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