Fred Blair, Berlin, Wisconsin (1946)

Edited by Shannon Downing (2021)

The Holocaust arguably was the most significant genocide in World History, with six million Jews murdered. Prior to World War II, in 1939, Adolf Hitler gave a speech in which he told his followers that their Jewish neighbors were “parasites” living among them and that they must find a solution to this so-called “Jewish Question.” Ominously, he concluded falsely that Jews would be responsible for the next world war—knowing that his government already was preparing to launch that war—and noted that such a war would end in the “annihilation of the Jewish race.” The war that would come to be called World War II was launched in September 1939 with a German attack on Poland.

Under cover of war in 1941, German officials accelerated their plans for Jewish genocide using the coded term, “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” After a phase involving mass shootings of millions of Jews in Eastern Europe by Nazi S.S. and regular Order Police, the architects of the Holocaust shifted to a strategy that involved deportation of Jews to six extermination camps located in German-occupied Poland. Inside the extermination camps was a nightmare few could imagine. Selection was made as soon as Jews, who had been deported in crowded trains, disembarked. Those selected were sent to the gas chambers as soon as they got there. Pregnant women, small children, elders, the sick, and the injured were a part of this first selection. Those not selected were not spared from in the horrors of the camp itself: the starvation, back-breaking labor, filth, black markets, unimaginable anxiety, armed Nazi guards, and further selections for the gas chambers are detailed in numerous accounts written by survivors like Italian chemist Primo Levi.

The United States government obtained reliable information about the “Final Solution” as early as 1942 but did little to stop it at the time. You might expect that a genocide would be covered on the front pages of newspapers, but news coverage of the atrocities in the American Press was almost never front-page news and information came out slowly. Thus, few Americans knew what was happening in German-occupied Europe. Finally in 1944, under pressure from members of Congress and officials in his own administration, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board which saved over 200,000 Jews who had fallen under Nazi rule.

Fred Blair was an American writer from Berlin, Wisconsin. At the end of World War II when he found out about the horrors committed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, he was outraged. He responded to this news by writing a book-length poem in honor of the six million people who were murdered simply for being Jewish. Blair was known for his love of poetry and literature. He mentions in his writing how upper-class Americans were living in luxury while millions of Jews were being murdered and thrown into gas chambers. His poetry speaks to the guilt he and other Americans felt after learning about the extermination camps and a sense of helplessness at not being able to do anything about it.