Never Shall I Forget

“Spleen (I have more memories)” by Charles Baudelaire (1857)

Baudelaire is a provocative French poet from the 19th century, and, like Wiesel’s poem, Baudelaire poems often carry a mournful tone, with Baudelaire dramatizing the pain of living in a big city (Paris) and dealing with modern life. In this poem, memories haunt Baudelaire, and he compares his head to a chest full of miscellaneous junk, burdened by the weight of it.

“Death Fugue” by Paul Celan (1948)

Paul Celan is a famous European poet who survived the Holocaust and alludes to his traumatic experiences in his poems. In “Death Fugue,” Celan uses repetition to reinforce the murderous inhumanity of the Nazis, repeating the phrase “death is a master from Deutschland [Germany]” (Lines 22, 26, 28, 32). In Wiesel’s poem, night, silence, and smoke follow him everywhere. In Celan’s poem, “black milk” (Lines 1, 9, 18, 26) haunts the speaker.

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath (1964)

Plath is a confessional poet who battled mental health issues. Though she wasn’t directly affected by the Holocaust and lived an upper-middle-class life, Plath used Nazi imagery and Holocaust diction in her poems to emphasize her inner turmoil.