The Book of Yolek

“More Light! More Light!” by Anthony Hecht (1967)

Like “The Book of Yolek,” this poem describes a Nazi atrocity in World War II. It begins with the death of a religious prisoner in 16th-century England. He was burned at the stake but continued to assert his innocence and died courageously. The setting changes to a wood in Germany, where a German soldier forces a Polish man and two Jews to dig a grave, which the Jews are forced to lie in. The Pole, however, refuses to fill the grave. The soldier orders the men to change places; the Pole lies in the grave and the Jews shovel the dirt on him. When only his head remains visible, he is ordered out of the grave and the Jews back in. This time the Pole obeys instructions and buries the Jews alive, after which the soldier shoots him in the stomach and he bleeds to death in three hours. Lacking the religious faith of the earlier victim, none of the three is able to die with dignity. Hecht has explained that the latter execution took place in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He got the details from a book by a former prisoner who survived the camp.