Ecphrastic Poetry: The Poetry of Empathy

Responding to Images of the

Holocaust

Jewish women return to the ghetto after forced labor on the outside. They line up to be searched by German and

Lithuanian guards. Kovno, Lithuania, between 1941 and 1944.

A Jewish boy searches the snow for food near the Hungarian Labor Camp where Company 108/57 was housed.

March 1942

Jews search through belongings in the Pabianice labor camp/storage facility. Date: Circa 1942 - 1943

Group portrait of Polish-Jewish refugee children in the Pahta Abak-Kolhoz orphanageoutside Andizhan, Uzbekistan shortly before they were repatriated to Poland.

SS men search Jews for weapons. Warsaw, Poland, October or November 1939

A group of SS, police, and ethnic German auxiliaries prepare to conduct a search during the opening months of the war.

Jews captured by the SS during the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising are lined up against a wall prior to being searched for weapons. The original German caption reads: "Before the search." 1943

Polish children imprisoned in Auschwitz look out from behind the

barbed wire fence. (July 1944)

Close-up of a child working at a machine in a Kovno Ghetto workshop. (1941 - 1943)

Close-up of two young girls in the Kovno ghetto, wearing Stars of David that were fashioned out of wood by their uncle. (July 1943)

An SS officer oversees a deportation action in the Krakow Ghetto. Jews, assembled in a courtyard with their bundles, await further instructions. (Circa 1942)

Polish laborers seal off the doors and windows of buildings on the outer periphery of the Krakow Ghetto. (1940)

Members of the Storm Troopers (SA), with boycott signs, block the entrance to a Jewish-owned shop. One of the signs exhorts: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!" Berlin, Germany

Jews forced to scrub the street of Vienna after the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria, March 1938

Circa 1935: two Jewish pupils are humiliated before their classmates. The inscription on the blackboard reads "The Jew is our greatest enemy! Beware of the Jew!".