Download Ecphrastic Poetry: The Poetry of Empathy

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 orphanage
outside 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!".