Between Poetry and History: Real-Time Writings on Holocaust Trains

This article pairs Dan Pagis’s iconic Hebrew poem, “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car” with letters and postcards Holocaust victims wrote while on deportation trains. I argue that Pagis’s poem can help sharpen scholarly analysis of these texts. Built as a universally accessible, prismatic representation of transport, “Written in Pencil” strips its reader of conventional narrative markers. Through its destabilizing devices, it draws attention to a multiplicity of discursive interpretations (for example, concerning how it might be read, where it might end, what its narrator might say) with which to navigate the historical dimensions of Holocaust transport. Specifically, I contend that Pagis’s biblical allegory invites critical reflection on the crisis that descended upon the family unit while in transit, shifting attention to the role of the train—often sidelined in the reconstruction of Holocaust history—in inducing familial disintegration. And I argue that rereading the relationship between Eve and Cain in the poem suggests a plurality of ways to consider why deportees recorded aspects of their ongoing ordeal. There was no defining experience of Holocaust transport. Rather, Pagis’s poem offers a vocabulary through which to imagine the range of deportees’ subjective experiences; it assists us in uncovering the multifaceted, at times perplexing nature of these texts.