arkacton.org 9 War Poetry.docx · Web viewHe had two daughters, one of whom died in 1899. His only son, John or ‘Jack,’ was desperate to join up and fight when World War One

Year 9 EnglishIndependent Workbook

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War Poetry

World War One and The Holocaust

World War One1. World War One and its poets2. ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’3. Writing: ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’4. ‘The Soldier’5. ‘My Boy Jack’6. Writing: Comparing ‘My Boy Jack’ and ‘The Soldier’7. ‘Dulce et Decorum est’8. Writing: ‘Dulce et Decorum est’9. ‘Spring Offensive’10. ‘The Hero’11. Writing: Comparing ‘Spring Offensive’ and ‘The Hero’12. ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ part 113. ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ part 214. Writing: ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

The Holocaust15. The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe16. ‘First They Came’17. ‘In Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto’18. Writing: Comparing ‘First they Came’ and ‘In Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto’19. ‘Shipment to Maidanek’20. ‘Night’ part 121. ‘Night’ part 222. ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ part 1

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23. ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ part 224. End of unit assessment

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The ‘Great’ War: World War One and its Poets

War, glory and poetry have always gone hand in hand. The first great work of poetry in Western literature comes from Ancient Greece: Homer’s ‘The Iliad’ is about nations in conflict: Greece and Troy. The Greek heroes seek glory and honourable death in battle so that they will never be forgotten. Conflict figures in Aeschylus’ tragedy ‘Agamemnon’, and Sophocles’ tragedy ‘Antigone’. Conflict figures in most Shakespeare tragedies, too: think ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Othello’. No war, however, has produced a greater abundance of poetry than the so-called ‘Great’ War, the First World War, which began in 1914.

The Causes of World War OneThere were three main causes of the First World War. In the long-tem, the economic might of Germany was becoming a superpower, a rival to the global British Empire, and the militarisation and arms race to build up ever more powerful navies was a rush for world dominance. In the medium-term, a complex network of alliances between rival European empires France, Britain, Russia, and Germany, Austro-Hungary and Italy was a powder keg waiting to explode. The short-term trigger that lit the fuse was the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand, whose murder in Serbia set Austria against Russia and dominoes fell, culminating in total war worldwide.

The Zeitgeist of Patriotism and JingoismIn Europe, most people fondly thought the war would be over by Christmas. The 1871 war between Germany and France had lasted just six weeks. In any case, 1914 was a gloriously warm summer in England. War, just like in Ancient Greece, was still associated with glory. Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ celebrates the courage of the British cavalry in the conflict with Russia in the Crimea in 1854. Annihilated by Russian cannon, Tennyson does not criticise the commander for the botched plan of attack, but praises the men’s glorious sacrifice: ‘When can their glory fade? Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade! Noble Six Hundred.’

Patriotism was traditional in European civilisation. Many Englishmen volunteered to fight for the British Army and Royal Navy. The zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, was jingoism: popular loyalty and belligerent devotion to national aggression. This is captured by Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The Soldier’: ‘If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.’ The words England or English appear five times in the sonnet, a poem associated with love – in this case, love for his country. Brooke died in Greece in 1915, in the first year of the war. Brooke’s poem was instantly taken up by the war propaganda (brainwashing) machine. It was read out in St Paul’s Cathedral in sermons. English schoolchildren memorised it by heart, encouraging older pupils to sign up en masse to fight in the war. Rudyard Kipling was so eager to send his only son Jack to the war, for whom he had written the poem, ‘If’, that even though he did not pass a medical inspection because of his poor eyesight, he convinced a family friend in the British Army to overlook the medical result, so Jack could bring glory to the family and fight for his country.

However, the Great War turned into the most blood-drenched war in British history. Far from being over by Christmas, it turned into a grinding, entrenched four-year stalemate. Kipling’s 18-year old boy Jack, his only son, was killed in 1915. He was last seen stumbling blindly through the mud, screaming in agony after an exploding shell had ripped his face apart. In 1916 at the Battle of the Somme the British Army had suffered 60,000 casualties within the first day. Torrential rains in October turned the battlefield into a muddy quagmire, and the British suffered 420,000 casualties and gained just five miles of muddy soil and barbed wire. At the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, a quarter of a million British soldiers were lost in months of fighting in deep mud, artillery fire and trenches. Just five more miles of territory were gained. One in five schoolboys in most British towns never returned from the war. In every village in Britain, there is a monument with the words: ‘Lest

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We Forget’ or ‘We shall remember them.’ What made the Great War different was the unprecedented scale and the lethal weapons: machine guns, poison gas and tanks. Thousands died each week.

People began to ask the question: why did we fight this war? King George V was the first cousin of the Kaiser Wilhelm II, and England was an Anglo-Saxon country with Germanic origins. Both countries had blundered into a meaningless, futile slaughter of the best and brightest in Europe, for no reason at all. By the end of the war, November 1918, three quarters of a million British lives were lost. More than 9 million soldiers died, on both sides. To its survivors, it was the ‘calculated and condoned [approved] slaughter of human beings.’

Anthems for Doomed Youth: War PoetsThe angriest of the soldiers wrote poems to counter jingoistic, nationalistic propaganda poetry. Siegfried Sassoon was a brave soldier who was awarded the Military Cross for valour (courageous heroism). When he received the medal, he threw it into the River Mersey to symbolise its futility. Wilfred Owen was a valiant officer, who had also earned medals for his valour. ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is Owen’s poem about a gas attack and the futility of glory:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cudOf vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--My friend, you would not tell with such high zestTo children ardent for some desperate glory,The old Lie: Dulce et decorum estPro patria mori.

The Latin means, ‘it is sweet and proper to die for your country.’ Owen is satirising the ideology of nationalistic propaganda. Sassoon writes, ‘The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still.’ His ironically titled poem, ‘The Hero’ is about the ‘gallant lies’ told to a mother about her ‘glorious boy,’ and how no one else seemed to care.

For those who fought in it like Sassoon and Owen, war was no longer glorious or heroic: it was futile. Wilfred Owen died on November 4th 1918, shot by a machine gun just one week before the armistice that ended the war. If he’d survived just seven more days, he would have outlived the terrible conflict. His mother was informed by telegram on Armistice Day, 11 th November 1918, just as the church bells were ringing out in celebration. Sassoon waited in vain to hear from his friend after the war, and only found out about his death months afterwards. He published a collection of Owen’s poems, with the preface in Owen’s words: ‘my subject is war, and the pity of war; the poetry is in the pity.’

Questions:1. What were the main causes of the First World War?2. How was war viewed prior to World War One?3. Which poets were patriotic and in favour of the war?4. Which poets were sceptical (critical) of the war?5. Which poets died in the war?

Extension: Why does war evoke poetry

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‘The Soldier’ by Rupert Brooke, 1914

Vocabulary recap: patriotic, assassination, irony, satire, sceptical, quagmire, entrenchedRecap:

1. When was the Battle of Balaclava?2. How many cavalrymen charged into Russian fire?3. How many were killed? How many wounded?4. When did World War One begin and end?5. When was the Battle of the Somme?

Extension: Which poets criticised the war?

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)Following a degree at Cambridge University, Brooke became a writer, and part of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, a collection of the best and brightest writers of the time. He was friends with Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats. Following the outbreak of World War One, Brooke joined up immediately. He was optimistic, as were most people, that the war would be over soon, and his unabashed patriotism is evoked in his graceful and lyrical poetry. Brooke never witnessed the later stages of war and the increasing brutality, as he died of septicaemia from a mosquito bite in 1915, aged only 27.

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‘The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:That there’s some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England. There shall beIn that rich earth a richer dust concealed;A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,A body of England’s, breathing English air,Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,A pulse in the eternal mind, no lessGives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

How does Brooke use language to evoke the theme of patriotism in ‘The Solider’?

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‘My Boy Jack’ by Rudyard Kipling, 1915

Vocabulary recap: lyricism, assassination, zeitgeist, jingoism, propaganda, futile, satire, gallantRecap:

1. How did Rupert Brooke die and when?2. When was the Battle of Passchendaele?3. How many British casualties were there on the first day of the Somme?4. What form of poem is ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’?5. What form of poem is ‘The Soldier’?

Extension: Why did Tennyson and Brooke write patriotic poems?

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)Born in India, where he grew up with his British parents, Kipling was a journalist and a war correspondent, as well as writer and poet, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907. He had two daughters, one of whom died in 1899. His only son, John or ‘Jack,’ was desperate to join up and fight when World War One broke out, but his poor eyesight meant he was rejected – he couldn’t even read the second row of letters on the sight test, even with thick glasses. His father pulled strings to get Jack recruited. Just six weeks after Jack’s eighteenth birthday, Kipling’s friend delivered the news that his son was missing, last seen stumbling blindly through mud, screaming in agony after an exploding shell had torn his face apart, and was presumed dead, and Kipling ‘cried a curse like the cry of a dying man.’ Kipling was obsessed with the idea that his son had survived and interviewed hundreds of his late son’s comrades.

‘My Boy Jack’

“Have you news of my boy Jack?”Not this tide.“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”Not this tide.For what is sunk will hardly swim,Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“What comfort can I find?”None this tide,Nor any tide,Except he did not shame his kind —Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,This tide,And every tide;Because he was the son you bore,And gave to the wind and the tide!

How does Kipling use language to evoke emotions in ‘My Boy Jack’?

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Writing: comparing ‘The Soldier’ and ‘My Boy Jack’

Vocabulary recap: zeitgeist, jingoism, patriotism, satire, ideology, annihilate, zest, ardent

Annotate these quotations, focusing on connections between them: how are they similar? Different?

‘If I should die, think only this of me’ ‘Have you news of my boy Jack?’

When we compare poems, we need to focus on:1. Themes and language2. Form and feelingsExtension: Ambiguities

The following questions can help to prompt your ideas:

Themes and languageHow do the titles compare? Eponymous? Anonymous? Short? Long? And why?How do the themes compare and contrast?How is language used in each poem, and how does it compare?How is imagery used in each poem? (Simile, metaphor…) Sound effects? (Sibilance, alliteration…)

Example paragraph: How do the themes and language compare?Rupert Brooke’s 1914 poem ‘The Soldier’ evokes patriotism with its frequent repetition of ‘England’ and ‘English’, words which become leitmotifs in the poem. The tone of the speaker is consolatory, assuring the reader who might mourn his death that ‘there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England,’ employing a metaphor to suggest that death is itself a kind of victory: even if the battle is lost, the dead body’s burial makes that land English. Brooke therefore extols the virtues of fighting for one’s country. Kipling’s overall message in ‘My Boy Jack’ is similar: the closing lines assert that his son ‘gave to the wind and tide’. This natural imagery, which is a refrain in the poem, similarly asserts that a soldier’s death gives to the nature that is one’s country. Yet the tone of ‘My Boy Jack’ is more anxious, as evoked by the interrogative mood of the three questions which open the first three stanzas, culminating in the third’s plaintive question: ‘what comfort can I find?’ The use of direct speech with an imagined dialogue evokes the assertion of patriotic idealism over emotional, human response. Both poems are removed from the reality of war; ‘The Soldier’ by choice, and ‘My Boy Jack’ by inexperience. In ‘The Soldier,’ the voice of the first person speaker’s perspective sooths and calms the reader: ‘all evil shed away,/A pulse in the eternal mind’, conveying the idea that national sacrifice leads to eternal glory, whereas in ‘My Boy Jack’ the distanced primary speaker can only take consolation in the knowledge that ‘he did not shame his kind.’ The monosyllables evoke an unspoken pity and even suppressed trauma in the voice of the speaker.

Useful words for comparison:Similarly, by contrast, comparably, comparatively, in parallel, in the same way, likewise, on the other hand, whereas, conversely, alternatively.

1. Write a paragraph on how the language and the themes compare in ‘The Soldier’ and ‘My Boy Jack.’

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Form and feelingsHow does the form of each poem compare and contrast? And why?How do the feelings of each poem compare and contrast? And why?

Example paragraph: How do the form and feelings compare?Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ uses the sonnet form, compared with Rudyard Kipling’s ‘My Boy Jack,’ the form of which is free verse in four irregular stanzas. Brooke’s use of the sonnet form, with its regular rhyme scheme, evokes a feeling of calm, compounded by the lyricism of the language: ‘If I should die, think only this of me.’ The sonnet’s complex rhyme scheme conveys the idea of predetermined thoughts, expressed evenly. The poem showcases a single, steady voice, and portrays a quiet and confident assertion that the speaker’s sacrifice is worthwhile, and even blessed: ‘blest by suns of home.’ Conversely, ‘My Boy Jack’ depicts two anonymous voices in conversation; one human, as conveyed with speech marks (‘have you news of my boy Jack?’), the other other-worldly, and disembodied, conveyed with italics (‘not this tide’). The call and response nature of the four stanzas gives the poem an unsettled sense, and the broken, irregular line lengths and lack of regular rhyme suggest a volatility of emotion not conveyed in the measured language.

Aspects of form: Sonnet Regular/irregular line length Regular/irregular stanza length Regular/irregular rhyme Regular/irregular rhythm Dialogue and voice

2. Write a paragraph on how the form and feelings compare in ‘My Boy Jack’ and ‘The Soldier.’

Extension: AmbiguitiesWhat are the ambiguities in the poems, and how do these compare? What are the silences? Whose perspective is marginalised? And why?

3. Write a paragraph on how the ambiguities in ‘The Soldier’ and ‘My Boy Jack.’

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‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen, 1917

Vocabulary recap: league, cannon, sabre, zeitgeist, botch, en masse, entrench, torrentialRecap:

1. When did Brooke write ‘The Soldier,’ and when did he die?2. When did Kipling write ‘My Boy Jack’?3. When was the Battle of the Somme, and how many British casualties were there on the first

day?4. When did World War One end?

Extension: What questions do we ask when we write about poems?

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)Owen worked as a language tutor in France before enlisting in the army in 1915, feeling pressured to do so by propaganda. Despite this, he enjoyed the impression he made when in public wearing a soldier’s uniform. He experienced heavy fighting, and was diagnosed with neurasthenia (shell-shock) in 1917, and sent to Craiglockhart Military hospital near Edinburgh to recover. During his time in hospital, he drafted a number of poems, and met Siegfriend Sassoon, who was already an established poet, and who gave Owen advice and encouragement. Owen’s reputation as perhaps the greatest poet of the First World War rests on poems he wrote in just a fifteen month period. He was deeply attached to his mother, and wrote around six hundred letters to her, where he detailed his experiences: ‘I have suffered seventh hell.’ Owen returned to France in August 1918, and his shocking experiences evoked some anti-war comments: ‘suffer dishonour and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed: but do not kill.’ Yet he was not a pacifist: ‘I hate washy pacifists.’ He felt he needed to ‘first get some reputation for gallantry before I could successfully and usefully declare my principles.’ In 1918 he wrote to his brother in a resigned tone: ‘I know I shall be killed. But it’s the only place I can make my protest from.’ He noted that ‘all a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poet must be truthful.’ His behaviour became increasingly reckless as he threw himself whole-heartedly into fighting, and in October 1918 he was awarded a Military Cross for bravery. He was killed in battle on 4 th November 1918. The news reached his parents on 11th November – the day of the armistice.

The last two lines of Owen’s most famous poem are directly lifted from the Roman poet Horace, who uses them in his ‘Odes’ to exhort Roman citizens to display their martial prowess to frighten off any potential invaders. Owen perhaps draws an analogy between the classical reverence for war and the indoctrination of British society to enlist and fight in World War One.

Questions:1. What does the title ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ suggest?2. What is the form of this poem, and why?3. Find an example of imagery in the first stanza, and explain why Owen creates this imagery.4. How does Owen use perspective in the final stanza, and why?5. What is the moral message of this poem?

Extension: What ambiguities, silences or marginalised perspectives are there in this poem?

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‘Dulce et Decorum est’

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,Till on the haunting flares we turned our backsAnd towards our distant rest began to trudge.Men marched asleep. Many had lost their bootsBut limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hootsOf disappointed shells that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;But someone still was yelling out and stumblingAnd floundering like a man in fire or lime.–Dim, through the misty panes and thick green lightAs under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could paceBehind the wagon that we flung him in,And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cudOf vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–My friend, you would not tell with such high zestTo children ardent for some desperate glory,The old Lie: Dulce et decorum estPro patria mori.

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Analysing ‘Dulce et Decorum est’

Vocabulary recap: ecstasy, smother, zest, ardent, ideology, zeitgeist, satire, sceptical, irony

Annotate this quotation with all your ideas:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge

When we write about poetry, we need to focus on:1. Themes and language2. Form and feelingsExtension: Ambiguities


Themes and languageWhat does the title suggest? Eponymous? Anonymous? Short? Long? And why?How does the language display the themes? And why?How does the poet employ imagery? (Simile, metaphor…) Sound effects? (Sibilance, alliteration…) And why?

Example paragraph: themes and languageWilfred Owen’s 1917 poem ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ employs an ironic allusion in its title to Horace’s

Odes, and refers to what would have been a popular quotation for contemporary readers. Owen

uses language throughout his poem to undermine the patriotic fervour which grips hopeful recruits,

giving his readers vivid, visceral imagery immediately and throughout to horrify them into

recognising the reality of war: ‘bent double, like old beggars.’ Owen combines alliteration with a

simile in his opening line to evoke the dehumanising experience of war, as once proud and strong

recruits are hobbled by their familiarity with the trenches. He uses another simile in the second line,

as the men cough ‘like hags’ to compound the reduction of humanity to such an extreme. His use of

the inclusive pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ invites the reader to empathise with the soldiers of the

stanzas, and experience vicariously the pain and hardship they are suffering. The totality of suffering

is emphasised with the repetition in the line: ‘all went lame; all blind.’ Owen implies that suffering at

the front line of a war is inescapable, and this is in direct contrast to the ‘old Lie’ of the title.

1. Write a paragraph on how the language represents the themes in ‘Dulce et Decorum est.’

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Form and feelingsHow does the form represent the feelings or ideas of the poet or speaker? And why?

Example paragraph: form and feelingsWilfred Owen’s poem employs irregular stanza lengths to depict the harrowing reality of war. Owen

repeatedly breaks the conventions of pattern and rhyme to display the soldiers’ perspective of life in

the trenches. The broken syntax of ‘Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling’ suggests the

chaos and panic of a gas attack, experienced by Wilfred Owen himself, and standing in stark contrast

to the sterilised reports the general public would read about successful and unsuccessful attacks.

The use of a short stanza of only two lines shifts the perspective from the moment of the intolerable

attack to its aftermath: ‘In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,/He plunges at me, guttering,

choking, drowning.’ In this shorter stanza we see the impact of trauma on soldiers, such as Owen

had himself experienced when shell-shock committed him to Craiglockhart military hospital in

Edinburgh. The tricolon of verbs evokes the painful memory’s detail for the sufferer.

Aspects of form: Regular/irregular line length Regular/irregular stanza length Regular/irregular rhyme Regular/irregular rhythm Dialogue and voice

2. Write a paragraph on how the form evokes the feelings in ‘Dulce et Decorum est.’

Extension: AmbiguitiesWhat are the ambiguities in the poem? What are the silences? Whose perspective is marginalised? And why?

3. Write a paragraph on the ambiguities in ‘Dulce et Decorum est.’

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‘Spring Offensive’ by Wilfred Owen, 1918

Vocabulary recap: valour, symbolism, futility, blunder, assassination, irony, stanza, ardentRecap:

1. What does ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ mean?2. From where does this line originate?3. Why did Owen spend time in Craiglockhard hospital near Edinburgh?4. Which famous poet did Owen meet at Craiglockhart?5. When did Wilfred Owen die?

Extension: How did Owen view war?

Spring OffensiveThe Spring Offensive was a series of German attacks along the Western Front, beginning in March 1918. In Owen’s poem, he contrasts the heavenly beauty of nature with the hellish reality of war.

‘Spring Offensive’

Facing the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge,Knowing their feet had come to the end of the worldSharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass,Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass. They tighten for battle. No alarmsOf bugles, no high flags, no clamorous haste—Only a lift and flare of eyes that facedThe sun, like a friend with whom their love is done.Soon they topped the hill, and raced togetherOver an open stretch of herb and heatherExposed. And instantly the whole sky burnedWith fury against them; and soft buttercupsOpened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopesChasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space. Of them who running on that last high placeLeapt to swift unseen bullets, or went upOn the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge,Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge,Some say God caught them even before they fell.But what say such as from existence’s brinkVentured too swift to sink?The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,And there out-fiending all its fiends and flamesWith superhuman inhumanities,Long-famous glories, immemorial shames—And crawling slowly back, have by degreesRegained cool peaceful air in wonder—Why speak they not of comrades that went under?

How does Owen use language to convey the themes in ‘Spring Offensive’?

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‘The Hero’ by Siegfried Sassoon, 1917

Vocabulary recap: imminent, clamour, chasm, fatigue, obscene, incurable, jingoism, patriotismRecap:

1. When was ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ written?2. When did World War One begin and end?3. Whose son died in World War One, and when?4. Which World War One poet extolled the virtues of war?5. Name two World War One battles with vast amounts of casualties.

Extension: What poetic form is ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and why?

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)Sassoon joined the army in 1915 and immediately impressed his comrades with his bravery. He was nicknamed ‘mad Jack’ for his near-suicidal exploits. Yet he became increasingly sceptical about the war, writing, like Owen, about the horror and brutality of war; and in 1917 a letter from Sassoon was published in The Times where he alleged that the government was deliberately and unnecessarily prolonging the war. His friend, the writer Robert Graves, convinced the authorities that the letter was a result of Sassoon’s shell-shock, thus saving him from being court-martialled. Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart military hospital for treatment. When ‘The Hero’ appeared in print in 1917, Sassoon was condemned by fellow officers for destroying the faith of mothers around the country who had lost their sons.

‘The Hero’

‘Jack fell as he’d have wished,’ the Mother said,And folded up the letter that she’d read. ‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’ Something brokeIn the tired voice that quavered to a choke.She half looked up. ‘We mothers are so proudOf our dead soldiers.’ Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out.He’d told the poor old dear some gallant liesThat she would nourish all her days, no doubt.For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyesHad shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.

He thought how ‘Jack’, cold-footed, useless swine,Had panicked down the trench that night the mineWent up at Wicked Corner; how he’d tried To get sent home, and how, at last, he died,Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care Except that lonely woman with white hair.

How does Sassoon use language to convey the themes in ‘The Hero’?

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Comparing ‘Spring Offensive’ and ‘The Hero’

Vocabulary recap: gallant, mine, trench, clamour, irony, disillusioned, sceptical, zeitgeist


‘Facing the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge’ ‘“Jack fell as he’d have wished” the Mother said’




Example paragraph: How do the themes and language compare?Wilfred Owen’s ‘Spring Offensive’ continually juxtaposes the beauty and peace of nature with the horror and reality of war. The hyperbole of presenting soldiers ‘at the end of the world’ evokes the idea that this is a war of apocalyptic proportions. The sibilance in the last two lines of the first stanza compounds the image of peace, and calm: ‘sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass,/Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass.’ The rhyme of the natural ‘grass’ with the man-made ‘glass’ prefigures the more extreme contrast that will come towards the end of the poem, where Owen describes the soldiers ‘who rushed to enter hell,’ where diabolical language conveys the horror of their reality. Conversely, Sassoon’s ‘The Hero’ is far removed from the battle fields, and the lack of hyperbole and lyrical language situates the poem in contrast within the civilian world, of a mother who receives news of her son’s death far from where he fell. The direct speech is combined with simple language as the Mother receives the news: ‘“Jack fell as he’d have wished,” the Mother said,’ and her simple reflection on this news, still stunned by it: ‘the Colonel writes so nicely.’ The enjambment of the first stanza illustrates the emotion the Mother is attempting to contain, and is the only hint of her true pain: ‘something broke/In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.’ The significant word ‘choke’ conveys the shock and distress of the mother. Both poems use language to reveal the reality of war: in ‘Spring Offensive’, Owen’s hyperbole and religious language brings the horror of the trenches to the reader, and in ‘The Hero’ Sassoon’s comparative understatement and restrained language unveils the lies told of fallen soldiers to comfort grieving relatives.

Useful words to compare:Similarly, by contrast, comparably, comparatively, in parallel, in the same way, likewise, on the other hand, whereas, conversely, by contrast, alternatively.

1. Write a paragraph on how the language and the themes compare in ‘Spring Offensive’ and ‘The Hero.’

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Example paragraph: How do the form and feelings compare?Wilfred Owen uses stanzas of varying lengths in ‘Spring Offensive.’ The opening four lines introduce the offensive, juxtaposing natural and unnatural. The second stanza is longer, more closely fusing war with the spring bloom of nature, and the third longer still. The third stanza’s crescendo of outrage, conveyed with rhetorical questions, depicts the poet’s increasing despair at the war and its reality and bloodshed. On the other hand, ‘The Hero’ consists of three regular stanzas with a regular rhyme scheme. Indeed, the simplicity of the rhyme scheme aptly reflects the over-simplified story the mother has been told about her child, and by the third stanza this nursery-rhyme style scheme is almost mocking her for her naïve belief in her ‘glorious’ son, despite his ineptitude.

Aspects of form: Regular/irregular line length Regular/irregular stanza length Stanza number Line number Refrain Rhyme Rhythm

2. Write a paragraph on how the form and feelings compare in ‘Spring Offensive’ and ‘The Hero.’


3. Write a paragraph on how the ambiguities in ‘The Soldier’ and ‘My Boy Jack.’

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All Quiet on the Western Front: Erich Maria Remarque, 1928

Vocabulary recap: nourish, gallant, ideology, symbolism, irony, futility, ardent, zestRecap:

1. Which poets met at Craiglockhart hospital near Edinburgh?2. When did Tennyson write ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’?3. When did World War One begin and end?4. When was the Somme? When was Passchendaele?5. When was the Armistice?

Extension: Which poets wrote in patriotic support for World War One? Which poets opposed it?

Remarque, a German citizen, was sixteen when the First World War broke out. He was called up for military service two years later, and fought in the Passchendaele offensive, where he was severely wounded. His novel presents the war through the eyes and mind of one schoolboy-turned German soldier.

Fourteen days ago we were sent up the line as relief troops. Kantorek was our form-master at school, a short, strict man. He kept on lecturing us until the entire class marched under his leadership down to the local recruiting office and enlisted. I can still see him, his eyes shining and his voice trembling with emotion as he asked, ‘You’ll all go, won’t you lads?’

In fact, one of our class was reluctant. That was Josef Behm, a tubby, cheerful chap. But in the end he let himself be persuaded, because he would have made things impossible for himself by not going. Many others felt the same way as he did; but it wasn’t easy to stay out of it because at that time even our parents used the word ‘coward’ at the drop of a hat. People simply didn’t have the slightest idea of what was coming. Oddly enough, Behm was one of the first to be killed. He was shot in the eye during an attack, and we left him for dead. We couldn’t take him with us because we had to get back in a great rush ourselves.

This can’t be linked directly with Kantorek, of course. Anyway, there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in the way that was the most comfortable for themselves. But as far as we are concerned, that is the root of their moral bankruptcy. They were supposed to be the ones who would help us, who would guide us into adult life, into the future. In our minds the idea of authority – which is what they represented – implied deeper insights and a more humane wisdom. But the first dead man we saw shattered this conviction. We were forced to recognize that our generation was more honourable than theirs. Our first experience of heavy artillery fire showed us our mistake, and the view of life that their Teaching had given us fell to pieces under that bombardment. While they went on writing and making speeches, we saw field hospitals and men dying: while they preached the service of the state as the greatest thing, we already knew that the fear of death is even greater. And we saw that there was nothing left of their world. Suddenly we found ourselves horribly alone.

In the trenches, passing the time, Muller asks Kropp, ‘What did Kantorek say in his letter?’ Kropp laughs and replies, ‘he calls us “young men of iron.”’ And yes, that’s it, that is what they think, those hundred thousand Kantoreks. Young men of iron. Young? None of us is more than twenty. But young? That was a long time ago. We are old now.

We had ten weeks of basic training, and that changed us more radically than ten years at school. We had joined up with enthusiasm and good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us. With our young, wide-open eyes we saw that the classical notion of patriotism we had heard from our teachers meant, in practical terms at that moment, surrendering our individual personalities more completely than we would ever have believed possible. Saluting, eyes front, marching, snapping to attention, insults – we had imagined that our task would be rather different from all this, but we discovered that we were being trained to be heroes the way they train circus horses.

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For me, the front is as sinister as a whirlpool. Earth – in the agony of terror, the explosion of annihilation, in the death-roar of the shell-bursts you gave us that massive resurgence of reconquered life. The madness, the tempest of an existence that had practically been torn to shreds flowed back from you into our hands, and so we burrowed deep into you for safety, and in the speechless fear and relief of having survived the moment, our mouths bit deeply into you!

We stumble into the darkness. The earth explodes in front of us. Great clumps of it come raining down on top of us. A hole has been blown in the ground right in front of me. Shells don’t often land in the same place twice and I want to get into that hole. I curl myself up quickly and grab for some cover, feel something to my left and press against it, it gives, I groan, and the earth is torn up again, the blast thunders in my ears. My fingers are gripped tight on a sleeve, an arm. A wounded soldier? I shout out to him – no answer – must be dead. My hand gropes on and finds more shattered wood – then I remember that we’ve taken cover in a cemetery.

But the shelling is stronger than anything else. It wipes out all other considerations and I just crawl deeper and deeper beneath the coffin so that it will protect me, even if Death himself is already in it. A hand grabs me by the shoulder; he shakes me and comes closer: ‘Gas – gaaaaas – gaaaaaas – pass it on!’ I pull out my gas-mask case. In between the explosions a bell rings the warning, gongs and metal rattles spread the word – Gas – gas – gas –

The first few minutes with the mask tell you whether you will live or die. Is it airtight? I know the terrible sights from the field hospital, soldiers who have been gassed, choking for days on end as they spew up their burned-out lungs, bit by bit. The gas is snaking over the ground and sinking into all the hollows. It insinuates itself into our shell hole wriggling its way in like a broad, soft jellyfish.

Hours later, and the shelling has stopped. We pick up a wounded man, and in a group we stumble away as quickly as possible. The cemetery has been blown to pieces. Coffins and corpses are scattered all around. They have been killed for a second time; but every corpse that was shattered saved the life of one of us.

Back at our trench, and it’s a nuisance trying to kill every single louse when you’ve got hundreds of them. The beasts are hard, and it gets to be a bore when you are forever pinching them between your nails. The rats here are especially repulsive, because they are so huge. They are the sort they call corpse-rats. They have horrible, evil-looking, naked faces. They seem to be really hungry. They have had a go at practically everybody’s bread. Carefully we cut off the pieces of bread that have been gnawed by the rats; we can’t throw the bread away, of course, or we would have nothing to eat tomorrow. In one of the adjacent sectors the rats attacked two big cats and a dog, bit them to death and ate them.

There are rumours of an offensive, and we go up the line. The British artillery has been strengthened. Morale is low. Two hours after we reach our dugouts, our own artillery drops some shells on to our trenches. That’s the third time this month. If they were just making mistakes with the gun-laying, nobody would say anything; but it’s because the gun barrels are worn out; sometimes the shots are so unpredictable that they scatter shrapnel right into our sector. Tonight two of our men are wounded that way.

Questions:1. How does Remarque depict Kantorek, and what does Kantorek symbolise?2. How does Remarque convey the cynicism of the young officers in lines 34-40?3. How does Remarque use language to vividly describe a gas attack in lines 58-65?4. Where is irony in lines 67-69, and why does Remarque include this detail?

Extension: How does Remarque use language to convey the horror of war?

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All Quiet on the Western Front – continued

Vocabulary recap: humane, morale, adjacent, artillery, zeitgeist, cynicism, jingoismRecap:

1. Whose perspective is ‘All Quiet from the Western Front’ told from?2. When was the Passchendaele Offensive, and how many British casualties were there on the first day?3. When was the Somme, and how many British casualties were there on the first day?4. What war does ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ refer to?5. Which military hospital treated shellshock?

Extension: How did the British public view World War One?

The front is a cage, and you have to wait nervously in it for whatever happens to you. Chance is hovering over us. A few months ago I was playing cards in a dugout; after a bit I got up and went out to go and talk to some men I knew in another dugout. When I got back, there was nothing left of the first one, a direct hit from a heavy shell had flattened it. It is simply a matter of chance whether I am hit or whether I go on living. I can be squashed flat in a bomb-proof dugout, and I can survive ten hours in the open under heavy barrage without a scratch. Every soldier owes the fact that he is still alive to a thousand lucky chances and nothing else. And every soldier believes in and trusts to chance.

Our trench has been shelled nearly to pieces. It is full of holes, craters and piles of earth. A shell bursts just in front of our post. Immediately everything goes dark. We have been buried and have to dig ourselves out. It’s as if we were sitting inside a massive echoing metal boiler that is being pounded on every side. The night is unbearable. We can’t sleep, we just stare. They say it is a mystery where the other side is getting so much artillery. We have to wait, wait. Around midday something happens that I have been expecting to happen. One of the recruits cracks. I have been watching him for a long time, seeing the way he has been constantly grinding his teeth and clenching and unclenching his fists. We are all too familiar with those hunted, wild eyes. He has collapsed in on himself like a tree that is rotten inside.

Another night. The tension has worn us out. It is a deadly tension that feels as if a jagged knife is being scraped along the spine. Our legs won’t function, our hands are trembling and our bodies are like thin membranes stretched over barely repressed madness, holding in what would otherwise be an unrestrained outburst of endless screams. We have no flesh, no muscles now, we cannot even look at one another for fear of seeing the unimaginable. And so we press our lips together tightly – it has to stop, it has to stop – perhaps we’ll get through it all.

The constant artillery fire has stopped, but in its place there is heavy defensive fire from behind us. It is the attack. Everywhere steel helmets are appearing from the trenches, and fifty yards from us a machine-gun has already been set up and starts to bark away. The wire entanglements have been torn to bits. We can see the attackers coming. Our big guns fire, machine-guns rattle, rifles crack. We have turned into dangerous animals. We are not fighting, we are defending ourselves from annihilation. We are able to look Death in the eyes, we are maddened with fury, we can destroy and we can kill to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to take revenge.

Right next to me a lance-corporal gets his head blown off. He runs on for a few paces more with blood shooting up out of his neck like a fountain. If we don’t destroy them they will destroy us. We have lost all feelings for others, we barely recognize each other, agitated as we are. We are dead men with no feelings, who are able by some trick, some dangerous magic, to keep on running and keep on killing.

We reach the enemy lines. Only gradually do we turn into something like human beings again. Night falls, and mist rises out of the shell holes. I’m cold. I’m on look out, staring into the darkness. I feel limp and drained, and so I find it hard to be alone with my thoughts. They are not really thoughts; they are memories that come to torment me in my weakness.

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The days rolls by. Attacks alternate with counter-attacks and slowly the dead pile up between the trenches in no man’s land. We can usually get out and fetch back any wounded men that aren’t too far away. Some have to lie there for a long time, though, and we listen to them dying.

Suddenly the shelling starts to thunder again. Soon we are sitting there, tense and rigid once more in that helpless waiting. Attack, counter-attack, charge, counter-strike. Even though we desperately need reinforcements, the new recruits almost make more trouble for us than they are worth. They’ve had hardly any training, they can’t spot things; in this sector, where we are under heavy attack, they are helpless and go down like flies. Modern trench warfare demands knowledge and experience. The new recruits are decimated; mown down; their chests and guts and arms and legs torn to pieces. To every one old soldier, between five and ten of the recruits are killed. A surprise gas attack carries off a lot of them. We find a whole dugout full of them, their faces blue and their lips black. Some of them have taken their gas-masks off too soon, and swallowed enough to burn their lungs to pieces. They are choking to death, coughing up blood and suffocating.

Continuous fire, trench mortars, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they embrace all the horrors of the world. Our faces are crusted with dirt, our thoughts are a shambles; when an attack comes, a lot of our men have to be punched hard so that they wake up and go along; our eyes are red and swollen, our hands are ripped, our knees are bleeding and our elbows raw. Is it weeks that pass – or months – or years? It is only days. We watch how time disappears before our eyes in the ashen faces of the dying. We see soldiers with their mouths missing, with their lower jaws missing, with their faces missing; we find someone who has gripped the main artery in his arm between his teeth for two hours so that he doesn’t bleed to death.

You can cope with all the horror as long as you simply duck thinking about it – but it will kill you if you try to come to terms with it. Everything that is sinking into us like a stone now, while we are in the war, will rise up again when the war is over, and that’s when the real life-and-death struggle will start.

‘There is one thing I’d like to know,’ says Kropp, ‘and that’s whether there would still have been a war if the Kaiser had said no.’ ‘I’m sure there would.’ ‘Well, if not just him, perhaps twenty or thirty people?’ ‘Maybe not then,’ I admit, ‘But they all did want a war.’ ‘It’s funny when you think about it,’ Kropp continues, ‘we’re out here defending our homeland. And yet the French are there defending their homeland as well. Which of us is right? Why on earth should a French locksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it’s just the governments. I’d never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and most of the Frenchmen won’t have seen one of us. Nobody asked them any more than they did us.’ ‘So why is there a war at all?’ Kropp goes on: ‘There must be some people who find the war worthwhile. All top-grade emperors need at least one war, otherwise they don’t get famous. Or it’s some kind of fever: nobody really wants it, but all of a sudden, there it is.’

How pointless all human thoughts, words and deeds must be, if things like this are possible! I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering. I see people being driven against one another, and silently, uncomprehendingly, foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another. I see the best brains in the world inventing weapons and words to make the whole process that much more sophisticated and long-lasting. My whole generation is experiencing this with me. For years our occupation has been killing – that was the first experience we had. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?Questions:

1. What does Remarque say about chance in lines 1-7?2. Look at lines 25-31. How does Remarque use language to convey the brutality of trench warfare?3. What happens to the new recruits, and why?4. How does Remarque use dialogue in lines 71-80 to convey the soldiers’ growing cynicism?

Extension: What is Remarque’s moral message in ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, and how does he use language to convey it?

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Analysing ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

Vocabulary recap: shelled, decimate, superficial, abyss, cynicism, sceptical, humane, insinuates

Annotate the lines below with the techniques you can see, and why they are used:

Another night. The tension has worn us out. It is a deadly tension that feels as if a jagged knife is

being scraped along the spine.

How does Remarque use language to convey the horror of war?In your paragraph you should include:

Plot and character: What is happening? How are characters and themes revealed by the writer?Quotation: Which quotations most vividly convey the horror of war?Techniques: What are the striking words or techniques in those quotations, and why are they combined?Context: How does the novel relate to what you know about World War One?

Here is an example paragraph:

Remarque’s 1928 novel ‘All Quiet on the Western Front,’ like the British war poets Wilfred Owen and

Siegfried Sassoon, exposes the reality of war and provides a counterpoint to the sanitised war

reports read by the general public in newspapers. For contemporary readers, the novel evokes the

similarity of war for both allies and German enemies, and humanises the experiences of German

soldiers with a protagonist anonymously sharing his experiences. The anger of the protagonist is

clear from the outset, as he rails against the ‘moral bankruptcy’ of those who pressurised others to

fight in the war, such as the derided teacher Kantorek. Remarque juxtaposes the older generation,

full of talk and bluster, with the young sufferers: ‘while they went on writing and making speeches,

we saw the field hospitals and men dying.’ Remarque’s inclusion of specific events shocks and

harrows readers: in the midst of battle, the shells unearth the dead bodies of a graveyard: ‘they have

been killed for a second time, but every corpse that was shattered saved the life of one of us.’ The

irony of the life-giving corpses is combined with the horror of the image itself to make this more

memorable, particularly for readers sceptical of Remarque and in favour of continuing the war

effort.

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Plot and character: What is happening? How are characters revealed by the writer?

Quotation: Which quotations most vividly convey the horror of war? I can still see him, his eyes shining and his voice trembling with emotion as he asked, ‘You’ll

all go, won’t you lads?’ That is their root of their moral bankruptcy The first dead man we saw shattered this conviction He calls us ‘young men of iron’ We saw that the classical notion of patriotism we had heard from our teachers meant, in

practical terms, surrendering out individual personalities more completely than we would ever have believed possible.

We discovered that we were being trained to be heroes the way they train circus horses For me, the front is as sinister as a whirlpool Earth – in the agony of terror, the explosion of annihilation, in the death-roar of the shell-

bursts you gave us that massive resurgence of reconquered life. In between the explosions a bell rings the warning, gongs and metal rattles spread the word

– Gas – gas – gas – [The gas] insinuates itself into our shell hole wriggling its way in like a broad, soft jellyfish. One of the recruits cracks. I have been watching him for a long time, seeing the way he has

been constantly grinding his teeth and clenching and unclenching his fists. We are all too familiar with those hunted, wild eyes. He has collapsed in on himself like a tree that is rotten inside.

We find a whole dugout of them, their faces blue and their lips black. Some of them have taken their gas masks off too soon, and swallowed enough to burn their lungs to pieces. They are choking to death, coughing up blood and suffocating.

And yet the French are there defending their homeland as well. Which of us is right? Kropp: ‘all top-grade emperors need at least one war, otherwise they don’t get famous’

Techniques: What are the striking words or techniques in these quotations, and why are they combined?

Context: How does the novel relate to what you know about World War One?

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The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe

Vocabulary recap: artillery, humane, morale, zeitgeist, jingoism, patriotism, zest, ardentRecap: What happened in:1. 1854 2. 1914 3. 1916 4. 1917 5. 1918 Extension: Which poems have we read, and when were they written?

Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi party and dictator in total control of Germany from 1933, had a murderous, poisonous hatred for the Jewish people. In 1939, Hitler made a prophecy: ‘If Jews succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’ By September 1939, Nazi Germany’s aggressive invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland had propelled Europe into world war. Hitler forced Europe into war in order to fulfil his menacing prophecy.

PropagandaAnti-Semitic (anti-Jewish) propaganda was coordinated in the mass media by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels noted in his diary: ‘The Jews are the lice of civilised humanity. They have to be exterminated.’ The head of the SS under Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, said: ‘The Jew must disappear from Europe.’ All this created a genocidal mentality in which German army officers competed to see how thoroughly they could implement Hitler’s threat to annihilate the Jews of Europe.

HumiliationIn the weeks after Hitler came to power in 1933, Nazi stormtroopers smashed Jewish shops and synagogues, beating up Jewish lawyers and judges, and forced Jews all over Germany to drink castor oil. Anti-Semitic hatred, fury and violence lay at the heart of Nazism at every level. Of the 525,000 Jews in Germany, 37,000 Jews emigrated in 1933 alone, and by 1937, there were 350,000. Anyone who returned would be sent to a concentration camp. Speeches, laws, decrees and police raids signalled that it was time to take violent action on the streets, to intimidate them into leaving. Jews were pulled out of their homes, beaten, spat on and stoned, their beards set alight. On 10 November 1938, around a thousand synagogues and 9,000 Jewish shops were burned all over Germany in a massive, coordinated assault. Around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps around Berlin. Jews were ordered to pay a collective fine of 1 billion Reichmarks for the damages.

Jews were forced to wear a yellow star of David on their coats, and were banned from most jobs, buses, railway stations, restaurants, cinemas, libraries, museums, and from buying coats or blankets, on pain of the death penalty. German women who were married to Jews were publically insulted and humiliated: ‘You Jew’s whore, why did you marry the Jew?’ They were no longer allowed to emigrate from Nazi-occupied Europe. The racial reordering of Europe had begun.

AtrocitiesBy 1941, Nazi Germany was in control of much of Europe: Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Hungary and Serbia, and had invaded Russia. Hitler’s Head of Security Services (the SS) commanded German Army officers: ‘all Jews must be shot.’ Mass pits were specially dug by the victims, where they were made to kneel down and be shot in the back of the neck. Around 1,500 people were killed in this was in a single mass execution. Any German officer who showed mercy was court-martialled and shot for betraying his comrades. By October 1941, Task Forces had ruthlessly shot more than 100,000 innocent, unarmed Jewish men, women and children in Ukraine alone. In Romania, 380,000 were shot. Around half a million Jews were murdered by the end of 1941. German police ordered the local Jewish council to pay for the ammunition used in the massacres. Pits were full with thousands of corpses.

Hitler was kept fully informed of the massacres, and having dinner with Himmler, said: ‘I prophesied to Jewry that the Jew will disappear from Europe if war is not avoided. This race of criminals has the two million dead of the First World War on its conscience, and now hundreds of thousands again.’ One Task Force report concluded: ‘Despite the liquidation of thousands of Jews, this method will not provide a solution to the Jewish problem. We can’t shoot 3.5 million Jews.’ It was becoming clear that the scale of extermination could not be achieved by mass shooting alone. The Nazis now turned to the annihilation of the Jews on a global scale.

Wannsee Conference

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In a lakeside villa in the tranquil Berlin suburb of Wannsee in 1942, fifteen highly intelligent German officials met to finalise the solution to the Jewish question in Europe: mass extermination by gas chamber. There were 11 million Jews in Europe, and it was decided that all must die. Although neither Hitler, nor Himmler, nor Goebbels attended, nor signed the conference papers, their impulses were clear. In a speech, Hitler said: ‘We are clear that the war can only end with the German people being annihilated or by Jewry disappearing from Europe. The old Jewish law “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is being applied for the first time.’ Goebbels wrote in his diary: ‘60% of them must be liquidated, and 40% of them put to work for the war effort. The Jews are being punished barbarically, but they have fully deserved it. If we did not defend ourselves against them, the Jews would annihilate us. It is a struggle to death between the German race and the Jewish bacteria. The Leader is unrelenting. Jewry must be exterminated. That is what this war is about. It is the Leader’s aim to make the whole of Europe Jew-free.’ In 1943, he ordered the German press (newspapers) to devote more attention to attacks on the Jews. ‘The Jews are to blame; they wanted this war.’ Himmler repeatedly pushed on the killing program. The Nazis were driven by a deluded, ideological mixture of fear and hatred, blaming the Jews for all of Germany’s ills, seeking their destruction as a matter of life and death, for Germany’s survival.

Extermination Gas chambers and crematoria were set up in extermination camps. Within four weeks, 75,000 Jews had been put to death. The gas used was the chemical pesticide Zyklon-B. Behind the 1,000-person gas chambers were burial pits. Himmler visited the camps in 1943, and the Camp Commandant Hoess boasted that he had ‘no criticisms to make.’ Himmler ordered an intensification of the killing. He also decided that the bodies buried should be dug up and burned so as to destroy the evidence of the murders. By July 1943, 700,000 corpses, which had been crudely buried in mass pits, were incinerated. Cattle trains of Jews from Romania, Croatia, Finland, Norway, Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, Denmark, Greece and France arrived for incineration. Some 2,000 German guards worked at the death camp Auschwitz, 7,000 over the course of the war. They lived with their families in the nearby town, with pubs, parties and a medical centre, all denied to the inmates. Jewish prisoners were greeted on arrival with a gate bearing the legend and lie: ‘arbeit macht frei,’ German for ‘work sets you free.’ As many as 1.5 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, 90% of them Jews, including 300,000 from Poland, as well as resisters, Gypsies and Russian prisoners-of-war. Commandant Hoess said that he suppressed any human feeling, seeing it as a betrayal of the Fuhrer. His children were fond of prisoners who worked in their garden, and begged him to give them cigarettes.

One question that many Jews asked themselves was: ‘why did we allow ourselves to be slaughtered?’ The Jews had been terrorized by the extreme violence of the Germans. They knew that if they tried to resist, their families and many others who had not been involved would be tortured and killed. Jewish police made resistance difficult. Weapons were hard to buy. The vast majority were weakened by prolonged hunger, poverty and disease, and too preoccupied with the daily struggle to stay alive, to resist.

The Nazis carried out industrialised, mechanised, mass murder like no other genocide in human history. Racial hatred was fuelled by years of propaganda that indoctrinated Germans to think that Jews were dangerous, inhuman enemies of civilisation. Altogether 3 million Jews were murdered in the extermination camps, 700,000 by mobile gas vans and 1.3 million shot by SS Task Forces, while 1 million died from hunger, disease or brutality in the ghettoes and concentration camps. It is certain that over 5.5 million Jews were deliberately killed by the Nazis and their allies. One German wrote ‘With this terrible murder of the Jews, we have brought on ourselves a curse that can never be lifted. We are all guilty.’

Questions:1. How were Jews treated when Hitler came into power?2. What did Hitler say about Jews?3. What happened at the Wansee Conference?4. How were Jews killed by Nazis?5. Why was it difficult for Jews to resist the Nazis?

Extension: Why is the Holocaust such a significant moment in history?

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‘First They Came’ by Pastor Martin Niemoller, 1946

Vocabulary recap: genocide, court-martial, exterminate, incinerate, indoctrinate, ghettoRecap:

1. When was World War One?2. When was ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ written, and by who?3. When did Hitler gain power in Germany?4. When was the Wannsee Conference?5. How many Jews were slaughtered in the Nazi genocide?

Extension: How were the Jews slaughtered?

Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984)Niemoller was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. He fought in World War One as a naval officer, had been in command of a U-Boat, and was a fervent nationalist. He was fiercely anti-Communist, and at first supported Hitler, believing Germany required a strong leader to promote national unity and honour. Yet he was soon disillusioned and became the leader of a group of clergymen opposed to Hitler. Despite warnings from the state police, he continued to preach against the state’s attempts to interfere with Church governance and what he saw as the neo-paganism encouraged by the Nazis. He was arrested in 1937 and was a political prisoner in the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Dachau. He was released in 1945 by the allies.

‘First They Came’

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—Because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I wasn’t a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Questions:1. How does Niemoller use repetition, and why?2. How does Niemoller use personal pronouns, and why?3. What form is ‘First They Came,’ and why?

Extension: What is the moral message of ‘First They Came,’ and how does Niemoller use language to convey this?

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‘In Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto’ by Esther Morguez Algrante, 1975

Horrifying figures come suddenlyStubbornly to disturb my sleepOf that terrifying Nazi-contrived agonyFor my brothers killed with such brutality,

My soul turns towards the graves of the deadWhence I hear voices asking me:‘Why were we mistreated, destroyed?Why were we burned?’ they cry out to me in distress.

Fallen heroes in the Ghetto of Warsaw,Young men and women, the pride of our race,Unconquerable champions full of energy,You fought like noble warriors.

Immediately my trial begins thus.My conscience questions me incessantly:‘Well, now, speak, answer. Why are you still alive, When six million lost their lives?’

Six million eyes are fixed on meAnd I find no answerSix million innocent burned! –Wretched grief, impossible to suppress.

O God! How could You permit such a catastrophe?How could you grant such power to a monster?O God! I implore you to punish cruellyThe one who did this to Your Chosen.

Little girls reduced to ashes, Precious daughters vanished from the earth.Blooming flowers untimely cut. O great God! Tell me: why upon them these wounds?

Infants with pleasant and graceful smilesInnocent angels hurled form balconiesWhy should your fate be so agonizing?O great God! Tell me: why were they killed?

Learned rabbis who prayed for us.Cast were they into the fiery furnace. Men who eternally revered their God.O great God! Tell me: why were they annihilated by fire?

To you old men and women no mercy was shown.Shot at, slain, burned, such was your sad fate.Savage enemy who respected not even age. O great God! Tell me: why their brutal death?

Every single day will I remember The tortured and burned bodiesWith writings and elegies will I lament them,

For in my heart they remain forever engraved.Heavenly angels, forever pray for these martyrs,For their souls to rest among the just.Innocent victims eternally etched in our hearts.

How does Algrante use language to represent the themes in ‘In Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto’?

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Comparing ‘First They Came’ and ‘In Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto’

Vocabulary recap: suppress, conscience, revere, martyr, etch, decimate, humane, morale


First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out— Horrifying figures come suddenly




Example paragraph: How do the themes and language compare?Niemoller’s ‘First They Came’ uses simple, repetitive language, which is relatively devoid of figurative language, a simplicity that compels the reader to self-reflection; conversely, Algrante’s ‘In Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto’ deploys intricate figurative language, using metaphor, imagery and Biblical allusions to depict a message of overwhelming grief. Niemoller’s use of anaphora and repetition: ‘first they came…/Then they came…/Then they came;’ ‘because I…/Because I…’ establishes a repetitive pattern in the poem, lulling the reader into a false sense of certainty, before shocking the reader in the final stanza. Niemoller’s use of personal pronouns in the first four stanzas, ‘I,’ is made even more personal in the final stanza’s more plaintive and hopeless ‘me.’ The repetition of ‘me’ in the final stanza evokes the sense that the speaker of the poem is egocentric, and only grasps the true horror of a fascist regime when it directly affects themselves. Algrante’s poem also uses personal pronouns: ‘six million eyes are fixed on me,’ also deploying the metaphor and metonymy of conflating those killed by the Holocaust with their eyes alone, and putting the speaker under pressure to account for their existence when so many have died so cruelly. Algrante’s use of personal pronouns, however, is employed in speaking up for those unfairly fallen in the Holocaust, and the speaker’s sense of injustice at their deaths, and ends in a solemn prayer-like promise: ‘Every single day will I remember.’ Algrante uses direct speech in ‘In Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto’ to enact the disbelief and horror many felt in the aftermath of the Second World War, discovering the catastrophic injustices of the Nazis: ‘Well, now, speak, answer. Why are you still alive,/When six million lost their lives?’ The conscience is personified through this direct speech, and the predominant use of monosyllables combined with simple language and a rhetorical question underlines the guilt felt by the speaker.

Useful words to compare:Similarly, by contrast, comparably, comparatively, in parallel, in the same way, likewise, on the other hand, whereas, conversely, by contrast, alternatively.

1. Write a paragraph on how the language and the themes compare in ‘First They Came’ and ‘In Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto.’

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Example paragraph: How do the form and feelings compare?Niemoller’s poem contains five stanzas in free verse. Although ‘Communist,’ ‘Socialist’ and ‘Trade Unionist’ rhyme, this is not intentional, and the lines contain irregular rhythm. The line lengths are regular for the first four stanzas, with a shorter second line. The repetition evokes a sense of arrogant dismissal; that the speaker did not speak out because they were not themselves condemned. These regular line lengths are reversed for the final stanza, to reveal pathos for the speaker who has, after all, merely done what most did. ‘In Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto’ is a far lengthier poem, with 12 stanzas. Almost all the stanzas are quatrains, meaning the penultimate stanza stands out as the only shorter one, of three lines. This irregularity could reveal the increasingly unrestrained emotion coursing through this poem, however the final stanza reverts to the regularity of the preceding ten, providing a sense of closure and calm to an unsettling poem.

2. Write a paragraph on how the form and feelings compare in ‘First They Came’ and ‘ In Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto.’

Aspects of form: Regular/irregular line length Regular/irregular stanza length Stanza number Line number Refrain Rhyme Rhythm


3. Write a paragraph on how the ambiguities in ‘First They Came’ and ‘In Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto.’

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‘Shipment to Maidanek’ by Ephraim Fogel (1920-1992)

Vocabulary recap: zeitgeist, cynical, sceptical, incessant, exterminate, incinerate, ghetto, genocide

Recap:1. Which two poets were treated for shellshock, and where?2. When did World War One begin and end?3. When did World War Two begin and end?4. What happened in 1941?5. When was the Wannsee Conference, and what was decided there?

Extension: What was so horrifying about the genocide of the Jews?

Maidanek Concentration CampMaidanek was an extermination camp in Poland between 1941 and 1944. Unlike other camps, Maidanek was not in some far-flung, rural location, but was within the boundaries of a major city. The number killed in Maidanek has been a matter of historical dispute, with estimates ranging widely between 80,000 and 1.5 million victims.

Part of what made the Holocaust so horrifying was the clinical bureaucracy with which it was carried out, and the complex administration of the process. The money and valuables confiscated from Jewish victims paid for the cost of their murder; the irony of this stolen money being directly invested into the transport of Jews by train to death camps cannot be escaped. But to add to the horror, everything taken from the Jews was registered with the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office in Berlin. These exhaustive records show us that 200,000 watches, 2,000 boxcars of clothes and material, and 3,000kg of gold (much extracted from teeth) were among the effects taken from those condemned to die. The Jews were systematically not only dehumanised, but commodified by the Nazis.

Questions:1. What does the title of this poem imply?2. Which words are repeated in this poem, and why?3. How would you describe the speaker of this poem, and why does Fogel choose this?4. What is the form of this poem, and why?5. How does Fogel use language to convey indifference in this poem?

Extension: What message does Fogel’s poem convey about the Holocaust?

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Shipment to Maidanek

Arrived from scattered cities, several landsIntact from sea land, mountain land and plain,Item: six surgeons, slightly mangled hands,Item: three poets, hopelessly insane,

Item: a Russian mother and her child,The former with five gold teeth and usable shoesThe latter with seven dresses, peasant-styled.

Item: another hundred thousand Jews.

Item: a crippled Czech with a handmade crutch. Item: a Spaniard with a subversive laugh;Seventeen dozen Danes, nine gross of Dutch.

Total: precisely a million and a half.

They are sorted and marked – the method is up to you. The books must be balanced, the disposition stated. Take care that all the accounts are neat and true.

Make sure that they are thoroughly cremated.

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‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel

Vocabulary recap: subversive, cremate, zeitgeist, revere, emigrate, indoctrinate, court-martialRecap:

1. Was Rupert Brooke a patriotic or sceptical poet?2. Was Wilfred Owen a patriotic or sceptical poet?3. When was the Battle of the Somme, and how many British casualties were there on the first day?4. When did Hitler take power in Germany?5. When did World War Two end, and how many Jews died during it in the Holocaust?

Extension: How did the Nazis view the Jews they slaughtered?

Elie Wiesel (1928-2016)Wiesel was a Romanian writer and concentration camp survivor. In 1944, Wiesel and his family were taken to concentration camps: first Auschwitz, then Buchenwald. Wiesel wrote about his experiences in the novel ‘Night.’

‘Night’

Why did I write it? To leave behind a legacy of memories, to help prevent history from repeating itself? As a witness with a moral obligation to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory?

The Nazis in Germany set out to leave behind a world in which Jews would seem never to have existed. Everywhere in Europe their death squads turned their machine guns on more than a million Jews, men, women and children, throwing them into huge mass graves, dug just moments before by the victims themselves. The corpses were then burned.

Convinced that this time in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. The subtitle of this novel is: ‘And the world remained silent.’ Today, the past seems to have been relegated to oblivion. Today, there are Anti-Semites who tell the world that six million exterminated Jews is nothing but a hoax, and many people, not knowing any better, may well believe them. It is the duty of the survivor who chooses to testify to bear witness for the dead and the living. Future generations inherit our collective memory. To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue. I was thirteen. A man, the poorest of the poor, once asked me, ‘Why do you pray?’ Why did I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? ‘I don’t know,’ I told him, troubled. He said, ‘Every question possesses a power that’s lost in the answer…’ ‘And why do you pray?’ I asked him. ‘I pray for the strength to ask the real questions.’ We remained in the synagogue long after all the faithful had gone.

One day, all the foreign Jews were expelled. He was one of them. Behind me, someone said, sighing, ‘What do you expect? That’s war.’ Days, weeks, months went by. A year later, as I was about to enter the synagogue, I saw him sitting on a bench near the entrance. He told me what had happened. The Jews were ordered onto a train. It stopped by a forest. Everyone was ordered out. They were forced to dig huge trenches. The Gestapo shot them all. Children were thrown in the air and used as targets for machine guns. How had he been able to escape? By a miracle. He was wounded and left for dead…

Day after day, night after night, he went from one Jewish house to the next, telling his story. But people not only refused to believe him, they refused to listen. ‘Jews, listen to me!’ Even I did not believe him. ‘I wanted to come back to warn you.’ That was the end of 1942.

Spring 1944. There was no longer any doubt: Germany would be defeated. Even we doubted Hitler’s resolve to exterminate us. Annihilate an entire people? So many millions! In the twentieth century? The elders concerned themselves with strategy, diplomacy, politics – but not with their own fate.

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Anti-Semitic attacks took place every day. Fascists attacked Jewish stores, synagogues. I asked my father to sell everything, and leave. ‘I am too old, my son,’ he answered. ‘Too old to start a new life from scratch. Too old to leave Budapest.’

German soldiers, with steel helmets and their death’s-head emblem. They made no offensive remarks. The optimists were jubilant. ‘Well? What did we tell you? What do you say now? Where is their famous cruelty?’

On the seventh day of Passover, the Germans arrested the leaders of the Jewish community. Everything happened very quickly. The race toward death had begun.

First edict: Jews were prohibited from leaving their residences for three days, on penalty of death. Second edict: a Jew was forbidden to own gold, jewellery or valuables, and hand it all over to the authorities. Third edict, three days later: every Jew had to wear the yellow star. ‘It’s not lethal,’ said my father.

Then came the ghettoes. Two ghettoes created and sealed with barbed wire. No more anguish. We would live among Jews… The ghettoes were ruled by neither German nor Jew, but by delusion.

Night fell. My father returned, his face drained of colour. ‘The news is terrible,’ he said, then one word: ‘Transports.’ The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely. ‘Where will they take us?’ we asked. That was a secret. A secret for all, except one, the president of the Jewish council. But the Gestapo had threatened to shoot him if he talked.

At nine o clock, policemen wielding clubs were shouting, ‘All Jews outside!’ That was when I began to hate them, the first faces of hell and death. We were all people condemned to the same fate – still unknown.

A convoy of cattle cars was waiting. The police forced us to climb into the cattle train, eighty persons in each one, and a few pails of water. After two days, the thirst and heat were intolerable. ‘If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot like dogs,’ a German army officer said.

On the third night, a piercing cry broke the silence. ‘Fire! I see a fire! I see a fire!’ an old woman screamed. Someone muttered: ‘She is mad, poor woman…’ She continued to scream and sob fitfully: ‘Jews, listen to me. I see flames, huge flames!’ Someone said, ‘She’s hallucinating because she’s thirsty…’ The night seemed endless. The heat, the thirst, the stench, the lack of air were suffocating us. Her screams continued, and tore us apart. A few more days and all of us would have started to scream.

But we were pulling into a station. ‘Auschwitz.’ Nobody had ever heard that name. And as the train stopped, this time we saw flames rising from a tall chimney into a black sky. In the air, the smell of burning flesh. It must have been around midnight.

A fellow prisoner said, ‘You should have hanged yourselves rather than come here. Didn’t you know what was in store for you here at Auschwitz? See that chimney over there? And the flames? You will be burned! Turned into ashes!’ I heard whispers around me. ‘We must do something. We can’t let them kill us like that, like cattle in the slaughterhouse.’ Was I still alive? Was I awake? How was it possible that men, women and children were being burned and the world kept silent? I told my father that I could not believe that human beings were being burned in our times; the world would never tolerate such crimes… Questions:

1. Why does Wiesel say he has written ‘Night’?2. How did the Jews respond to warnings of extermination?3. What three edicts were passed?4. How does Wiesel describe the transport to Auschwitz?5. How does Wiesel respond to the reality of an extermination camp existing?

Extension: How does Wiesel use language in ‘Night’ to convey the horror of the Holocaust?

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‘Night’ – continued

Vocabulary recap: convoy, wield, edict, subversive, cremated, suppress, annihilate, humane, moraleRecap:

1. When was World War One?2. When did Wilfred Owen die, and when was the Armistice?3. What happened in 1933?4. When were 100,000 Jews shot by Nazi taskforces?5. When and where was ‘The Final Solution’ decided?

Extension: Why did Hitler want to exterminate Jews?

We were on the threshold of death. An SS officer said, ‘You are in a concentration camp. In Auschwitz. Work or crematorium – the choice is yours.’ In a few seconds, we had ceased to be men.

Behind me, I heard a man whisper, ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ My father said: ‘God is testing us. He wants to see whether we are capable of killing the Satan within ourselves.’ God chose to be silent.

1945 came, and I was put in the infirmary because my foot was wounded, infected and full of pus. One day, a doctor came in and said: ‘Evacuation. Tomorrow, right after nightfall, the camp will start on its march. Block by block. The sick remain in the infirmary. They will not be evacuated.’ I did not want to be separated from my father. We had suffered so much, endured so much together. ‘What are we going to do?’ The choice was in our hands: to stay, both of us, thanks to the doctor, in the infirmary, my father as a patient or medic. I’d made up my mind to accompany my father wherever he went. ‘Right after the evacuation, they’ll blow up the camp,’ he said. ‘Let’s be evacuated,’ I said. After the war, I learned the fate of those who had remained in the infirmary. They were liberated by the Russians two days after the evacuation.

My wound had reopened and was bleeding: the snow under my feet turned red. Then the death march began. Near me, men were collapsing into the snow. Gunshots. A young boy from Poland was marching beside me. He had terrible stomach cramps. ‘I can’t go on,’ he said, ‘my stomach is bursting.’ He fell to the ground and was trampled under the feet of the thousands of men who followed us. The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, started to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot. To no longer feel anything, neither fatigue nor cold, nothing. To let myself slide to the side of the road…

My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me. I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his sole support.

Eventually, we reached railroad tracks. A cattle train appeared. The SS shoved us inside, a hundred per cart. Pressed tightly, heads heavy, brains a whirlwind of decaying memories, minds numb with indifference. The train stopped. The SS walked by, shouting: ‘Throw out all the dead! Outside, all the corpses!’ Twenty corpses were thrown from our wagon. ‘Here’s one! Take him!’ Two men approached my father. I threw myself on his body. He was cold. I rubbed his hands and hit him, crying: ‘father! Father! Wake up!’ His body remained inert. The two gravediggers said: ‘Leave him alone! Can’t you see he’s dead?’ ‘No!’ I yelled, ‘he’s not dead yet!’ I hit him harder and harder. At last, my father half-opened his eyes. They were glassy. He was breathing, faintly. The two men went away.

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The night was endless. Someone groaned, ‘why don’t they just shoot us now?’ That same night, we reached our destination. We had arrived in Buchenwald. The gate said: ‘JEDEM DAS SEINE’: ‘TO EACH WHAT THEY ARE DUE.’

Every day, my father was getting weaker. I no longer dared to believe that he could still elude death. One camp warden said: ‘Listen, don’t forget you’re in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even your father. In this place, there is no such thing as a father, brother, friend. Each lives and dies alone. Here’s some advice: stop giving your ration of bread to your old father. You cannot help him anymore.’ My father groaned once more: ‘Elie…’ I didn’t move.

I woke at dawn the next day. Another sick person lay on my father’s bed. His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered him.

I remained in Buchenwald. Nothing mattered to me since my father’s death. On April 5, the wheel of history turned. The Buchenwald camp was to be liquidated. There were still some twenty thousand prisoners in the camp. At six o clock that afternoon, the first American tank stood at the gates of Buchenwald. I was sixteen.

Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves on the bread. Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill. I was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks between life and death. One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle train. The fiery altar on which the history of our people was meant to be sacrificed. I remember asking my father, ‘can this be true? This is the twentieth century. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?’ It is so much easier to look away from victims and avoid interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is awkward and troublesome to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. During the darkest of times, in the ghettoes and death camps, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.

And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that America knew, the West knew. One thousand Jews on a ship arrived on the shores of the United States were sent back. Why didn’t they allow these refugees to disembark? What happened? Why the indifference to the suffering victims? The world did know, and remained silent. I have tried to keep the memory alive, because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

When adults wage war, children perish. Our survival has this meaning for mankind: human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

Questions:1. Why does Wiesel choose to be evacuated from the camp?2. How does Wiesel describe the evacuation in lines 17-27?3. How does Wiesel feel about his father, and how does he convey his feelings?4. What shocks Wiesel most about the genocide?5. What meaning does Wiesel say Jewish survival has for mankind?

Extension: Why did Wiesel write ‘Night’?

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‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ by Victor Frankl

Vocabulary recap: fatigue, deportation, perish, contemplate, hoax, obligation, fascistRecap:

1. In which death camp were 1.5 million Jews exterminated?2. Which death camp was located in a major city?3. When were 100,000 Jews shot across Europe by taskforces?4. When was the Wannsee Conference, and what was decided there?5. When was World War One?

Extension: How does Holocaust literature differ from World War One literature?

Victor Frankl (1905-1997)Victor Frankl was a Jewish Austrian psychologist living in 1930s Vienna. Frankl’s father, mother, brother and wife died in the concentration camps in the 1940s. Suffering from hunger, cold and brutality in Auschwitz, he discovered a profound truth about the human condition: when to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. As Nietzsche said, ‘whoever has a why to live can endure almost any how.’ His autobiography is the best example in world literature of how humankind can transcend its predicaments.

‘Man’s Search for Meaning’

People often ask why I did not try to escape when, in 1938, Hitler occupied Austria. I lived in Vienna, and had been granted a visa to the United States of America, and so was allowed to leave. The dilemma beset me: could I leave my parents alone to face their fate of a concentration camp, or extermination camp, or emigrate with my wife and write my books? I noticed a piece of marble in our house, and asked my father what it meant in Hebrew. It was one of the Ten Commandments: ‘Honour thy mother and father.’ I decided to stay with my parents, and let the American visa lapse.

How is life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the prisoner?

Fifteen hundred people had been travelling by train for several nights and days, eight people in each coach. ‘Auschwitz’ read the sign – gas chambers, crematorium, massacres. The first selection was a verdict on our existence or non-existence. Ninety percent were sent to their deaths.

A hundred and fifty captives cooped up in a shed built for twenty at most. We were cold, hungry and there was not enough room to lie down. One piece of bread was our only food in four days. Two blankets were shared between nine men. We had no mattresses, no toothbrushes, no messages. We could only lie on our sides, crowded and huddled together against the bitter cold. And yet sleep brought oblivion and relief from pain for a few hours.

Daily and hourly beatings occurred in the slightest provocation, often for no reason at all. Once, asymmetry in the queue for bread displeased the guard, and I received two sharp blows on the head from his stick. It’s not the physical pain which hurts most, but the mental agony of the injustice. A guard once threw a stone at me, ragged, emaciated creature that I was. ‘Wait til you dig dirt with your teeth – you’ll die like an animal!’

It is very difficult for an outsider to grasp how very little value was placed on human life in camp. Emaciated bodies of the sick were thrown on carts drawn by other prisoners. If a sick man died before the cart left, he was thrown on anyway, the list had to be correct! The list was the only thing

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that mattered. A man counted only because he had a prison number. Dead or alive, he became a number, and the life of a number was unimportant.

What did the prisoner dream of most frequently? Of bread and warm baths. But the dreamer always had to wake to the reality of camp life, and the terrible contrast between this and his dream illusions. The worst moment was awakening, at still nocturnal hours, as shrill whistles tore us pitilessly from our exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams.

We looked like skeletons disguised with skin, and our bodies began to devour themselves, any muscles disappearing. Our sub-human existence made us unable to think of anything other than food. Prayers were improvised in the darkness of locked cattle trucks in which we were brought back from a distant work site, tired, hungry and frozen in our ragged clothing.

One early morning when we had to march to our work site in the icy wind, as we stumbled on in the darkness, thoughts of my wife came to mind. A thought transfixed me: that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. I made a fellow prisoner memorise my will to my wife: ‘If I don’t get back to my wife, and if you should see her again, tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. I have loved her more than anyone, and the time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here.’ Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human thought can impart: the salvation of mankind is through love. Even in a position of utter desolation, mankind can, through loving contemplation, achieve fulfillment. I did not know whether she was alive, and I had no way of finding out. Even had I known she was dead, that thought would still have been just as vivid: for love is as strong as death. In the hopelessness of imminent death, I felt this thought transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and answer to my question about the purpose of existence.

Questions:1. Why did Frankl not emigrate in 1938?2. How does Frankl describe daily life in the concentration camps?3. Look at lines 44-47. How does Frankl’s language vividly depict life in Auschwitz and the

impact on human psychology? 4. What realisation does Frankl come to in the final paragraph of this extract?

Extension: How does Frankl use language in this extract to communicate the reality of life in an extermination camp?

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‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ part two

Vocabulary recap: emaciated, provocation, vivid, transfix, cease, deportation, infirmary, fatigueRecap:

1. When was the Light Brigade cavalry charge, and what war was it during?2. Which poets were at Craiglockhart Military Hospital, and when?3. When did Hitler come into power?4. Which concentration camp killed most Jews, and how many were killed there?5. When was World War Two?

Extension: Why do Holocaust survivors write?

Poems, jokes and satire all helped us forget, and they did help. Humour was the soul’s weapon in the fight for self-preservation. It gave us the ability to rise above any situation, if only for a few moments. We were grateful for the smallest of mercies.

At times, lightning decisions had to be made, decisions which spelled life or death. He had minutes to make up his mind: to attempt to escape or not? Should he flee? Should he take the risk? He suffered the tortures of hell in those minutes.

In 1945, the Red Cross liberated Auschwitz. Mass transports had taken nearly all the prisoners to other camps. Outside the gate, a white flag floated in the wind.

The experiences of the concentration camps show that mankind does have free choice. Mankind can preserve a vestige of freedom of mind, even under terrible conditions of psychological stress. We who lived through the concentration camps remember the men who walked through huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They were few, but they prove that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose our own way. There were always choices to make. Every day, every hour offered the opportunity to make a decision. Fundamentally, anyone under any circumstances can decide what becomes of them. It is this freedom – which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful. Agitation ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. Any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camps had to first succeed in showing him some future. In Nietzsche’s words, ‘whoever has a why to live for can endure almost any how.’ What was needed was a fundamental change in our attitude towards life. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the answers to its problems, and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from person to person, and moment to moment. They are unique to each individual. Each situation calls for a different response. Whoever knows the why of their existence, is able to endure almost any how.

Once, the authorities had discovered a theft, but not the perpetrator, and demanded the guilty man be given up, or the whole camp would starve for a day. The mood in the huts was low, little was said, and every word sounded irritable. I was cold, hungry, tired and irritable, but I had to make the effort and use this unique opportunity. I said that human life never ceases to have meaning, and that this includes suffering, and knowing how to die. We do not want to die for nothing: our sacrifice is of the deepest significance. Miserable friends limped towards me to thank me with tears in their eyes. But I have to confess that only too rarely did I have the inner strength to console my companions in suffering, and that I missed many opportunities for doing so.

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What was the psychology of prisoners after liberation and release? With tired steps we prisoners dragged ourselves to the camp gates. Timidly we looked around and glanced at each other questioningly. Then we ventured a few steps out of the camp. No orders were shouted at us, no need to avoid a blow or kick. ‘Freedom,’ we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream. We could not believe it was true. How often in past years had we been deceived by dreams!

We who thought that we had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that we could still suffer more, and still more intensely. Some found no one awaited them. The person whose memory alone had given courage in the camp did not exist anymore! When the day of dreams came, it was so different for all we had longed for! Every prisoner can no longer understand how they endured it all, and the extermination camp experiences seem nothing but a nightmare.

There are three main schools of psychotherapy. Freud said that humans are motivated by the pleasure principle and the death drive. Adler said that humans are motivated by power, wealth, fame, status and money. The third school of psychotherapy, existential psychotherapy, says that humans are motivated by purpose and the search for meaning. People are able to live and even die for the sake of ideals and values! When asked what was most important to them, 78% said that most important was ‘finding a meaning and a purpose to my life.’ Everyday, human, existential problems occur for us all: agitation, frustration, anxiety. Mankind has to make choices. It is no good asking what the meaning of life is. That is like asking a chess champion: ‘what is the best move in the world?’ There is no such thing as the best move, except in a particular situation. The same holds for human existence. Everyone has a unique task, and a specific opportunity to implement it. Ultimately, we should not ask what the meaning of life is, but realise it is we who are asked. To life, we can only respond by being responsible. We are ultimately self-determining, deciding what we will become in each moment. One boy was paralysed from the neck down when he was 17. He spends his time reading, watching films, and writing using only a mouth stick to type. He says, ‘I view my life as full of meaning and purpose. I broke my neck; it didn’t break me. My suffering enhances my ability to help others.’ Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant, even those who went to the gas ovens with the Shema Yisrael prayer on their lips.

So, let us be alert – alert in a twofold sense:

Since Auschwitz we know what humankind is capable of.

And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

Questions:1. Look at lines 12-29. What lessons does Frankl say Auschwitz taught him?2. How does Frankl describe the psychology of prisoners who have been released?3. What lesson did Holocaust survivors learn after the war? Look at lines 46-51.4. What are the three schools of psychotherapy, and which does Frankl endorse?

Extension: Summarise what Frankl learns from his time in Auschwitz.

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Practice comparison:

Unseen comparison of two poemsWhen you approach an unseen poem, you should read the poem through a minimum of three times.

First reading: read for meaning. Are there any themes which strike you?

Second reading: circle any significant vocabulary, especially if it links to any themes.

Third reading: note any poetic techniques, and consider why they are used. What is the poetic form, and why?

Think: is there any relevant context you know? Do you know anything about the poet? The time they wrote the poem in?

When you write to compare two unseen poems, you need to answer the same questions in your essay:

1. How do the themes and language compare?2. How do the form and feelings compare?3. What are the ambiguities?

Use these questions to help structure each paragraph:Themes and language:

How do the titles compare? Eponymous? Anonymous? Short? Long? And why? How do the themes compare and contrast? How is language used in each poem, and how does it compare? How is imagery used in each poem? (Simile, metaphor…) Sound effects? (Sibilance,

alliteration…)Form and feelings:

How does the form of each poem compare and contrast? And why? How do the feelings of each poem compare and contrast? And why?

Ambiguities: What are the ambiguities in the poems, and how do these compare? What are the silences?

Whose perspective is marginalised? And why?

If This is a Man Primo Levi, 1947

You who live secureIn your warm houses,Who return at evening to findHot food and friendly faces

Consider whether this is a manWho labours in the mudWho knows no peace

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Who fights for a crust of breadWho dies at a yes or a noConsider whether this is a womanWithout hair or nameWith no more strength to rememberEyes empty and womb coldAs a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:I commend these words to you.Engrave them on your heartsWhen you are in your house, when you walk on your way,When you go to bed, when you rise. Repeat them to your children.Or may your house crumble,Disease render you powerless, Your offspring avert their faces from you.

Never shall I forget Elie Wiesel, 1960

Never shall I forget that night, The first night in the campWhich has turned my life into one long nightSeven times cursed and seven times sealed.

Never shall I forget that smoke.Never shall I forget the little faces of the childrenwhose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smokebeneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flameswhich consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silencewhich deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.

Never shall I forget those momentswhich murdered my God and my souland turned my dreams to dust.

Never shall I forget these things. Even if I am condemned to liveAs long as God himself.

Never.

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End of Unit Assessment

Unseen comparison of two poemsWhen you approach an unseen poem, you should read the poem through a minimum of three times.

First reading: read for meaning. Are there any themes which strike you?

Second reading: circle any significant vocabulary, especially if it links to any themes.

Third reading: note any poetic techniques, and consider why they are used. What is the poetic form, and why?

Think: is there any relevant context you know? Do you know anything about the poet? The time they wrote the poem in?

When you write to compare two unseen poems, you need to answer the same questions in your essay:

4. How do the themes and language compare?5. How do the form and feelings compare?6. What are the ambiguities?

Use these questions to help structure each paragraph:Themes and language:

How do the titles compare? Eponymous? Anonymous? Short? Long? And why? How do the themes compare and contrast? How is language used in each poem, and how does it compare? How is imagery used in each poem? (Simile, metaphor…) Sound effects? (Sibilance,

alliteration…)Form and feelings:

How does the form of each poem compare and contrast? And why? How do the feelings of each poem compare and contrast? And why?

Ambiguities: What are the ambiguities in the poems, and how do these compare? What are the silences?

Whose perspective is marginalised? And why?

Note on ‘Shema’:The Shema is a traditional Jewish prayer which can be translated as ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.’ This professes the central belief of Judaism: there is only one God.

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Flanders Field (1915)By John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row,That mark our place: and in the skyThe larks still bravely singing flyScarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead: Short days ago,We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved and were loved: and now we lieIn Flanders fields!

Take up our quarrel with the foeTo you, from failing hands, we throwThe torch: be yours to hold it highIf you break faith with us who die,We shall not sleep, though poppies growIn Flanders fields.

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Shema By Primo Levi

You who live secureIn your warm houses,Who return at evening to findHot food and friendly faces

Consider whether this is a manWho labours in the mudWho knows no peaceWho fights for a crust of breadWho dies at a yes or a noConsider whether this is a womanWithout hair or nameWith no more strength to rememberEyes empty and womb coldAs a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:I commend these words to you.Engrave them on your heartsWhen you are in your house, when you walk on your way,When you go to bed, when you rise. Repeat them to your children.Or may your house crumble,Disease render you powerless, Your offspring avert their faces from you.

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‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ 1

Bent double, like old b________ under s_______,

Knock-kneed, coughing like h________, we cursed through s________,

Till on the h_________ f________ we turned our backs

And towards our d________ r_______ began to trudge.

Men marched a________. Many had lost their b_______

But limped on, b_______-shod. All went l_______; all b________;

Drunk with f_________; deaf even to the h_______

Of d________ s________ that dropped behind.

Gas! G_____! Quick, boys! – An e_______ of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy h________ just in time;

But someone still was y________ out and s___________

And f__________ like a man in fire or lime.–

Dim, through the m________ panes and thick g_________ light

As under a g______ sea, I saw him d__________.

In all my d________, before my h________ sight,

He plunges at me, g__________, choking, d_________.

If in some s____________ dreams you too could p_______

Behind the w________ that we f________ him in,

And watch the w_______ eyes w________ in his face,

His hanging face, like a d_________ sick of s_______;

If you could hear, at every j________, the blood

Come g_________ from the froth-c_________ lungs,

Obscene as c________, bitter as the c_____

Of vile, i__________ sores on i___________ tongues,–

My f_____, you would not tell with such high z_____

To children a_______ for some d_______ glory,

The old L_____: Dulce et decorum est

Pro p________ m________.

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Bent d_______, like old b________ under s_______,

Knock-kneed, c_______ like h________, we c________ through s________,

Till on the h_________ f________ we t________ our b_________

And towards our d________ r_______ began to t_______.

Men m______ a________. Many had l_______ their b_______

But limped on, b_______-s_______. All went l_______; all b________;

D________ with f_________; d_______ even to the h_______

Of d________ s________ that d__________ behind.

G_____! G_____! Quick, boys! – An e_______ of f_________,

Fitting the c________ h________ just in time;

But s_________ still was y________ out and s___________

And f__________ like a m______ in f______ or l______.–

Dim, through the m________ p_______ and thick g_________ light

As under a g______ sea, I saw him d__________.

In all my d________, b_______ my h________ sight,

He p__________ at me, g__________, c_______, d_________.

If in some s____________ d_______ you too could p_______

B________ the w________ that we f________ him in,

And w_______ the w_______ eyes w________ in his face,

His h________ face, like a d_________ sick of s_______;

If you could hear, at every j________, the b______

Come g_________ from the froth-c_________ l________,

O_______ as c________, b_______ as the c_____

Of vile, i__________ sores on i___________ tongues,–

My f_____, you would not t____ with such h_______ z_____

To children a_______ for some d_______ g______,

The old L_____: Dulce et decorum est

P_____ p________ m________.

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Bent d_______, like o_____ b________ under s_______,

Knock-k______, c_______ like h________, we c________ t_______ s________,

Till on the h_________ f________ we t________ our b_________

And t_______ our d________ r_______ b______ to t_______.

Men m______ a________. M_______ had l_______ their b_______

But l________ on, b_______-s_______. All went l_______; all b________;

D________ with f_________; d_______ even to the h_______

Of d________ s________ that d__________ b__________.

G_____! G_____! Q_______, boys! – An e_______ of f_________,

F________ the c________ h________ just in t_______;

But s_________ still was y________ out and s___________

And f__________ like a m______ in f______ or l______.–

D______, through the m________ p_______ and thick g_________ l_______

As u______ a g______ s______, I saw him d__________.

In all my d________, b_______ my h________ s_______,

He p__________ at me, g__________, c_______, d_________.

If in s_______ s____________ d_______ you too could p_______

B________ the w________ that we f________ him in,

And w_______ the w_______ eyes w________ in his f_______,

His h________ face, like a d_________ sick of s_______;

If you c______ h______, at every j________, the b______

Come g_________ from the f______-c_________ l________,

O_______ as c________, b_______ as the c_____

Of v______, i__________ s_______ on i___________ t__________,–

My f_____, you would not t____ with such h_______ z_____

To c________ a_______ for some d_______ g______,

The o____ L_____: D______ et d________ est

P_____ p________ m________.

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Bent ……………………………………………………………………………..,

Knock-……………………………………………………………………………..,

Till ……………………………………………………………………………..,

And ……………………………………………………………………………..

Men ……………………………………………………………………………..

But ……………………………………………………………………………..;

Drunk ……………………………………………………………………………..

Of ……………………………………………………………………………...

Gas! ……………………………………………………………………………..,

Fitting ……………………………………………………………………………..;

But ……………………………………………………………………………..

And ……………………………………………………………………………...–

Dim, ……………………………………………………………………………..

As ……………………………………………………………………………..

In ……………………………………………………………………………..,

He ……………………………………………………………………………...

If ……………………………………………………………………………..

Behind ……………………………………………………………………………..,

And ……………………………………………………………………………..,

His ……………………………………………………………………………..;

If ……………………………………………………………………………..

Come ……………………………………………………………………………..,

Obscene ……………………………………………………………………………..

Of ……………………………………………………………………………..,–

My ……………………………………………………………………………..

To ……………………………………………………………………………..,

The ……………………………………………………………………………..

Pro ………………………………………

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Recap answers

The Soldier1. November 18542. 6003. 150, 1204. 1914-19185. 1916

My Boy Jack1. Septicaemia, 19152. 19173. 60,0004. Ballad5. Sonnet

Dulce et Decorum Est1. 18542. 1914, 19153. 19154. 1916, 60,0005. 1918

Spring Offensive1. It is sweet and proper to die for your

country2. Horace’s Odes3. Shellshock4. Siegfried Sassoon5. 4th November 1918

The Hero1. 18542. 1914-19183. Rudyard Kipling, 19154. Rupert Brooke5. Somme/Passchendale

All Quiet Part 11. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon2. 18543. 1914-19184. 1916, 19175. 11th November 1918

All Quiet Part 21. German soldier2. 1917, 250,0003. 1916, 60,0004. Crimean War5. Craiglockhart near Edinburgh

The Final Solution1. Charge of the Light Brigade2. WWI begins3. Somme; 60,000 casualties on first day4. Passchendaele, 250,000 killed5. World War I ends; Owen dies 7 days

before armistice

First They Came1. 1914-19182. 1854, Alfred Tennyson3. 19334. 19425. 5.5 million

Shipment to Maidanek1. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon,

Craiglockhart hospital2. 1914-19183. 1939-19454. 1942, The Final Solution to the Jewish

problem5. Over 100,000 European Jews shot by task

forces

Night1. Patriotic2. Sceptical3. 1916, 60,0004. 19335. 1945, 5.5 million

Night part 21. 1914-19182. 4 November 1918, 11 November 19183. Hitler came into power4. 19415. 1942, Wannsee conference

Man’s Search for Meaning1. Auschwitz2. Maidanek3. 19414. 1942, Final Solution5. 1914-1918

Man’s Search for Meaning part 21. 1854, Crimean War2. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon,

19173. 19334. Auschwitz, 1.5 million5. 1939-1945

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Documents

arkacton.org 9 War Poetry.docx · Web viewHe had two daughters, one of whom died in 1899. His only son, John or ‘Jack,’ was desperate to join up and fight when World War One