A Penitential Prayer

Many books have been written about the Holocaust. Few have used poetry to explore the lives of those who suffered through it. From the first incursions against the Jews among others to the final death camps with their gas chambers, furnaces, and smokestacks, these poems tell human stories about people in the grip of perverse ironies: How could a soldier whose job is to shoot Jews write such loving letters to his family? How could a guard loading trains to the death camps think so joyfully of the girl who awaits him? How could a boy helping bury bodies be compelled to sing so sweet a song? How could a great poet be celebrated on a site where millions of people were burned? These poems do not purport to explain the Holocaust. They deal with horrific questions about the nature of humans caught up in the organized killing of six million 'despised' peopleNazis declared that land within their control should be cleared of Jews and other 'undesirables.' Before they were stopped, six million people or more were separated from their families, their property, their livelihoods; subjected to humiliations, brutality, tortures, and killed with beatings, bullets, poison gas. Six million. This book is dedicated to them.Gerald George’s courageous writing renders the shattered lives caught in the Holocaust in bold and vivid imagery. Both startling and horrific, this book has a heft within its telling pages that calls for an inner strength just to lift it up and read. Once the first poem is absorbed, however, an equal effort is required to put it down until the very end.  -Les Simon, author and poetIn A Penitential Prayer, poet Gerald George confronts the endless pathos of the Holocaust, from the bewilderment of the first innocent victims, to the packed railroad cars carrying them on a one-way trip, to the hunger, stench, and illness of the camps themselves, in which one awakes each morning to the newly dead, to the cruelty of the guards, for whom a rifle butt to the head has become routine-all this George presents in language that is straightforward and unadorned, without once raising his voice to denounce or decry, aware undoubtedly that such abstract utterance would not likely be commensurate with its task; his task admirably performs, being to let the unspeakable speak for itself.-Herbert Greenberg, Professor-emeritus of English, Michigan State University