of class, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation” (317). Nor
does empathy overwhelm the boundaries between self and other, for that would be
identification, not empathy.
But neither is empathy compassion. Nussbaum judges that empathy is different
from and insufficient for compassion, an emotion that, like love and grief, “expand[s]
the boundaries of the self” (300). Compassion, Nussbaum tells us, requires that three
conditions be present: “The first [. . .] is a belief or appraisal that the suffering [of
another person] is serious rather than trivial. The second is the belief that the person
does not deserve the suffering. The third is the belief that the possibilities of the
person who experiences the emotion are similar to those of the sufferer” (306). In
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 400
2/23/12 12:05 PM
“Once there was Elźunia”
401
approaching Elźunia’s song, we can without difficulty agree that conditions one and
two are met. Her suffering is serious and, as a child, she has certainly done nothing
to merit death. Condition three, that our possibilities are similar to those of Elźunia,
is more difficult, for here we must indeed overcome boundaries not only of religion,
ethnicity, and perhaps gender at the least, but also of historical distance and, most
important, of the enormous threat to self that results if our possibilities are similar
to those of Elźunia, if we, like her, could possibly die a senseless, violent death. As
Lawrence Langer notes, “the American mind [. . .] nurtures a psychology of mental
comfort that discourages encounters with tragedy” (Preempting 63).
Compassion, then, extends the boundaries of a self and seeks to comprehend the
other, in both senses of the word: to understand and to include. It does not take over,
obliterate, appropriate, or annihilate the other. Because the self and the other are
clearly and consciously held to be separate, compassion is not a form of surrogate
victimage of the sort that LaCapra seeks to avoid. Nor is it cheap or easy. Difficult to
cultivate, compassion is a courageous act of imagination that unfolds slowly, requiring time and space for contemplation. And it is precisely the sensitive, imaginative
act of compassion that we hope to inculcate in our students.
French survivor Charlotte Delbo asks us to engage in this sort of imagining. In
her memoir None of Us Will Return, she sets brutal images of events in Birkenau on
half-empty pages and asks us to “Try to look. Just try and see” (84–86). Elie Wiesel,
in attempting to explain language’s limited ability to conjure the events of the Holocaust, likewise acknowledges the need to “force man to look” (Kingdom 15). Similarly,
Gideon Hauser, chief organizer of the Adolf Eichman trial, chose to make events of
the Holocaust “concrete” by having them narrated by a succession of witnesses. In
this way, Hauser hoped that events would be “tangible enough to be visualized” (qtd.
in Wieviorka 69). Scholars concerned with over-identification may find problematic
these pleas to imagine scenes of violence.9 Yet imagining the violence that befell the
victims, in the service of compassion, is precisely what Delbo, Wiesel, and Hauser
ask that we do: look and imagine, even if finally we do not succeed in this task. The
blank space surrounding Delbo’s words, just mentioned, becomes a kind of screen
onto which we can project images, and summon presences, sounds, and emotions.
Its function is to slow us down and provide room for imaginative work. Compassion
does not unfold unbidden in a vacuum. Our job as teachers and readers of literature
of the extreme is to work at creating the space, time, and conditions for fostering
compassionate imagination.
At this point, I would like to return to Elźunia’s song by embedding it in a series
of contexts and texts. My intent is to create, in this way, a space that I hope may
encourage imagination, engagement, and the extension of self through empathy to
compassion. We will need to move gradually through this space, slowing down so that
the violence implicit in Elźunia’s song is given a chance to resonate. I will proceed
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 401
2/23/12 12:05 PM
402
College English
by examining her historical situation, the words of her song, and the words of the
Polish children’s lullaby that provided her with a melody and model. My intent here
is to develop a pedagogical model of analysis for Elźunia’s poem that will allow us to
move closer to her by entering her world imaginatively, to the limited extent possible.
H i s t o r i c a l C o n t e x t : S ee k i n g
a
Life Story
for
E l źu n i a
If we wish to assist students in building a sense of compassion for Elźunia and what
she endured, it is crucial to provide some way to imagine her. Yet we know hardly
anything about her beyond the fact of her poem’s preservation at Majdanek. Even
the words “Auschwitz” and “Maidanek,” which appear prominently in her song,
convey very little to those without a detailed sense of how one usually arrived at
such destinations and what sorts of events might befall one there. Majdanek, in
particular, is not well known to contemporary audiences. Though we cannot know
the personal history of the specific child named Elźunia, we can know what course
of events befell Jews living in particular locations. Each town had its own history of
terror. What, then, can we know about the historical Elźunia, and are we entitled to
try to construct a history for her?
Certainly, survivors and historians alike have written books whose purpose is
to memorialize groups of individuals vanished in the Holocaust. Delbo’s Convoy to
Auschwitz, in which she records information about each of the 230 French women
deported with her to Auschwitz, is one of these. Serge Klarsfeld’s book French Children of the Holocaust creates a memorial in text and images for the 11,402 French
children deported, all but about 300 of whom did not survive (8). Both of these works
evince the impulse to preserve whatever can be known of these interrupted lives.10
Michael Bernard-Donals, however, contests the idea that it is possible to associate
images of children with the destruction that awaits them. He writes about a pair of
photographs taken of a beautiful child, Aline Korenbajzer, murdered less than a year
after the photographs were taken:
Klarsfeld’s book is clearly intended to forge a memory of what was lost, but it is difficult
if not impossible for any one of us or our students to begin to create a narrative—or
a history—that would link the image of this beautiful child to the unimaginable (or,
if one were to be cynical, to the all too imaginable) destruction entailed in that loss.
What we’re left with is just that loss, and not a knowledge of what happened: by
evoking the image of this child, Klarsfeld has instead evoked her loss as something
that simply can’t be written, at least not in terms of history and perhaps not even in
terms of our culture’s memory. (392)
Like the photo of Aline, the song of Elźunia is an isolated fragment that evokes a loss
the precise history of which cannot be captured without trespassing into the zone
of the unimaginable. But this is precisely the zone in which we need to spend some time.
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 402
2/23/12 12:05 PM
“Once there was Elźunia”
403
The fragments that remain—a picture, a poem—allow us to encounter, however
minimally, these vanished children.
Wiesel provides us with a way to understand such fragments. In his early novel
The Accident, he tells of a young survivor, Sarah, who had been twelve years old while
in the camps. Within the novel, Wiesel opens a space to consider her plight through
the powerful language of imprecation, demanding, before we know anything about
her, that we feel. The narrator curses “those who do not think of her, who did not
think of her at the time of her undoing” (289). He continues, “Whoever listens to
Sarah and doesn’t change, whoever enters Sarah’s world and doesn’t invent new
gods and new religions, deserves death and destruction” (289). Sarah is modeled on
an actual survivor of that name. Within his memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel
discusses his meeting with her in France after the war. “‘Tell me a story,’ I said, and
she replied, ‘My name is Sarah.’ [. . .] ‘That’s not a story.’ ‘Yes it is,’ she said. [. . .]
‘Don’t you understand? My name is Sarah and I was born in Vilna’” (298). This
severely constricted narrative, Sarah implies, should be enough for anyone who understands the events of the Holocaust to understand something of her fate—the fate
of a Jewish child in Vilna, “the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” bearing the name of “Sarah,”
the name assigned by the Nazis to all Jewish women. For her, “My name is Sarah
and I was born in Vilna” is a story. Containing the seeds of a shattering tragedy, a
name and a place are story enough for those who can read the starkly encoded tale.
Such a narrative is not personal or individual, but public, an account of the shared
fate of all Jews at a certain time and place. If one knows the history of Jewish Vilna,
then one knows the fate that Sarah shared with her community and the rough shape
of the events that befell her. Having a compassionate response to the narrative, “My
name is Sarah and I was born in Vilna,” in fact depends on knowing this history.
In this spirit, I propose to examine the story of Elźunia, another extraordinarily
condensed account. Although we cannot recapture her individual fate, we can know
something of the course of events that overtook her. Doing so begins the process of
what Nussbaum conceptualizes as an empathetic imagination, a first step in helping
students build or enlarge compassion by helping them to imagine Elźunia and her
circumstances.
What, then, can we know about Elźunia and the fate she shared with her community? Kulisiewicz informs us that her coat and her poem, smeared with blood,
were found in late 1943 at Majdanek. Presumably, she died there close to that time.
This is the only concrete fact that we have about Elźunia. Knowing the history of
Majdanek in late 1943 allows us a glimpse of what she may have endured and how
she died. Methods for mass killing Jews (and others), including children, varied in
Majdanek across the years. According to historian Jósef Marszałek, early mass killings were done by machine gun. The first Jews slain in this way at Majdanek were a
group of 3,000 from Majdan Tatarski who, in April of 1942, were taken to a forest
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 403
2/23/12 12:05 PM
404
College English
near Majdanek and shot. The bodies of these Jews, including children, were stripped
after the shooting (128). Gas chambers were used at Majdanek from September 1942
to September 1943 (129). During this period, children were generally gassed upon
arrival, but the camp also had children’s huts, where some apparently stayed for
longer periods. Survivor Janino Latowicz provides the following report concerning
a roundup of children on a Sunday in 1942:
A lorry was brought into the camp. A woman guard and a young SS man went into
the children’s hut and began dragging them out. They had whips. The children were
whipped towards the lorry. They were thrown into the air. Many were flung against
the lorry and the side of the huts, their heads were smashed open. They were piled
into the lorry like filth. (Qtd. in Gilbert 499)
In SS parlance, the children were being taken to “the rose garden,” that is, to gas
chambers, situated nearby (Gilbert 499). Elźunia’s fate may conceivably have been
of this sort.
After September 1943, the gas chambers were closed and killings were done by
shooting once more (Marszałek 129, 130). If Elźunia died on November 3, 1943, then
she may have been a victim of what the Nazis called, with hideous euphemism, the
“Harvest Festival” (Erntefest), an aktion implemented after various ghetto uprisings
and intended to kill the remaining Jews in the Generalgouvernement by executing
them in mass graves at Majdanek and two affiliated camps. During Operation Harvest Festival, about 42,000 Jews were executed by shooting in a single day 18,000 at
Majdanek alone (Marszałek 130, 133–34).11 The fullest account of this day is given
by historian Marszałek. He reports that before the aktion fresh graves were dug behind the crematorium. Loudspeakers were mounted on trucks to play dance music
intended to cover the sounds of massacre.12 All Jews were stripped naked before
being shot by SS men, who “shoved them into the ditch in groups of ten,” forcing
them to lie down, facedown, on the bodies of those slain before them (132; 130–32).
The shooting lasted from about 6:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. (131, 132). One witness
to the massacre, Paul Trepman, a Jew who survived disguised as a Pole, records his
reaction to watching the Jews as they were marched to their destruction: “I felt as
if my head were about to fall from my shoulders; my heart stood still” (142). The
fact that Elźunia’s poem was found in “late 1943” suggests that she may have fallen
victim to the shootings on “Bloody Wednesday,” as eyewitnesses called it. If this
were the case, however, the blood on her poem would have been the result of some
form of violence prior to the shootings, because at this time Jews were slain naked.
Elźunia’s specific death will remain hidden from us, but the types of violence by
which children in this period were annihilated can be known.
If place can suggest fate, as it did for Sarah from Vilna, what can we know of
Elźunia’s whereabouts before being taken to Majdanek? What was her hometown?
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 404
2/23/12 12:05 PM
“Once there was Elźunia”
405
The process of trying to discover Elźunia’s home, even if unsuccessful, is a part of
what allows connection with her. With emotionally and intellectually mature students, the task of understanding Elźunia’s fate and of finding her home could be left
to them, as they grapple with historical sources the teacher provides. Most students
will need assistance, however, and all will need patience in confronting questions
that are, finally, unanswerable. Students will need to learn to value the process of
engaging with questions rather than coming to conclusions. This engagement allows
time to imagine Elźunia and her circumstances.
By the time that Elźunia wrote her poem, she apparently had seen the deportation of her parents to Auschwitz and Majdanek. She reports dying alone “because”
her parents were in these two camps. Presumably, then, she herself was not yet in
Majdanek when she composed her song. It is also doubtful that she would have
had time or the means to sew her poem into her coat pocket, had she already been
there. Which cities, then, would allow a child to see her parents deported before
her to both Majdanek and Auschwitz? Polish Jews arrived at Majdanek from three
primary locations: the Lublin district, the Bialystok district, and Warsaw. Of these
three locations, Warsaw seems the least likely origin for Elźunia, because deportations from Warsaw went primarily to Treblinka. But in April and early May of 1943,
about 40,000 Jews were sent from Warsaw to the Lublin district and to Majdanek.
Then, after the failure of the Warsaw ghetto uprising on May 16, 1943, surviving
Jews from Warsaw were again brought to Majdanek and its sub-camps in Trawniki
and Poniatowa (Yahil 446). Remaining survivors from Warsaw were killed during
Operation Harvest Festival in November 1943 (363). However, few Jews from
Warsaw were taken to Auschwitz. From Lublin, Jews deemed fit for labor were
regularly deported to neighboring Majdanek starting in March of 1942 (Marszałek
66). Those unable to work were killed in Belzec. Ten thousand Jews still alive in the
Lublin sub-camps of Majdanek by November 1943 were marched to the main camp
and killed during Operation Harvest Festival (131). Jews from Lublin were not often
sent to Auschwitz. In May to July of 1943, six months after the Lublin ghetto was
liquidated in November, 5,000 Jews were selected for labor in Auschwitz (Marszałek
70). A child in Lublin could lose a parent only to Belzec or Majdanek if she survived
the 1942 ghetto liquidation.
The situation in Bialystok was different. Most Jews in Bialystok district were
deported to Majdanek, Auschwitz, or Treblinka in November of 1942, and yet another 9,000 again in February of 1943 (Yahil 442, 443). When the Bialystok ghetto
was liquidated in August of 1943, Jews from that area were sent either to Treblinka
or to Majdanek, or to its sub-camp, Poniatowa (USHMM 59). Those still alive
on November 3, 1943, would have fallen victim to Operation Harvest Festival. If
Elźunia was killed during the Operation Harvest Festival of November 1943, then
only the Bialystok area (or region) would be a possible point of origin for her. This
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 405
2/23/12 12:05 PM
406
College English
particular location, at some time, saw deportations to both Auschwitz and Majdanek.
Beyond these generalizations, it is impossible to know Elźunia’s hometown. If
she were from the areas around Bialystok or Lublin, the winter coat in which her
poem was found suggests that she somehow survived past the summer months of
1943 and could well have witnessed the August ghetto clearances. We can surmise, as
well, that she witnessed the destruction of families, including her own, and suffered a
terrifying death through gas or being shot into a pit while dance music played. The
words of Elźunia’s poem tell us only a little of how she viewed her own impending
death. Perhaps her thoughts were similar to those of a ten-year-old girl in Byten,
Poland, who wrote a final letter to her father in July of 1942:
My dear father!
I am parting from you before my death. We want to live very much, but what’s
to be done—they don’t allow it. I am so terrified of death, because little children are
thrown into the grave when they’re still alive. I am parting from you forever. I kiss
you strongly, strongly.
Yours, Yuta.13 (Bacharach 106)
The search for Elźunia, aimed toward building the difficult skill of imagining the
other, may be conducted in a variety of ways beyond considering her hometown or
the means of her death. For gentler medicine, teachers might try an examination of
Jewish life before the Holocaust or music that a Jewish child in Europe might have
enjoyed in the 1940s. (What experiences might Elźunia have had while at home?
What lullabies might she have heard? Why was the one she chose a good one for
her purpose?) Perhaps more to the point, given the likelihood that Elźunia survived
at least one ghetto clearance, one could unpack the meaning of the painfully bland
sentence, “The ghetto was liquidated,” in order to gain a sense of what Elźunia may
have gone through in this respect. Examining this approach is beyond the scope of
this essay; however, I will note that materials are copious, ranging from accounts in
memoirs, photographs, short stories by survivor Ida Fink, children’s textbooks from
the Third Reich, and the stitched and embroidered account of the deportation of
the Jews of Rochow by Esther Nisenthal Krinitz.
E l ź u n i a ’ s S o n g : I n t e r p r e t a t i o n
and
Sacred Ground
Stepping onto the sacred ground of the text likewise allows us a sense of the child
herself and provides a means of developing compassion. The reading and interpreting of literature are in fact essential paths to emotional vitality. What Nussbaum
has stated of the arts and humanities in general applies specifically to literature, as
well. Without the humanities, she asserts, “we will very likely have an obtuse and
emotionally dead citizenry, prey to the aggressive wishes that so often accompany
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 406
2/23/12 12:05 PM
“Once there was Elźunia”
407
an inner world dead to the images of others” (426). Using close reading as a way of
engaging with Elźunia’s song allows us to begin to imagine this child and her concerns, in however shadowy a form. One of the clearest facts we may deduce about
Elźunia is that she loved music, and valued the act of pouring experience into words,
giving the tragedy of her brief life a lasting shape that others can examine. Elźunia’s
song gives us access to her mind. However, no less a figure than Wiesel has warned
us away from interpreting Holocaust literature in his well-known essay “A Plea for
the Dead.” “We dare to interpret?” he writes. “Who are we to judge them [victims
and survivors]?” This is an injunction that my graduate student, mentioned at the
start of this essay, took very much to heart. But interpretation need not be judgment, particularly if we step away from the hermeneutics of suspicion and engage,
instead, with analysis as a means of being with and understanding an Other. Such
interpretation allows us to use imagination on behalf of compassion, and to extend
the light and life of these texts on earth. Interpretation, in this sense, is an intellectual
endeavor that prepares a space for awe.
What can we gather, then, about Elźunia herself through close reading and
through embedding her text in a community of like texts? Her song, like Pagis’s
much-admired Holocaust verse “Written in Pencil,” is a fragment. Brief as it is, it
still allows us a glimpse into the concerns of the young mind that produced it. In
fact, Elźunia’s refraction of her experiences is congruent with that of many other
writers of the Holocaust. Like others, she experiences a deeply split self, as one both
dead and dying, young and old.
The first line of Elźunia’s song, “There once was Elźunia,” places her in the past.
Her name, as Hoffman tells us, is the diminutive of the Polish name for Elizabeth.
She has a nickname. Someone loved her enough to refer to her affectionately. But
beloved little “Elźunia” is also sealed off in a fairy-tale past, not simply distant in
time, but unreal. Her previous life with her family seems a fiction. “There once was
Elźunia,” in fact, echoes the first lines in two different verses from the still-popular
Polish lullaby, “A Little Spark Is Twinkling on the Ash Grate.” By echoing the
structure of this lullaby, Elźunia associates herself with remote fairy-tale creatures
that appear in later verses of the popular song: a princess and a witch. A comparison
of these lines follows:14
Była sobie raz Elźunia
Była sobie raz królewa
Była sobie Baba Yaga
There once was Elźunia
There once was a princess
There was a Baba Yaga
But the first line of Elźunia’s poem could also be read as an epitaph: Elźunia once
existed and hence is no more. The lullaby becomes an elegy.15
Elźunia’s second line, “She’s dying all alone,” shocks us with the knowledge
that the dead child is still dying. As one who perceives herself as at once alive and
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 407
2/23/12 12:05 PM
408
College English
dead, Elźunia resembles many survivors of the Holocaust. Langer notes that the
testimony of survivors often includes “the death of the self” and a “[collapse] of
conventional distinctions between living and dying” (Holocaust 70, 72). Thus Bessie
K., whose testimony is recorded in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Oral Holocaust
Testimonies at Yale, relates the moment when her infant son was taken from her. A
German guard spotted her trying to carry a bundle containing her child.
To look back, the experience was—I think I was numb, or something happened to
me, I don’t know, But [sic] I wasn’t there. And he stretched out his arms I should hand
him the bundle; and I hand him over the bundle. And this was the last time I had the
bundle [. . .] For me, I was dead. I died . . . (Preempting 71)
Jorge Semprun, in his memoir Literature or Life, likewise reports his life after
surviving Buchenwald as a death. “Death is not just something that we brushed up
against, came close to, only just escaped, as though it were an accident we survived
unscathed. We lived it. [. . .] We are not survivors, but ghosts” (89). Similarly, Delbo’s
memoir, The Measure of Our Days, reports the words of another survivor, Mado, who
also feels dead while alive. Delbo, recording Mado’s voice, writes, “It seems to me
that I’m not alive. Since all are dead, it seems impossible that I shouldn’t be also.
[. . .] No, it’s not possible. I’m not alive. I see myself from outside this self, pretending
to be alive. I’m not alive. I know this with an intimate, solitary knowledge” (257).
Delbo recognizes Mado’s feeling. As she puts it in one of her poems, “I am here / in
front of life / as though facing a dress / I can no longer wear” (Measure 240). This
bleeding through of death into life is already present in Elźunia’s poem. The Elźunia
of the poem’s past is dead, locked in an impossibly distant fairy-tale world, while the
Elźunia of the poem’s present is dying. She further distances herself from both the
dead and the dying Elźunia by narrating the whole of her verse in the third person,
as if she were observing two other Elźunias.
Elźunia, like other children caught in the Holocaust, takes on roles beyond
her years. Much like those Jews who said kaddish for themselves, she writes a poem
about her own death. At age nine, she is no longer a child, but a poet who converts a
children’s lullaby into an elegy, at once proclaiming and abolishing her connection to
childhood. She also provides a memorial for her parents in her verse, the only grave
they have. Holocaust testimony provides accounts of other children who similarly
had to shed childhood. Poet and child survivor Irena Klepfisz states, “As a child, I
was old with terror and the brutality, the haphazardness of survival” (qtd. in Gubar
75). One Hungarian boy in Birkenau, when asked by an SS commander how old he
was, replied, “Nearly one hundred.” He paid for this response with his life (Gilbert
748–49). One survivor, forced to fend for himself in the streets from 1943 to 1945,
recalled, “I was only five [. . .] but I was like 70. Like an old man, I had to rely on
myself” (qtd. in Langer, Holocaust, 111).
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 408
2/23/12 12:05 PM
“Once there was Elźunia”
409
The children’s sense of themselves as old beyond their years derived not only
from their brutal experiences during the Holocaust, but from the adult roles they
had to adopt. A diary of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz reports on a five-yearold who took on the role of mother for her one-year-old brother in the undressing
room to the gas chamber. The diary states, “One from the Kommando came to take
off the boy’s clothes. The girl shouted loudly, ‘Be gone, you Jewish murderer! Don’t
lay your hand, dripping with Jewish blood, upon my lovely brother! I am his good
mummy, he will die in my arms, together with me’” (qtd. in Gilbert 633). Yitzhak
Katzenelson, in his poem The Song of the Murdered Jewish People, written shortly after
the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, comments on the children he has seen in a Jewish
orphanage in Warsaw. He, too, notes one “five-year-old mother” who cleverly fed
her weeping younger brother and “talked him into joy” (39). He remarks as well on
an ancient two-year-old with “such grave eyes” (38):
I watched the two-year-old grandmother,
The tiny Jewish girl, a hundred years old in her seriousness and grief.
What her grandmother could not dream she had seen in reality. (38)
Perhaps most remarkable is the account of Israel Lau, an eight-year-old survivor
of Buchenwald. On the day of liberation, an American officer, Rabbi Herschel
Schechter, pulled him “from a pile of corpses” (qtd. in Gilbert 792). Martin Gilbert
provides this account:
The rabbi burst into tears and then, hoping to reassure the child, began to laugh.
“How old are you?” he asked Israel Lau, in Yiddish.
“Older than you.”
“How can you say that?” asked the rabbi, fearing that the child was deranged.
“You cry and laugh like a little boy,” Lau replied, “but I haven’t laughed for years
and I don’t even cry any more. So tell me, who is older?” (792)
Children during the Holocaust were aware of being older than their years, of forfeiting the luxury of childhood in order to survive. Within the literature emerging
from the Holocaust, children do not evoke the “sentimental.” Instead, they show us
a dimension of human experience—the ancient child—that we cannot know except
through an imaginative act of empathy.
In the third and fourth lines of her song, Elźunia explains why she is dying alone:
“Because her daddy is in Maidanek / And in Auschwitz her mommy.” Although these
lines indicate that she knows of these camps, it is not clear what she knew of their
deadly purpose. Nor do her words make clear whether she conceives of her parents,
imprisoned in these camps, as alive or dead. But by 1943, Jews in the eastern part of
Poland did understand clearly the function of the locations to which they were being
transported. In Bialystok, for example, leaflets were prepared to warn Jews about the
meaning of deportation. Printed in January 1943, they read,
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 409
2/23/12 12:05 PM
410
College English
The evacuation of Jews from the town—means death.
Do not go to your death of your own free will.
Defend your children. Avenge the death of your mother. [. . .]
Do not go to Treblinka. [. . .] (Yahil 443)
By reading such a pamphlet or by listening to adult conversation, Elźunia could have
divined her fate and that of her parents. Other children do seem to have been aware
of the dangers. For example, children from Bialystok, aged six to fifteen, arriving
at Theresienstadt in August 1943, after the ghetto liquidation, knew enough to be
afraid of the word gas, posted on a notice board, and refuse to enter the bathhouse
there (Gilbert 601). Elźunia may have been well aware of the potential of death by
gassing, shooting, or burial alive.
The lullaby “Na Wojtusia z Popielnika” (“A Little Spark Is Twinkling on the
Ash Grate”), on which Elźunia modeled her song, was well chosen to convey a sense
of threat. The melody line, in a minor mode, rises and falls gently. The song itself
expresses both life’s promise and the possibility of its sudden extinction. (In some of
the longer versions, it is a song of disappointed love.) A typical version runs as follows:
Na Wojtusia z Popielnika
A Little Spark Is Twinkling on the Ash Grate
Na Wojtusia z popielnika Iskiereczka mruga,
Chodz, opowiem ci bajeczkȩ,
Bajka bȩdzie długa.
At Wojtus, from the ash grate
a little spark is twinkling.
Come, I’ll tell you a fairy tale.
The fairy tale will be long.
Była sobie raz królewna,
Pokochała grajka, Król wyprawił im wesele . . .
I skończona bajka.
There once was a princess
She fell in love with a village musician.
The king threw them a wedding party.
And the fairy tale is over.
Była sobie Baba Jaga,
Miała chatkȩ z masła,
A w tej chatce same dziwy . . .
Cyt! iskierka zgasła.
There was a Baba Yaga,
She had a hut made of butter,
And that hut was full of mysteries,
Ssst! the spark went out.16
[in a stove]
Elźunia’s use of this particular song reflects her powerful grasp of the fit between
the metaphoric structure of the song and the circumstances of her life: the blinking
spark that is extinguished, the “long” fairy tale that is finished within four lines.
Within the context of the Holocaust, the reference to the soon-to-be-extinguished
spark twinkling on the ash grate becomes an eerie reference to extinguished lives
and perhaps to the voracious crematoria.
Equally eerie is the appearance of Baba Yaga in the third verse. Though it is likely
enough that Elźunia knew of such a verse, it is impossible to know what, if anything,
she understood about Baba Yaga. The witch in the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,”
who bakes children in an oven, is one of Baba Yaga’s best known incarnations. Told
mostly to children, tales of Baba Yaga were used as a “pedagogical fiction” to help
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 410
2/23/12 12:05 PM
“Once there was Elźunia”
411
them “overcome their fears about the outside world” (Johns 93). Baba Yaga, a figure
in Slavic folklore, is a cannibal, a destroyer, a kidnapper, and occasionally a helper
of children. She flies through the air in a mortar and uses an iron pestle for her oar.
With a broom or a branch, she sweeps away any traces of her flight. Both the mortar
and pestle and the broom that sweeps away traces are powerful symbols of erasure,
effacing both victim and perpetrator. Baba Yaga not only threatens us with utter
oblivion by erasing our deaths, but with exaltation in our murder. (In some versions,
she jumps or rolls on the bones of her victims.) Baba Yaga is thus emblematic of the
dual threats of the Holocaust—annihilation and erasure of that very annihilation.
If Elźunia indeed knew tales of Baba Yaga, then her choice of this lullaby to convey
her grief is striking in its ability to express at once the lost comfort of home and the
fear of impending destruction and erasure.
Conclusion
I would like to conclude by returning to my initial questions. Is there a place for
emotion in the study of Holocaust literature or, more broadly, in academe? How
should we approach literature that generates great emotion? What knowledge, what
mental and emotional preparation, is necessary?
Our students certainly know that although classes may expose them to emotionally intense texts, only an intellectual response—objective, rigorous, and carefully
pruned of emotion—is acceptable. After attending a reading of Holocaust poetry at
a regional convention, one of my graduate students once asked me, “Are we permitted to cry?” Such a question derives from a rich sense of compassion coupled with
a clear sense of academic protocol and values. This student rightly discerned that
academe brackets off emotion, yet she needed a vehicle for expressing compassion.
For this student, I would reinforce the sense that emotion and intellectual engagement need not be in opposite camps. I would steer her toward Nussbaum, who finds
the wall regularly erected between thought and feeling to be a false division. For
Nussbaum, affect is a form of thought. Her argument is complex, and all that will
be possible here is to sketch in some of the key points demonstrating that emotion
and thought are not so neatly separable. Nussbaum uses her grief over the death of
her own mother as a case in point. She rejects the idea that mere physical responses,
such as “fluttering or trembling” are her response to her mother’s death, because
these reactions “lack the aboutness and the capacity for recognition that must be
part of an emotion” (44):
Internal to the grief itself must be the perception of the beloved object and of her
importance; the grief itself must estimate the richness of the love between us, its centrality in my life. The grief itself must contain the thought of her irrevocable deadness.
Now of course we could say that there is a separate emotional part of the soul that
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 411
2/23/12 12:05 PM
412
College English
has all these abilities. But we seem to have lost our grip on the reason for housing
grief in a separate noncognitive part: thought looks like just the place to house it. (44)
Emotions, as Nussbaum defines them, are not simply physical sensations or even
the unthinking “feelings of tumult” that accompany thought (64). Instead, emotions
are necessarily about something. Further, the cognitive content of an emotion is
complex. Nussbaum argues that
[emotion] contains rich and dense perceptions of the object, which are highly concrete
and replete with detail. Thus, typically, grief is not just an abstract judgment plus the
ineliminable localizing element: it is very highly particular. Even if the propositional
content is, “My wonderful mother is dead,” the experience itself involves a storm of
memories and concrete perceptions that swarm around that content, but add more
than is present in it. The experience of emotion is, then, cognitively laden, or dense
[. . .] and it is probably correct to think that this denseness is usually, if not always, a
necessary feature of the experience of an emotion such as grief.
What this means is that emotions typically have a connection to imagination,
and to the concrete picturing of events in the imagination [. . .] (65)
Emotion, then, involves “evaluative recognitions” (64) assisted by the imagination,
which faculty Nussbaum views as “a bridge that allows the other to become an object
of our compassion” (66). To the degree that we are trying to facilitate compassion,
according to Nussbaum, there must be room in our classrooms for emotion. Arguably, the imaginative work of building bridges to the other—the bedrock of compassion—is one of the chief functions of literature, including literature of the Holocaust.
But how do we approach Holocaust literature and the literature of trauma, where
emotion is so greatly heightened, and what emotional and mental preparation do
we need to impart to our students? The necessary work of the teacher in supporting
students who approach these texts is considerable. We should begin by acknowledging
the emotional content of the works themselves and the strain of our own emotional
investment. We should acknowledge the courage it takes to come in contact with
the dark places and moments of history, and with the array of emotions that students
may encounter, including anger, fear, grief, outrage, and awe. We should note, as
well, the jarring tension between the beautiful day in which we read these texts and
the events about which we read. Our task is to stay with the text, to have patience,
to try to see, as Delbo says, so that the text does, finally, become a space in which
we can extend the self toward the other.
Complicating the task of teaching Holocaust literature is the fact that experiencing compassion is not all we want our students to do. We do want them to
engage intellectually with Holocaust texts. But, in my teaching at least, I hope to
avoid a kind of compartmentalization in which emotion is kept in one bottle and
intellectual engagement in another, lest contamination occur. To this end, I find it
useful to short-circuit my graduate students’ usual critical responses with an exer-
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 412
2/23/12 12:05 PM
“Once there was Elźunia”
413
cise geared toward helping them notice the two bottles. I first ask them to think of
a critical or theoretical approach that they would like to apply to a text, one with
which they are comfortable. Once they have chosen an approach, I distribute a brief,
deeply emotional passage, such as Elźunia’s poem. I then ask them to apply their
chosen approach to the text. After a while, often even before writing begins, pens
are suspended in midair, and it becomes clear that the students cannot proceed in
their usual way; some other approach is needed. This exercise allows students to
experience the shortcomings of academic discourse when it comes to literature of
the extreme, and allows the class to discuss other possible models for approaching
emotionally intense literature, such as my earlier analysis.
Some students, however, may already be well aware of the gap between what
they are feeling and how they believe they are expected to write. To the sensitive
student who asks, “Dare I interpret?” we must respond, “Dare we leave these texts
in obscurity, burying them and their authors again? Dare we avoid the work of interpretation, which is precisely the work of keeping these texts in the light?” When
we respond to the poem, we can bring to it knowledge of our own that may help
to understand Elźunia’s experiences: our own historical knowledge of Auschwitz
and Majdanek and what happened there, without which the poem would be incomprehensible; our sense of what it might mean to speak of oneself as already dead,
already in the past; our view of what it might mean to conceive of a lullaby as an
elegy; and our thoughts on how we might understand the situation of a nine-yearold who, having lost both parents, is left to face death on her own. To do so is not
to appropriate Elźunia’s experience, which is indeed not our own, but to attempt to
prepare to extend ourselves toward it, to keep the young author as the object of our
compassionate attention.
We can’t comfort Elźunia. We can’t hold her hand or interpose our bodies
between hers and the fatal shot. We can read her song and take some time with
it, coming to know Elźunia a little better by analyzing her craft of songwriting, by
working to imagine her within a historical context, and by remembering the blood
that obscures the lower part of her text. We read all Holocaust literature through
blood. Interpretation of this sort, like the act of washing the dead and staying with
them in the hours after death in the Jewish tradition, may be an act of compassion.
Notes
1. Hoffman reports that the words were found in the sole of the child’s shoe (152). But because she
is reporting from memory, I will rely on Kulisiewicz’s report.
2. The English translation of Elźunia’s poem may be found in Kulisiewicz (3–4). Note also Hoffman’s
translation in After Such Knowledge (151–52). Charles Fishman’s poem “A Camp Song Newly Heard,” in
his book The Death Mazurka, is a poetic tribute to Elźunia that begins by quoting the Kulisiewicz ver-
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 413
2/23/12 12:05 PM
414
College English
sion of her poem. It is also posted on Fishman’s website at www.charlesfishman.com/poems_by_charles_
fishman.htm#A_Camp_Song_Newly_Heard.
3. The Polish text of Elźunia’s poem is reproduced in Poems Before and within the Flood (Ma’ariv
Book Guild, 1990), collected and translated into Hebrew by Halina Birenbaum, a survivor of the Warsaw
ghetto, Majdanek, and Auschwitz.
4. The hermeneutics of suspicion has recently been critiqued by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in an essay
frequently cited in studies of Holocaust literature. She points out that suspicion is now “widely understood
as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities” (5).
5. Omer-Sherman’s sensitive reading of Pagis’s poem here characterizes inappropriate emotions
in response to Holocaust poetry, which should be neither “shrill” nor “hysterical.” For a corrective to a
stance that prescribes emotions, see Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of “accountability to the real,” which
examines not “how ‘one’ should read [. . .] but how ‘one’ does” (2).
6. Felski notes the gap between this theoretical stance and the common reader’s sense of texts as
connected to their authors. She concedes that “while we do not usually mistake books for persons, we
often think of them as conveying the attitudes of persons” (32).
7. This concern is also repeated in Hirsch and Kacandes. See page 15.
8. LaCapra’s notion of “unsettled empathy” is equivalent to the idea of empathy in clinical psychology.
9. In general, the plea to visualize events of the Holocaust has not been well received. Daniel J.
Goldhagen’s study, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, has incurred the wrath of many scholars because of its
detailed accounts of violence (among other issues). One of the mildest critiques of this work, from French
historian Annette Wieviorka, states that Goldhagen’s view of history “is the juxtaposition of horror stories
[. . .] [that] encourages the abandonment of thought and intelligence in favor of sentiment and emotion”
(92, 93).
10. Götz Aly’s study, Into the Tunnel, came to my attention after completing this article. This work
likewise memorializes and meticulously documents the life of one German Jewish child, Marion Samuel,
whose name was selected at random by the German Remembrance Foundation and used as the title of
a prize. Initially, nothing was known about Marion, except the fact that she perished. Walther Seinsch,
co-founder of the Remembrance Foundation, states that the purpose of the Marion Samuel Prize is to
recover “the fate of those who seem nameless and unknowable [. . .] [and to] illuminate the unmistakable individuality” of those who died in the Holocaust (Aly 110). Aly’s research uncovered documents,
photographs, and even a few of Marion’s words, remembered by a schoolmate.
11. Gilbert sets the total number of those slain at Majdanek during Operation Harvest Festival at
50,000 (627). However, this figure appears to be the aggregate of Jews shot during the “Harvest Festival,”
not for Majdanek alone. Leni Yahil sets the number of Jews shot to death there on November 3, 1943,
alone at 17,000 (363).
12. Trepman, a Jewish survivor of Majdanek, reports in his memoir, Among Men and Beasts, that
the tune played on November 3, 1943, during the massacre was the German popular song “Rosamunde,
Give Me a Kiss and Your Heart” (141). (He erroneously gives the date as September 3, 1943.)
13. Yuta, the daughter of Zlotka and Moshe Wishniatzky, was slain in a forest in Poland on January
20, 1943, along with her mother and one other sibling. Her letter was appended to that of her mother
(Bacharach 106–7).
14. I would like to thank my colleagues Alexandra and Kris Kaniasty for their help with the translation of the Polish lullaby and Elźunia’s version of it, as presented in this section of the paper.
15. Kulisiewicz considers Elźunia’s poem to be a protest song (4). Like much writing emerging
from the Holocaust, Elźunia’s poem blurs genres.
16. Versions of this text are available on various websites. For the text cited here, see Mama Lisa’s
World at www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=2185&c=70.
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 414
2/23/12 12:05 PM
“Once there was Elźunia”
415
Works Cited
Aly, Götz. Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931–1943. Trans. Ann Millin. 2004. New
York: Henry Holt in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2007. Print.
Bacharach, Zvi, ed. Last Letters of the Shoah. Trans. Batsheva Pomerantz. Jerusalem: Devora and Yad
Vashem, 2004. Print.
Benjamin, Alfred. The Helping Interview. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Print.
Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993. Print.
Bernard-Donals, Michael. “Forgetful Memory and Images of the Holocaust.” College English 66.4 (2004):
380–402. JSTOR. Web. 10 Oct. 2011.
Dawidowicz, Lucy S., ed. A Holocaust Reader. New York: Behrman House, 1976. Print.
Dean, Carolyn. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Print.
Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. Trans. Rosette C. Lamont. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print.
———. Convoy to Auschwitz: Women of the French Resistance. Trans. Carol Cosman. Boston: Northeastern
UP, 1997. Print.
———. The Measure of Our Days. Auschwitz and After. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print.
———. None of Us Will Return. Auschwitz and After. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Print.
Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. Print.
Gigliotti, Simone. “Night and the Teaching of History: The Trauma of Transit.” Approaches to Teaching
Wiesel’s Night. Ed. Alan Rosen. New York: MLA, 2007. 32–40. Print.
Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. New York:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985. Print.
Gubar, Susan. Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
2003. Print.
Hirsch, Mirianne, and Irene Kacandes, eds. Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust. New York: MLA,
2004. Print.
Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public
Affairs, 2004. Print.
Johns, Andreas. Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale. New York: Lang,
2004. Print.
Katzenelson, Yitzhak. The Song of the Murdered Jewish People. Trans. Noah H. Rosenbloom. Beit Lohamei
Haghetaot (Ghetto Fighters’ House), Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1980. Print.
Klarsfeld, Serge. French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial. New York: NYU P, 1996. Print.
Kulisiewicz, Aleksander. “Polish Camp Songs, 1939–45.” Modern Language Studies 16.1 (1986): 3–9.
JSTOR. Web. 10 Oct. 2011.
Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991. Print.
———. Preempting the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Print.
Marszałek, Jósef. Majdanek: The Concentration Camp in Lublin. Warsaw: Interpress, 1986. Print.
Nealon, Jeffrey, and Susan Searls Giroux. The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the Humanities, Arts,
and Social Sciences. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Print.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. 2001. New York: Cambridge
UP, 2003. Print.
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 415
2/23/12 12:05 PM
416
College English
Omer-Sherman, Ranen. “Responding to the Burden of Witness in Dan Pagis’s ‘Written in Pencil in the
Sealed Railway-Car.’” Hirsch and Kacandes 303–13.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You.” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Ed. Sedgwick.
Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 1–37. Print.
Semprun, Jorge. Literature or Life. Trans. Linda Coverdale. 1994. New York: Viking, 1997. Print.
Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Print.
Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. 1970. New Haven:
Yale UP, 1998. Print.
Tinberg, Howard. “Taking (and Teaching) the Shoah Personally.” College English 68.1 (2005): 72–89.
JSTOR. Web. 10 Oct. 2011.
Trepman, Paul. Among Men and Beasts. Trans. Shoshana Perla and Gertrude Hirschler. New York: Barnes
and Bergen Belsen Memorial Press, 1978. Print.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum [USHMM]. Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. New York:
MacMillan, 1996. Print.
Wiesel, Elie. The Accident. The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident. 1962. New York: Noonday,
1988. Print.
———. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs. 1994. New York: Schocken, 1995. Print.
———. From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences. New York: Summit, 1990. Print.
———. “A Plea for the Dead.” Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Langer. New
York: Oxford UP, 1995. 138–52. Print.
Wieviorka, Annette. The Era of Witness. Trans. Jared Stark. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. Print.
Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry 1932–1945. Trans. Ina Friedman and Haya Galai.
1987. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print.
g395-416-May2012-CE.indd 416
2/23/12 12:05 PM