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Journalism of Courage
Eighty-five years ago, on September 1, 1939, as “defenseless against the night, the world in stupor” lay, a quiet Polish village named Wieluń awoke at dawn to the deafening roar of German aircraft. Little did they know that it would mark the beginning of World War 2, a conflict that would change the course of history.
British-American poet, WH Auden, who had just moved to the New World, sat in a dimly lit bar in New York, feeling the weight of history bearing down upon him. He scribbled furiously, trying to capture the fear, the uncertainty, the anger that pulsed through the veins of humanity. September 1, 1939 — his poem — became a clarion call, echoing the sense of dread that had seeped into the global consciousness.
The invasion of Poland, as Auden put it, was not just the start of a war; it was the culmination of a decade of broken treaties (Treaty of Versailles 1919) and shattered hopes. The infamous Munich Agreement of 1938, where British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain allowed Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland, now stood as a bitter reminder of failed diplomacy. Auden’s lines, “As the clever hopes expire/Of a low dishonest decade/Waves of anger and fear/Circulate over the bright/And darkened lands of the earth,” capture this sentiment perfectly.
Polish cities fell one by one. By September, Warsaw, once vibrant and full of life, was reduced to rubble. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Auden’s poem found its way into the hands of countless readers, offering a haunting reflection of the era’s fears.
His most famous line remains, “We must love one another or die.” Ironically, years later, disillusioned with this line and finding it “ infected with an incurable dishonesty,” the poet whose poetic sensibilities had evolved, first tried to rectify the line, changing it to “one must love another and die,” and then attempted to unsuccessfully banish the poem from his oeuvre. Auden would later go on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his poetry collection, The Age of Anxiety, which perfectly encapsulated the worries of the age.
This disillusionment was not limited to Auden; it resonated across Europe, where the genocide wrought by the Second World War exposed the continent as “the grandest of illusions,” notes Diya Gupta, a lecturer in Public History at the City, University of London, in her book India in the Second World War: An Emotional History.
A civilisation that once considered itself the epitome of culture and progress revealed the barbarism lurking at its core. In Out of This War (1941) diasporic Tamil poet M J Tambimuttu challenges the notion of the West as “an arena for action” noting that it was ethically compromised by “plunder, rape, devilry.” He writes: “Time was and time will be/For building and erection/Time for work and time for rest./This, this is September time: time of action/Time for murder and time for thrust,/For plunder, rape, devilry.”
“O Lord! Save us from the Parathas of a foreign land
And grant us the food of our home.”
– Nawazish Ali (Mushtaq), Quartermaster of 42nd Company
The verses above, seeped in longing and homesickness, have been written by the poet Nawazish Ali, Quartermaster of 42nd Company, who wrote under the pseudonym Mushtaq, was part of Force K6 and evacuated from Dunkirk, Gupta writes in The Tribune, a UK-based magazine for the 80th anniversary of the evacuation from Dunkirk.
She writes, “Nawazish’s reflections on English life reveal a soldier’s awe: “After reaching England, we saw a new system there;/The streets were clean and the behaviour of the shopkeepers good; Everything was placed in order, with the power of knowledge and skill.”
Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India fought under the British flag as part of the Allied powers (the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the United States, and China) during World War II. Gupta observes that it was “the largest volunteer army in the world at the time.” Several Indians also fought for the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan).
In her book, Gupta probes whether Indians believed this war to be their own. “Contested feelings pushed against one another, particularly after Japan’s rapid military take-over of British-occupied territories in Southeast Asia by May 1942. Songs composed by the Indian People’s Theatre Association proved extremely popular among impoverished peasants from Bengal: O kishan, tor ghore agun, baire je toofan./Bideshi sarkar ghore, duare Japaan. (O farmer, your home is on fire, and outside a typhoon rages. A foreign government occupies your home, and on your doorstep is Japan).”
Gupta says: “Folk memory is intertwined with soil, agriculture, and the rootedness of people, evoking a sense of mourning. There is a lingering uncertainty for women as they wait for their loved ones to return. Loss is relived through evocative images of land. Take this poem penned by the folk poets of Bengal: Chatignaye ranga go mati,/O tor bhaiyer kachhe likhchhi chitthi./Guner nanad go, tor bhai gelo boideshe,/Aar ailo na deshe./Militaryte je jon chakri go kore,/Shejon keno biya kore go? Tor bhai gelo boideshe,/Aar ailo na deshe. (The earth of Chittagong is red! O, I am writing a letter to your brother./My talented sister-in-law, your brother left for foreign lands,/And never returned to his own land./Those who take up work in the military,/Why do they choose to get married? Your brother left for foreign lands/ And never returned to his own land.)”
This narrative of loss and separation during World War II is mirrored in the verses of Welsh poet Alun Lewis, who served in the Indian Army. His poem Burma Casualty starkly portrays the agony of soldiers, the trauma of injury, and the hollow victory of survival: “Three endless weeks of sniping all the way… Your leg must go. Okay?” The surgeon said./“Take it,” he replied. “I hate the bloody thing.”
Rabindranath Tagore also expressed apprehension at the start of World War 2. Gupta writes, “In 1937, on the brink of the recurrence of a world war, and having himself returned from the borderland between life and death, Tagore wrote these lines in Bengali: Nagini-ra charidike phelitechhe bishakto nishwas/ Shantir lalita bani shonaibe byartha parihas/Bidae nebar age tai/Dak diye jai/Danober shathe jara songramer tore/Prostut hotechhe ghore ghore. (Everywhere the serpents hiss their poisonous breath/The gentle message of peace will play on in futile mockery/Before I take my leave then/ Let me call out/To those who are arming themselves/For battle with the demon, in home after home)”.
“I fell beside him; his body turned over,
already taut as a string about to snap.
Shot in the nape. That’s how you too will end,
I whispered to myself: just lie quietly.
Patience now flowers into death.”
– Miklós Radnóti, Razglednica 4
Miklós Radnóti, a Hungarian Jew, wrote his final poems under the direst of circumstances, as a slave labourer during World War II. His ‘Razglednicas’ (Postcards) is perhaps the most visceral example of Holocaust poetry, penned on scraps of paper while he was in a forced labour camp.
As the poets reflected on their experiences — whether in the ghettos, concentration camps, or the harrowing death marches — their verses captured the essence of human suffering.
Charlotte Delbo, a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote hauntingly about the female experience in the camps: “As far as I’m concerned/ I’m still there/dying there/a little more each day/dying over again/ the death of those who died/and I no longer know which is the real one/ this world, right here/ or the world over there.”
The poets who emerged from this harrowing epoch echoed the lamentations of Jeremiah, the biblical prophet whose verses mourned the destruction of the First Temple. The connection between the Holocaust and Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of mourning for the temples, is stark.
American poet Charles Reznikoff’s work, Holocaust, is a ‘documentary’ poem, crafted from the testimonies given at the Nuremberg Trials and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. His method strips away the personal voice, presenting the horrors of the Holocaust in a way that is almost clinical in its detachment. In a poem, he recounts the deportation of Jews: “Russian freight cars without steps -/ And they had to lift each other into the cars.”
Tadeusz Borowski, a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote of the dehumanisation he was subjected to. “Don’t walk in the street, don’t eat, don’t live./ backbreaking work is all you’re allowed,/ and beware the sign that bares its teeth:/ ‘Only for Germans, others keep out.”
“The last century was witness to two major holocausts which have been memorialised in poetry. We know of the poets who wrote between the two wars, l’entre deux guerres, and of WH Auden’s “Shield of Achilles” where Tethys, grief-stricken at the horrors of a million boots marching off to wage a senseless war, can only wring her hands in despair,”says Professor Manju Jaidka, former Professor and Chair of the English Department at Panjab University.
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
– The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, Randall Jarrell
In the summer of 1940, the skies over Britain were filled with the relentless drone of Luftwaffe (German air force) bombers, their dark shadows a harbinger of the devastation that awaited below. This was the Battle of Britain. Victory for the Luftwaffe would have opened the gates for a full-scale invasion, with Hitler’s forces poised just across the English Channel, ready to crush the last bastion of resistance to Nazi tyranny. But, Britain’s fate would not be sealed on the ground, it would be decided in the heavens.
As the battle raged on, the Blitz followed — a rain of fire that lit up the night sky as London and other cities bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s fury. In this crucible of war, the poet’s pen became as vital as the soldier’s rifle. Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet captured the heart of this era in his poem A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London. “After the first death, there is no other,” he wrote, suggesting that in the face of such overwhelming loss, the individual becomes part of a larger, timeless cycle. The poem’s refusal to indulge in sorrow resonates deeply with the stoic resilience of the British people during the Blitz.
Across the Atlantic, Randall Jarrell’s haunting poem The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner distilled the brutality of war into a few stark lines. Jarrell, an American poet who served as an instructor during the war, writes: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”
The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova gave voice to the suffering of countless mothers in her poem Requiem, which, significantly, is “a poem without a hero.” She begins with a powerful declaration: “No, not under a foreign sky/Nor in the shelter of a foreign wing/With my people, there stood I/With them, in their suffering.”
English poet Stephen Spender reflected on the impact of war on civilian life in his poem Air Raid. He opens with a serene image of family warmth, only to be shattered by violence: “In this room like a bowl of flowers filled with light / Family eyes look down on the white ceiling/ …/And explodes. And tears their loved home down to earth.”
However, not all poetry is without hope. Bertolt Brecht, the German poet and playwright, who fled Germany during the Nazi period, writes: “General, your tank is a strong machine;/General, your plane is a strong machine;/General, man is a useful machine;/ He can fly and he can kill./ But he has one drawback;/ he can think.”
“Give back my father, give back my mother;
Give grandpa back, grandma back;
Give me my sons and daughters back.
Give me back myself.”
– Sankichi Toge, Hiroshima survivor
On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings killed hundreds of thousands of people and as the two cities smouldered, poets around the world grappled with the enormity of what had occurred. Their poetry serves as a testimony to the suffering endured by the hibakusha — the survivors of the atomic bombs — who bore witness to the horror with scars etched on their bodies and souls.
From the ashes of Nagasaki, Yosano Akiko’s lament, written decades earlier but hauntingly prophetic, found renewed relevance: “O mother, turn your gaze upward/ Toward the blue sky above!/Plant your feet firmly,/And prepare for the terror of the sky.”
These words, though written in 1905, eerily presaged the terror of aerial warfare that culminated in the atomic bombings.
“To write a poem after Auschwitz would be barbaric.”
– Theodor Adorno
While a lot of good poetry came out of World War II, the oeuvre was significantly less than in World War I, especially in Britain. World War I poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon articulated their experiences with striking immediacy. Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est vividly portrays the terror of gas warfare, while Sassoon’s The Soldier reflects patriotic sacrifice with haunting sincerity. Therefore, in the shadow of the two wars, a question arose: Where are the poets of World War II?
German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously claimed that in the aftermath of the Second World War, there was no place for something as beautiful as poetry. Adorno’s sentiment is not singular. As Jaidka notes, WB Yeats’ reference to “hysterical women” suggests that war is no time for poetry, criticising those who maintain cheerfulness amidst such grim realities.
Poet-critic William Logan succinctly captures this dilemma, arguing that the sheer scale of devastation — marked by the Holocaust and the atomic bomb — left poets paralysed. “The first shock of the war produced a paralysis of the poetical intelligence,” he writes.
Col Ashok Ahlawat, a columnist and poetry connoisseur who has studied World War II extensively, observes, “Less poetry was written during the Second World War as people felt that all the poetry that could be written about war had already been magnificently written. So many promising youngsters died in the First War; it is said Britain could never raise a generation half as great as they lost in the First World War.”
“If you look at the roots of poetry, it is all related to war and the survival of man as he braves the elements and vanquishes his enemies. Poetry has always been birthed in conflict,” he adds.
“we’ve packed a contraband humanitarian aid kit of war songs
and shipped it to Europe America India and China
silence dressed up in Cyrillic letters…”
– An ‘untitled’ poem from Ukraine by Iya Kiva
In the 21st century, the world is once again engulfed in conflict. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have given rise to new poetic voices.
Ukrainian poet Ostap Slyvynsky’s Amber reflects the struggle to find hope amid destruction: “I seemed to see, on the other side,/how the leaves were warming,/children ready for school,/dressed in starched collars…/a grain of amber is ripening,/like a lamp, briefly lit…”
In Gaza, poets like Anthony Alessandrini channel their anguish into verses that demand remembrance. In Hole in the World, he writes in memory of a murdered poet: “On the day you were murdered,/I was not. I came/home and read/to my daughter and made her supper./Whatever your killers could accuse you of—/being a poet, a teacher, a lover/ of the world and a hater/ of those killers by the numbers—/that’s me too.”
In A Trick to Remember the Strings, Alessandrini tells the tragic story of young Lubna Alyaan, who dreamed of becoming a violinist but was killed in an airstrike.”Lubna Alyaan was martyred/early in the morning/at her aunt’s house…/Cats go down alleys,/good dogs always eat/catgut and nylon and steel/and killing silence.”
As we reflect on the poetry of World War II, it becomes clear that war deeply affects everyone — from soldiers to civilians, families to historians. Whether through the verses of Auden or the haunting laments of Ukrainian and Gaza poets today, the impact of conflict continues to be felt across generations.
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