A Poem I Wouldn’t / Shouldn’t / Couldn’t Finish
I started notes for “The Mother and Dr. Mengele” sometime after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27. That night I’d watched a section of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Four Sisters on PBS. Lanzmann’s final film uses the same interview technique he’d developed for Shoah, and the witness told her story with a minimum of interruption. Her biography included incidents one might consider unspeakable. But she spoke them with calm.
Pregnant in Auschwitz, Ruth Elias was singled out by Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death, for an experiment. He wanted to learn how long a newborn could survive without food. After giving birth, Elias’s breasts were bound. She wasn’t permitted to touch the baby left beside her. “It,” she called her child. “I wasn’t allowed to feed it,” is what I remember from the film.
I began writing what I’d heard — at this point, mostly as a note to self. Jewish, I was taught from childhood, “Never forget.” WWII was receding, living memory dying off. I needed my own hand-copied record.
Weeks later, I shared my breakfast with the New York Times article, “At CIA Black Sites, Interrogation Techniques Were Worked Out on the Fly.” According to the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, “the use of waterboarding was ‘little more than an amateurish experiment, with no reason at the outset to believe it would either be safe or effective.’” Two psychologists who had set up the interrogation program, Dr. James Mitchell and Dr. John Jessen, expanded their roles “as psychologists acting as consultants in 2002 to interrogators ultimately running an $81 million business that provided private guards and more interrogators … They tested a range of practices including the use of ‘rectal rehydration’ and ‘rectal feeding’ on defiant detainees … To deprive detainees of sleep, they strung them up with chains.”
The word “experiment” and the title “Dr.” joined the article to my hand-written notes in a way that stirred a poem. I began shaping Ruth Elias’s testimony into short lines of verse, sticking to what I’d jotted down after watching Lantzmann’s film and adhering to the witness’s narrative. Drs. Mitchell and Jessen never appeared in drafts, though their “work” inspired it.
I was of course aware of Theodor Adorno’s quote, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Even more true of writing poetry about Auschwitz, especially from the safety of a breakfast nook in south Florida. In the final stanza of the draft I showed to my writing group, I argued: “But how will our boys’ boys’ / boys see like Ruth without / new films, paintings, books — / Mengele walked the earth like you.”
But the more I looked at the draft, the more squeamish I got. Wasn’t this a gross appropriation of a survivor’s narrative, different from the opportunity Lanzmann gave Elias to tell her own story? And isn’t it wrong to compare Mitchell and Jessen’s “experiments,” horrific as they were, to the singularity of the Holocaust? I’ve gone back and forth with both questions. In theory, I believe with Robert Lowell that anything can be a subject for poetry. But I’m not convinced the poem clears these two serious ethical bars, and if one can write a poem about anything, I haven’t figured a way to write this one.