An episode from 06/06/2024: Tonight, I share two stories from the Shoah, or Holocaust.
The first is about the Sonderkommando, those prisoners forced to do the most devastating work in the concentration camps. During a 2015 Fresh Air interview with László Nemes and Géza Röhrig about their 2015 film, Son of Saul, a brief story about an actual Sonderkommando member is told. It remains one of the most overwhelming minutes that I have ever heard.
In the second part, I read from Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2006 book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. The book is Mendelsohn’s attempt to discover what happened to six members of his family who were murdered in the Holocaust, and the section I read from is about the difficulty of truly entering the mind and situation of a sixteen year-old girl, who is rounded up with a thousand other Jews, and murdered.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I’ve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.
Leave a Reply