bd Chimneys

Nellie Sachs

Once upon a time there were newspapers. And people read them. They were delivered to your doorstep or you bought them from a vendor at a street stand. You held them in your hands and learned to navigate their large size. They were thick with pages and pages that opened worlds. Their ink captured your fingers. Their copy’s spacing and location were markers – signposts.

My parents trained me early to read with a critical eye. The editorials were highly focused and well written. Different newspapers told the same story in different ways. I learned soon to go to the national and international obituaries because they told of the most remarkable lives. Lives of wisdom, valor, contribution. I was excited to know of such, and then became less so because those people had lived while I was alive and I knew of them not. The only way to find them was to read, read, read.

I wish I had known of Nellie Sachs.

There is more discussion of her associated in her next poem, O The Chimneys. But here are the essentials: she lived during the Nazi Holocaust but was not imprisoned. Please be assured that there have been other holocausts — but not this size and methodical delivery -- through the ages. The Holocaust Encyclopedia https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008193 records that 6 million – of her beloved fellow Jewish people - were tortured, starved, worked, shot, used in medical experiments, and gassed to death under Nazi direction in World War II. There were other groups – individually fewer in number - of people who suffered similar atrocities.

When she won the1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, she said, “I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people.” And she speaks with a gentle spirit about the most grievous actions taken by one people against another. Her tool is connection. She is devotedly connected to her faith, history, and people. People she does not know are her family. Read the poem aloud. Hear the pain; see the images that she uses to connect suffering. The images are simple, familiar, but placed in a context that is, gratefully, distant to most of us.

Do not miss the significance of the word, chorus. Chorus: A group singing the same thing. Unity. A chorus can repeat. One of the results of the Holocaust was the refrain, “Never again,” meaning that the Jewish people vow not to suffer a holocaust again.

Literature lives beyond historical relevance when the work can be applied to others – not just perceived to reflect a particular group. Clearly, Sachs speaks the voice of those released from concentration camps but consider this: there are personal holocausts at the individual level, too, out of this time and experience.

When a person has been deprived from his normal for a period, the adjustment to a new normal can be disorienting and painful. Even if the change is good, there are memories. Habit may have to be broke. Gentle changes must be made. A dog we may have at home can be gentle and loving. One looking like it can be terror. An unexpected sweetness can be jarring. A person can be too afraid to “live” again.

Chorus of the Rescued

An excerpt:

We, the rescued,

Beg you:

Show us your sun…. but gradually.

Lead us from star to star, step by step.

Be gentle when you teach us to live again.

Lest the song of a bird,

Or a pail being filled at the well,

Let our badly sealed pain burst forth again

And carry us away—

That we will dissolve into dust—