Simon Goldberg
Written in Transport: Deportee Letters and the Influence of an Iconic Poem
2015 | Full access
This thesis explores letters and postcards that Holocaust victims wrote on trains to concentration and death camps. Looking at transport through both a historical and a literary lens, it examines deportee texts alongside Dan Pagis’ iconic Hebrew poem, “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car.” What is the relationship between a letter that someone threw from a train car and this poem by Dan Pagis? If, for instance, Pagis disrupts the flow of time in “Written in Pencil,” do archival testimonies of transport convey similar disruption? My primary intention is to probe how a fusion of historical and literary lenses can enrich present understanding of Holocaust victims’ deportation experiences.
In Holocaust historiography, the subject of deportation has mostly centered on the logistics involved in coordinating train departures and arrivals. As such, it has largely sidelined victims’ perspectives. While Simone Gigliotti’s groundbreaking study, The Train Journey, sheds much light on physical and psychological trauma inside the train car, her scholarship draws heavily on postwar survivor testimony. By contrast, this thesis investigates victims’ changing sensibilities in transport by foregrounding real-time testimonies of witnessing: postcards, notes, and letters victims wrote on (and later threw from) deportation trains.
The tightly compressed, disorienting language Dan Pagis employs in “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car” engenders strong emotional responses. Despite (or perhaps as a result of) its creative license, the poem has come to dominate popular representation of transport during the Holocaust to a degree overshadowing its historical context. Yet this study does not aim to reverse the trend by simply dismissing “Written in Pencil.” The fact that the poem has attained iconic status internationally reflects its capacity to provoke the reader into contemplating victim train journeys. As a point of departure, I contend that “Written in Pencil” offers a deeper vocabulary with which to approach letters written in transport. I therefore juxtapose my readings of the poem with an analysis of deportee texts. The letters examined in this thesis evoke themes in a rich dialogue with those in Pagis’ poem.
My analysis resulted in several findings. While Pagis suggests that Eve’s train exists in collapsed time, actual letters negate such a reading by attesting to victims’ tenacious grasp of time on the train. Concurrently, the letters propose an alternate collapse that expresses itself in emotional disorientation rather than in a loss of physical cognition. However, deportee texts also suggest that human agency could be accessed through language, recovering elements of powerlessness in the face of mounting despair. Deportee letters studied demonstrate that, to a noteworthy degree of consistency, victims’ expressions of tumult mostly reflected their knowledge (or their lack of knowledge) of the transport’s true destination. Yet, regardless of deportees’ awareness, processes of mourning, already commenced on the transport, exacerbating the earlier trauma of separation. Mothers, fathers, children, and siblings mirrored Pagis’ Eve in mourning what was already lost as a result of deportation, before they knew with any certainty what awaited them.
Supervisors:
Dr. Alan Rosen
Prof. Dan Michman