18 pages • 36 minutes read
Never Shall I Forget
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Spleen (I have more memories)” by Charles Baudelaire (1857)
Baudelaire is a provocative French poet from the 19th century, and, like Wiesel’s poem, Baudelaire poems often carry a mournful tone, with Baudelaire dramatizing the pain of living in a big city (Paris) and dealing with modern life. In this poem, memories haunt Baudelaire, and he compares his head to a chest full of miscellaneous junk, burdened by the weight of it.
“Death Fugue” by Paul Celan (1948)
Paul Celan is a famous European poet who survived the Holocaust and alludes to his traumatic experiences in his poems. In “Death Fugue,” Celan uses repetition to reinforce the murderous inhumanity of the Nazis, repeating the phrase “death is a master from Deutschland [Germany]” (Lines 22, 26, 28, 32). In Wiesel’s poem, night, silence, and smoke follow him everywhere. In Celan’s poem, “black milk” (Lines 1, 9, 18, 26) haunts the speaker.
“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath (1964)
Plath is a confessional poet who battled mental health issues. Though she wasn’t directly affected by the Holocaust and lived an upper-middle-class life, Plath used Nazi imagery and Holocaust diction in her poems to emphasize her inner turmoil. In “Daddy,” Plath turns a father figure into a Nazi and plays with the idea of being Jewish. The poem is famous and controversial, with critics contending that she’s glamorizing the genocide of around 11 million people.
Further Literary Resources
Night by Elie Wiesel (1958)
Night is Wiesel’s best-known book, and it’s where the poem “Never Shall I Forget” comes from. Night documents Wiesel’s life in Auschwitz and the constant cruelty he experienced and witnessed. What Wiesel alludes to in the poem, he details in the book. He graphically represents the physical abuse and the constant threat of death due to mistreatment and selections (when Nazis picked people in the camp to go to the gas chambers). He also illustrates his battle to remain committed to God and to not lose compassion for his father.
Dawn by Elie Wiesel (1961)
Dawn is the second part of Wiesel’s Night trilogy (the third part is The Accident [1961], which, later on, Wiesel renamed Day). While the first part of the trilogy is memoir, the last two parts are fictionalized accounts of Holocaust survivors. The book takes the young main character, Elisha, to Israel, where he has to execute a British soldier, as Jews battle England (which had control of the Palestine territory) and Arabs in the 1940s to create a Jewish homeland. The story foreshadows the violence that’s come to define the region, with a leader of a pro-Israel militia telling Elisha that it’s time for Jews to play the role of executioners, not victims.
No Pretty Pictures by Anita Lobel (1998)
Lobel provides a unique account of how she survived the Holocaust as a child. Lobel doesn’t identify as Jewish, and she finds solace in Christianity. Unlike Wiesel, her memories of the tragedy don’t haunt her forever. Embracing a somewhat carefree tone, Lobel writes, “I have spent many, many more years living well, occupied with doing happy and interesting things, than I spent ducking the Nazis” (xiii).
Listen to Poem
After a performance of a piece of music by the Swiss Jewish composer Ernest Bloch, creative writing professor Tracey Donohue reads Wiesel’s poem (around the 3:12 mark) as a part of East Carolina University’s Holocaust Memorial Concert in 2020.
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By Elie Wiesel
