Poetry

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30 years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, a survivor of the camp told Michael Goldfarb, "One day they will never believe it happened". As soon as the conflict ended it became the task of artists to ensure that the industrial slaughter of European Jewry was never forgotten. How well have they succeeded? On the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz Goldfarb looks at how writers, filmmakers, and poets have over these decades succeeded or failed in the almost impossible task of understanding and memorialising what happened at Auschwitz and in other places in the terrible three and a half years of the Shoah. Cultural critic Theodore Adorno said writing poetry was "barbaric" after Auschwitz. Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska proved him wrong. Michael looks at her life and the handful of poems in which she distilled the essence of what happened: the randomness of survival, the curse of a Jewish name, and the inevitable erosion of memory into poetic language that is anything but barbaric.