Three poems from And the sun still dared to shine

Holocaust

The Cut for Survival Was Made on the Second Hand

Survival in the Holocaust concentration camps meant something different for every human being who lived as a prisoner. And it meant the same. Survival meant enduring dread, fear, pain, starvation, exhaustion, and debasement. Survival required ever increasing degrees of physical, mental, and emotional adaptation and tolerance. Survival meant ever-increasing extremes of degradation in every realm -- degradation of faith, hope, strength, standards. And survival meant being lucky at every turn, in every moment, with each breath. In And The Sun Still Dared to Shine, Peter Scheponik wrote about surviving and survival. To those who are free, the words are the relatively same. To those featured in the poems "Afterlife," Love Photos," and "Punishment," the cut made between surviving and survival happened on the second hand.

The hands of the Nazis doled out cruelty and held chance loosely, as in a game. To a Nazi, taking life was easy and expected. To give life back again, after "everything went black/blacker than the swastikas / and boxcar journey / blacker than the night sky […] a sinking blackness that / seemed liked death" (lines 9-11, 14 -- 15) was part of the game that caused "SS sneers" (line 19) and, one would assume, laughter and derision. Pleasure was derived from returning a Jew to the unbearable state of surviving and to the understanding that "the afterlife / belonged to the Fatherland / and the bullet to his head" (lines 19 -- 21). The point of the game was to signal to the prisoners that their survival was based on the irrational moves of their opponents, and that the prisoners had no control over the outcome. When a clever "guard raised his arm / and aimed the gun" (lines 3-5) but instead "the wooden plank / whacked from behind" (lines 6 -7), did Scheponik intend the similarity to counting coup, this demonstration of Nazi cruelty rather than native bravery? A warrior, whose dignity was robbed through the counting of coup, survived all the same. Surviving in the death camps required the minute and repeated tapping of the store of one's bravery. The chance of survival increased when fear was contained and panic squelched. In this poem, the prisoner, who stood bravely waiting for the bullet, "closed his eyes" (line 2) until, surviving in the "salvation of unconsciousness / […] he opened his eyes" (lines 17-18), to again face his fate.

Scheponik reminds the reader that some of the bravest of the surviving were very young children. In "Punishment," he portrays the brutality exacted on a child "for eating a crust of bread / during roll call" (lines 21 -22). The child is punished for trying to survive and survives by enduring the grueling physical punishment. By force of will and intent to survive -- by not giving in or giving up -- "as the little / arms, outstretched / quivered from / the dense pull of the bricks" (lines 7 -14), the child is made to be complicit in his own punishment. The fact that prisoners in the death camps were numb from exhaustion and starvation may well have extended their chances of survival and the length time their were engaged in the act of surviving. It was typical for prisoners to be forced to comply with the conditions of their own deaths. Lacking the strength, the means, or the opportunity to take action against the Nazis meant that the prisoners' lives sometimes hung in the balance -- with passivity acting as scaffolding. If there was camouflage to be had, it could be found in a cloak of passivity. Yet, even as "the weight of / the rock presses / directly upon the child's head / crushing the vertebrae in / the small / neck struggling / to stay straight" (lines 1-9), the child is at once a victim and a defiant survivor.