So, if we could look at the first of the poems called Some Holocaust Poetry. Do you see it? >> Page seven. >> And I want to mention to you that we are teaching the class in English. And yet in some ways a lot of what we are going to be talking about, most of what we're talking about, happened in other languages. And I know that for many of you, English is not your native langauge. Which give you a step up on other people who are native speakers. Who think prepositions are interchangeable parts. They're not. One of the things I ask you to think about is what languages were people talking. And when you read Dry Tears, you will discover that the family was saved because Nechama, the daughter, would speak perfect Polish. Unaccented. How many of you have abilities like that? When my father and mother and older sister were leaving Vienna, shortly after Anschluss. My father showed his passport at the railroad station to the Nazi guard, but my mother's passport had expired and my sister was on the passport. So he showed his passport and he flashed my mother's passport. She was holding my sister. And the Aryan Nazi guard, waved them through. But before that he stopped than, and stopped my sister and my mother. And looked at my sister and said, what a beautiful Aryan child because she was blonde and blue-eyed. So, he saw what ideology, what propaganda had prepared him for. Waved them through. So too, Nechama, a beautiful Aryan child. Which raises all sorts of questions, including that question about, what does a Jew look like? And you know people used to think we had horns and hooves and tails, and that's how we controlled the world. But I've already given you a tip on how you, too, can get some of the smarts by studying together. We'll see about the others. So to look at this poem, written by someone who was a young boy. Wandered between the lines of the armies. Having grown up in the city of Czernowitz, where he spoke German as his native language as many Jews did. Eventually, after liberation, he was brought to the land of Israel on a youth program. And he became a student. He got there when he was about 10. And he said to me, that at about 16, in the public schools which are in hebrew, he suddenly started to write hebrew poetry. And later on he became a very distinguished scholar of The convivencia, the Spanish world where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived and fought and worked together in the Middle Ages, well, a little bit later. But he also was a very great poet. His name is Dan Pagis, and I wanna look at these poems and like all Israelis he studied the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, and that was part of his poetry. [FOREIGN] [FOREIGN] Written in pencil in the sealed railway car. Here in this carload, I am Eve, with Abel, my son. If you see my other son, Cain, son of man, tell him that I. It's an amazing poem. It's very brief. No, there's not a missing period at the end. Because it goes on. The question at the end continues, right? You saw that. You didn't need me to tell you about it. But part of literary study is to express what's implicit. And you could see right away, that this is Eve and she has 2 sons. And she's there in the car load with Abel. And then she's addressing us. If you see my other son, Cain, and she doesn't say Cain, the son of Adam. She says, son of man, tell him that I. This is a poem that raises all kinds of questions about evil, murder. Who murders whom, but why? How? That dreadful moment for a mother. Right, every once in a while, in one of those stupid TV programs. The mother of the murderer gets interviewed, right. Here is Eve, the longest line in the poem is its title. If you go to the Washington holocaust museum you will see a railway car, one of those that was sealed. And you will see that there is scratching on it. It's amazing what people do in their extreme circumstances, and so here is a poem that echoes. That derives from historical material, but puts it into the Hebrew Bible. It also puts it then into the world of myth. Because the Hebrew bible is one of those books that are about people who are so much our ancestors that they're larger than we are. And it also puts it into the present because If you see Cain, son of man, tell him that I. And it raises, then, a whole series of questions, about our responses, about their responses. And it raises a question about testimony. Eve is asking us to testify to something. Yes I saw Cain yesterday, or he's still among us, or a whole series of questions that these writers all raise. And it's a series of questions, that for example, when you watch parts of Lanzmann's movie Shoah, he keeps asking nazis. He keeps trying to interview them. What did you think? It's really hard to find a nazi who's willing to sit still, and be interviewed. On the other hand, in 1960 the Israelis' kidnapped Adolf Eichmann. From this German enclave in Argentina where he'd been living, brought him to Jerusalem and put him on trial. And the result was all kinds of questions about who he was, what had he done? By the way, an Uncle of mine was in Dachau, one of the first concentration camps. He too was in Vienna at the time, and the family lore is that he got out because his wife had an interview with Eichmann. Who was in charge of these things. And persuaded Eichmann to let her husband out. They ended up in the land of Israel. Of course in 1937 and 38 and earlier, the Nazis didn't want just to kill Jews, they hadn't quite gotten there. They wanted to get them to leave and leave their success behind. And later on of course, as Peter will tell us, there were a series of events that led to murder, better to kill them. Or later on, as Primo Levi will tell us, he was chemist in Auschwitz. And his supervisor saw that these students knew chemistry. They gave them a chemistry test, and three guys passed. They then spent the winter working in a chemistry lab. He describes that. Working in a chemistry lab, developing for the Nazis. They needed all the help they could get. They needed synthetic rubber. Time is a key element in all of this. And time is one of the issues in this poem, here in this carload, I am Eve. When I say it's a mythic poem, these are mythic roles and we all play them whether we want to or not, that part of what myth is. There are also historical moments. And this is also a biblical moment. Though we have layers, if you will, of meaning. And you have to decide how to honor the different layers, and to honor the different narratives. To honor the historical narrative and the literary representation. And we're gonna argue about how to balance that, and how to balance the film. And I think of these issues as something that you, the writers and the filmmakers and the poets are going to write about in the future. >> Well if I may return to a earlier topic, what we are doing here is that through literature, you can get a sense of the individual experience. Leading history is not very good at that. So what I will be talking about, will be institutions. I will be talking about the propaganda ministry. What I will be talking about Economic statistics. And reading literature, on the other hand. You can have a sense of the individual. So the idea of this course is to bring this together, and I think this makes our course worthwhile. >> And it raises the question about women's roles and men's roles. And it also will lead you to ask about other minorities that went through these extreme circumstances. The gypsies, homosexuals, a whole series of things. Because you have to learn about the Aryan pyramid. One of the worst things that happened at the end of the war was that Americans, soldiers, African-Americans. We're in charge of several sites, several cities. You see, African-Americans were just a little above of the Jews. There was all this hierarchy about who was important. Of course, as you turn around and look at each other. The blonde, blue-eyed ones, they were at the top of the heap. In Nazi ideology, in Nazi propaganda, a whole series of things. And if you think that doesn't still exist, >> Yes, the Jews were at the bottom, but no, the Jews represented danger, Gypsies did not represent danger. So when Nazi's talk about racial hierarchy. And the Jews are on the bottom of that hierarchy. They meant and then they did not mean it. Unlike all others, you had to be afraid of the Jews. And then, actually, toward the end, it reached the proportions which seem to me bordering on madness. >> A friend of mine who's even older than we are was in the American army in Germany >> And he was part of the occupying army. And he was, you know, like you, 18 years old, 19 years old, a soldier in very good health, buffed, all of those things that I know you all are. He had a German girlfriend, and he told me >> One day he told the German girlfriend that he was Jewish. She said, you can't be Jewish! He said what do you mean? So she pulled out one of the magazines with the pictures, the caricatures of who Jews are. Of course they didn't look at all like him. They didn't even look like Peter or Murray. They looked more like [LAUGH] batman's penguin, but that's another story. Okay.
