First They Came...

“Never Shall I Forget” by Elie Wiesel, translated by Marion Wiesel (1958)

Wiesel was a Romanian Jewish Holocaust survivor. He is best known for his 1956 memoir, Night, which recounts his imprisonment in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Like the Niemöller piece, there is debate over whether “Never Shall I Forget” is a poem or prose. Both pieces make heavy use of the refrain as a literary device.

“The Survivor” by Primo Levi, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann (1988)

Chemist, writer, and member of the Italian resistance movement, Primo Levi’s family didn’t actively practice Judaism in his youth. Still, he suffered under the racial laws of Fascist Italy for being ethnically Jewish, and he was imprisoned at Auschwitz in 1944. This poem shares Niemöller’s focus on guilt and shame. It features a formerly imprisoned person haunted by the ghosts of those who did not survive the camps.

“A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” by Czesław Miłosz (1973)

The speaker in this poem recounts the horrifying state of the Warsaw Ghetto using lyric language and lush imagery. Polish writer Czesław Miłosz explores the effects that mass violence and suffering have on individual people in their ordinary lives.