KENNETH SHERMAN
609
What is remarkable is how much the poem is able to say about the
Holocaust as a psychic phenomenon. Already in stanza four we are
thinking of the camp as though "driven
to."
The orphans are "made
to
walk." We are now far from the freedom of the first two stanzas, when
it was possible
to
saunter or become innocently lost. Just as Yolek's fate
is inescapable, so too, it seems, is our thinking of it. And that thinking
is tinged with the darkest irony, for Yolek is off to "his long home." The
longest home anyone has, of course, is death. "Shamble" also has its
double, resonating with the noun "shambles"-a slaughterhouse.
Stanza five stands out for two reasons. First, we have a change in the
use of pronoun. Hecht has been using the morally implicating "you."
This is somewhat different from the recriminatory
"tu"
of Baudelaire's
"Au Lecteur" or the accusatory "you" of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et
Decorum Est" with its indicting lines,
"If
in some smothering dreams
you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in... .
If
you
could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth cor–
rupted lungs . . .. " Hecht's reader is not the smug and oblivious Jessie
Pope (the original addressee of Owen's poem) who was largely repre–
sentative of her English compatriots. Hecht is addressing us: modern
readers who have seen the film footage of the camps and heard the sur–
vivors' accounts.
If
we are complacent it is not through ignorance. Just
the opposite: we are likely to be overinformed and jaded. Therefore a
contemporary poet's tactics have to be subtler than Owen's.
So in stanza five it is not "you" but rather "we" that are addressed .
The poem becomes inclusive and universal. We are all approaching that
August when the memory of Yolek's death will be driven home. "They
all were forced to take that terrible walk." All who are sensitive to the
Holocaust have, in some imaginative way, taken "that terrible walk."
The second difference in this stanza is the absence of irony. We have
arrived at the camp and irony would only act as a buffer, preventing us
from taking in the stark reality of "the electric fences," "the numeral
tattoo ."
Stanza six returns us to the present. But we are transformed: No mat–
ter where we are or what we are doing, we will remember "The smell
of smoke, the loudspeakers of the camp." But which smoke and camp
is the poet referring to? The summer camp or the death camp?
It
turns
out
to
be the latter, but during this moment of ambiguity these two pasts
are linked in the reader's mind. The summer camp has been transformed
into the concentration camp and we have become like survivors "who
will remember helplessly." Helplessness-impotence in the face of fellow
