All books here contain poetry about the Holocaust, written by survivors, childen of survivors, or others responding to the horrific events of the Holocaust.
 I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp 1942-1944 edited by Hana Volavkova
Fifteen thousand children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp. Fewer than 100 survived. In these poems and pictures drawn by the young inmates, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their hopes and fears, their courage and optimism. 60 color illustrations.
Paperback Revised edition
Published by: Schocken Books
Publication date: March 1994
ISBN: 0805210156....................order now or more info.
 Childhood in the Third Reich: World War II and it's Long Aftermath, A Long Poem by Kaye Abikhaled
"With cinematic elegance, Kaye Abikhaled allows us into the world of a six year old in Germany in WWII....This epic freeverse saga has both personal and public significance. The anecdotal style allows us to see through the eyes of a witness of the times -- to see war by its effects upon civilians, and to see the results after war -- with a success story worthy of the best American classics. Kaye has woven intricate portraits of people and times long gone, but remembered cinematically and accurately.... Yet this is more than a war story -- the humanity of her descriptions empowers us to trust that even in the worst of times, some salvation occurs." - Thom Woodruff (Thom the World Poet)
Paperback
Published by: Edward Mellen Press
Publication date: October 2001
ISBN: 0773434259....................order now or more info.
 The Holocaust and Hiroshima poems by Brian Daldorph
Roger Martin, guest columnist for the Kansas City Star, praises Brian Daldorph as "a poet whose work has jarred loose an idea about how to ward off evil." Martin says, of the poems in The Holocaust and Hiroshima--in which Daldorph speaks "in the voices" and sees "through the eyes of others": "These poems . . . suggest to me how crucial a long-legged imagination is in saving us from evil. Such an imagination permits us to vault into the perspectives, and the humanities, of those whose minds lie far from our own. It's when imagination turns paltry that we can harm others . . . ."
Paperback 70 Pages
Published by: Mid America Press
Publication date: Noveber 1997
ISBN: 0910479003....................order now or more info.
 Counting the Stones poems by Barbara hyde Habor, Ruth Steinberg, June S. Gould
Heartwrenching, direct, personal poems about the Holocaust and the resulting dislocation endured by its survivors and their children, with 44 accompanying photographs. In very different styles, and with different experiences, the three poets of Counting the Stones bear witness, not only to the horrors of the Holocaust, but also to the immense difficulties of starting new lives and to the pain and dislocation passed on to the second generation. The poems reach back to parents and relatives to rescue grief-frozen remembrance.
Paperback 101 Pages
Published by: Shadow Press
Publication date: August 1998
ISBN: 0966592808....................order now or more info.
 Tales From a Child of the Enemy poems by Ursula Duba
A German woman recalls her childhood in the rubble of Hitler's Germany--and the shattering revelation, years later, of the Holocaust in this haunting sequence of prose poems. Interwoven with these are the wrenching stories of the Holocaust survivors and their children who were her neighbors in an Eastern neighborhood in Brooklyn in the mid-sixties. Duba's confrontation with his heritage is unflinching and the stories hard to forget.
Paperback 128 Pages
Published by: Penguin Press
Publication date: April 1997
ISBN: 014058787X....................order now or more info.
 The Last Lullaby: Poetry from the Holocaust edited by Aaron Kramer and Saul Lishinsky
Kramer, a poet and scholar specializing in the translation of Yiddish literature, has been collecting and translating poetry written by victims and survivors of the Holocaust for 50 years, determined to preserve this indelible evidence of their courage and grief. The poignant works collected here include poems by Europeans and Russians who attained recognition as published writers, as well as poems and songs by people who never intended to become poets but who were driven to express the unbearable emotions aroused by the horrors of the Nazi era. Kramer has translated and preserved poems written under nightmarish circumstances in Jewish ghettos, way stations, death camps, and forests, poems full, not of fear and loathing, but of shock, of course, and sorrow and also deep spirituality, love, and forgiveness. Most are not works of art but the prayers of martyrs and the elegies of mourners, and as such, they glow with all that is good and strong in the human heart.
Hardcover 224 Pages
Published by: Syracuse University Press
Publication date: April 1998
ISBN: 0815604785....................order now or more info.
 Dead Men's Praise poems by Jacqueline Osherow
Osherow's poems are formally precise yet conversationally casual, theological and droll. Her persona is valiant and witty, scholarly and mischievous, almost as though she's posing as a clever young girl pulling on an elder's coat and asking why. Why were her people chosen, and what exactly for? Why didn't God prevent the Holocaust? As Osherow chronicles travels in Italy and literary expeditions in Dante and the Russian poets, all the sorrows of history, especially of our cruel century, rise cawing like startled crows. Then, in the glorious "New Tanager/New Song," she offers a shrewd paean to evolution--of the perceptual and spiritual as well as the physical--noting that "One era's commonplace is another's sign." There is only change, she implies: progress is a fantasy. Art, religion, and science all coalesce in new configurations in the magnificent "Scattered Psalms," in which Osherow conducts a supple and radicalized form of Talmudic study, parsing Hebrew psalms for insights into the nature of God and our perpetual longing for "something that will last."
Paperback 96 pages
Published by: Grove Press
Publication date: September 1999
ISBN: 0802136540....................order now or more info.
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 And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust translated by Isaac Jeck Levy
A unique compilation of poems that leave traces of anguish and despair. The poets scream, but their voices cannot be heard, as they plead for mercy for their brothers and sisters' lives. An excellent book that must be read over and over again.
Paperback Reprinted edition
248 Pages
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Publication date: March 2000
ISBN: 0252068610....................order now or more info.
 Blue Tattoo poems by Lyn Lifshin
Lyn's Holocaust poems give me the chilling perception that I've actually experienced life in a Nazi concenrtation camp. When I first read this book, I had the delusion that I was REMEMBERING, instead of simply ingesting, the experiences just by taking in the written words. Lyn must truly have the ability to travell in time as well as space. An awe-inspiring book, indeed!
...................- John Birkbeck
Paperback
Publication date: May 1995
ISBN: 1880391120....................order now or more info.
 Holocaust Poetry compiled by Hilda Schiff with poems from Anne Sexton, Stephen Spender and others.
Can there be poetry about the Holocaust? Isn't this kind of writing an attempt to escape--or to exploit--the suffering of millions? Poet and anthologist Schiff confronts these questions in her eloquent introduction. One answer she finds is that to remain silent is also to lie. Fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, great literature about the Holocaust has grown to a flood. As in Langer's landmark anthology Art from the Ashes (1995), the pieces here are of astonishing power. In English and in translation from many languages, more than 80 poets--including Wiesel, Fink, Brecht, Yevtushenko, Auden, and Sachs--give voice to what seems unspeakable. Schiff points out that compelling historical accounts document the facts and numbers, but a poem, like a story, makes us imagine how it felt for one person. These poems are stark and deceptively simple. No one can read them all at once. Each poem leaves you with an indelible memory. In words of one syllable, the Polish poet Roezewicz writes about having to reinvent language after Auschwitz ("this is a man / this is a tree this is bread" ). There's no healing in this tragedy: the last poem, by Primo Levi, is like a shout of rage to us to remember.
Paperback
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication date: April 1996
ISBN: 0312143575....................order now or more info.
 My Little Sister and Selected Poems (1965 - 1985) by Abba Kovner
Abba Kovner's My Little Sister, acclaimed as a major poem-sequence about the Holocaust, is published in a revised translation from the Hebrew, with a new selection from his other work since 1965. The poems in this book were chosen with the aim of collecting in English Kovner's most representative work, work that by the power and restraint of its personal response to the Holocaust proves poetry is possible after Auschwitz.
Paperback
Published by: Field Translations Series
Publication date: June 1986
ISBN: 0932440215....................order now or more info.
 Ghost Children poems by Lillian Boraks Nemetz
Ghost Children is a powerful collection of poems that explores the spiritual and emotional trauma suffered by child survivors of the Holocaust. Drawing on her own experiences as a child survivor in the Warsaw Ghetto, Lillian Boraks-Nemetz gives a gripping account of the attempt by survivors to find a means of continuing under the shadow of Auschwitz
Paperback 80 pages
Published by: Ronsdale Press
Publication date: September 2000
ISBN: 0921870787....................order now or more info.
 Art From the Ashes edited by Lawrence Langer
Lawrence Langer's exceptional collection of Holocaust literature includes both fiction and nonfiction, as well as drama and poetry. Among the nonfiction pieces are excerpts from the ghetto diaries of Abraham Lewin (Warsaw) and Avraham Tory (Kovno), an essay from Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, and an essay from Elie Wiesel's Legends of Our Time. There is fiction from Ida Fink (two stories from A Scrap of Time), Aharon Appelfeld (his short novel Tzili), Arnost Lustig (a story from Street of Lost Brothers), Tadeusz Borowski (a story from This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen), and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk (two stories from Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land). There's one playwright represented, Joshua Sobol, whose Ghetto is presented in full. Also included are 72 poems by six poets, most notably those of Nobel Prizewinner Nelly Sachs, the foremost threnodist of the destruction of European Jewry. Twenty works of art created in the Terezin concentration camp are reproduced here.
Paperback
Published by: Oxford University Press
Publication date: August 1995
ISBN: 0195077326....................order now or more info.
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