I Have Lived a Thousand Years

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“The Poetry of the Holocaust”

In this activity, students will research a variety of Holocaust poetry and how that has helped Jewish authors process their trauma after the Holocaust.

Bitton-Jackson’s relationship to poetry drastically changes over the course of the book. In the beginning, she will do anything to save her poetry notebook. But after the concentration camps, she does not even attempt to recover her notebook that was lost, saying that to invest any importance in her poems would be an act of “self-gratification” that would “violate the agony of Auschwitz” (191).

While Bitton-Jackson felt that her poetry was trivial in a post-Holocaust world, many Holocaust survivors have attempted to process their own trauma through poetry. In this exercise, you will research the body of Holocaust poetry, and then create a posterboard that gives an overview on the life and work of one particular poet.

• Research. First, begin by researching the many poets who have written about their experiences in the Holocaust. You may find the following sites helpful in your research: (1) Yad Vashem’s Commemoration and Poetry, (2) the Sydney Jewish Museum’s Telling the Holocaust Through Poems, and (3) the Wiener Holocaust Library’s Poetry in the Library’s Collections. Select one poet that will be the focus of your research project.
• Read. Read through your selected poet’s body of work and try to gather as much biographical details about their life as you can.
• Create. On poster board, create a presentation that includes the following elements: A picture of the poet (if available), a brief biography of the poet (no more than 2 paragraphs long), a section outlining the core themes in their poetry, and a copy of one of their poems that moved you the most.
• As a class, discuss your findings, taking turns reading aloud your poet’s work. Consider the following questions in your discussion: How do you think Bitton-Jackson might have felt about these poets’ work? What do you think made her feel that poetry was “self-gratification”? How does that compare to what these poets express?

Teaching Suggestion: Help your students understand that poetry and writing can be a powerful tool in processing trauma. Though Bitton-Jackson ultimately felt that, for her, to attempt to recover her own childhood poetry would be a selfish act, it is not hard to imagine that she could understand how some of the greatest writers of Holocaust poetry—Elie Wiesel, Czesław Miłosz, and Paul Celan—were not writing for “self-gratification.” In many of these poems, they explore the same themes she does in I Have Lived a Thousand Years: finding hope in darkness, the loss of innocence, and an exploration of one’s own Jewish identity.

Differentiation Suggestion: For students who struggle with reading fluency and comprehension, it could be helpful to have students work in partners with a more fluent reader. For visual learners, you could encourage students to draw a portrait of their poet rather than printing one from online or to draw a scene from one of the poems their poet wrote. For a reading/writing learning style, you could add a creative writing element to this project where students write their own poetry responding to the book. In this case, ask students to reflect upon how the book made them feel after reading it, and try to process their feelings into a few stanzas.