When Abraham Sutzkever wrote How? in February 1943, he was only seven months from his own freedom, yet the ghetto itself was still one year and five months from emancipation. Yet his portrayal of the day of Liberation appears very similar to a day in the Nazi ghettos, where time is extended through pain, devastation, and fear. The only difference felt is the frustration of their memories and their powerlessness to proceed past the hatred and pain that were connected to the deaths of thousands, both literally and figuratively. These dark memories are not forgotten by time, and his imagined survival of the Jews appears bleak and tedious; the pain and gloom of their experiences overshadowing their hopeful freedom in the future. Although the first line within Sutzkevers poem appears hopeful, its following lines reflect the bitter darkness and gloom that the Holocaust embodied. Dark scream, skulls, jammed locks, buried city, eternal gaze, and mole in particular help to paint a vivid picture of emotions that the Jewish people felt in response to Hitlers wrath. The dark scream of your past, depicts a piercing, blood curdling scream from the very depths of a persons soul, in this case spurred by the horrific memories from the victims' past, which they were forced to own and contend with. In this scream, Where skulls of days congeal/ In a bottomless pit? not only thrusts the readers into the common occurrences of the ghettos, but also reflects the endlessness of their situation. Death, represented through the skulls, is almost inevitable, and even if one does survive, one cannot escape from the hopeless memories. Furthermore, by congealing the dead into one mass and nameless pit, the dead lack identity and history, they were stripped of their lives, and those who lived felt similarly. Because these dead are congealed into a bottomless pit within ones dark scream from their past, then they too, are dead. Since the murdered from their...
