past are now a part of the living, loss of identity and despair stay embedded in their memories for life. For those who lived through the ghettos and camps, reaching Sutzkevers imagined liberation, were faced with jammed locks, blocking them from their once normal lives. Behind locked door lies their true selves, or individuality, which was locked by the repression and dehumanization of their culture. Once free, the memories time wont forget continue to block the entrance. And your memory will be like/ An old buried city. / Your eternal gaze will crawl/ Like a mole, like a mole. These lines reflects a darkness that never allows the hidden memories to escape. A buried city is full, intact but stagnant and unmoved with no where to go. By comparing ones memory to this, Sutzkever is making a powerful statement regarding the ramifications of the Holocausts terror. Since the memories are buried, they can hardly be removed, causing one to eternally acknowledge them. This acknowledgement crawls slowly like the dark mole due to the severity and depth of the Nazis immorality; the clich time flies when youre having fun works both ways. Consequently, buried and mole both reflect the theme of being hidden, either in ones memory, or from the regularity of life after the Holocaust.Through these dark images, the reader perceives a sense of frustration, not only pertaining to the Jews situation, but also with the importance of time in relation to their memories. Like bread you will bite the streets/ And think: better the past. These lines, in particular help illustrate Sutzkevers frustration. Like the normalcy of biting bread for nourishment, so too do they bite the street out of the need to accept and comes to terms with their situation, but it only results in their frustration for their predicament. By relating this to the past, two meanings can be derived: their past before the Holocaust allowed them to at least understand and functio...
