SAVING THEM FROM THE GAS: ANTHONY HECHT →

The currently dire uncertainty about when and how to open schools in the midst of the pandemic conceals a much deeper anxiety for parents: the sense that ultimately, we cannot protect our kids—or ourselves— from the fact that they are mortal. Nowhere have I found that sense of parental powerlessness— which, of course, is also a sense of the fragility of one’s own life in the face of catastrophe—more profoundly expressed than in Anthony Hecht’s devastating poem, “It Out-Herod’s Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.”

A dramatic monologue spoken by a father after he’s put his kids to sleep, it’s the greatest poem in English concerning the Shoah that I have encountered. True, some may balk against comparisons of Covid 19 to the Holocaust. I myself shrink from any such comparison. But the unavoidable chill parents feel when the thought of a threat to their children of any kind crosses their minds is very real and very much on display in this poem. That’s especially so in Hecht’s last stanza, in which the father says a “childermas”—a mass or prayer for children—in the hope that his kids’ sleep will be sound. At that moment, however, he realizes that he would have been powerless to save them from the Nazi gas chambers had they been Jewish children in Germany then. The use of “gas” as the last word of the poem makes me gasp every time I read it.

And that their sleep be sound   

I say this childermas

Who could not, at one time,   

Have saved them from the gas.