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Teaching the Holocaust and other Genocides

"The Black Messiah"

Sonia Schreiber Weitz was born in 1928 in Krakow, Poland, where she lived a "modest but comfortable" life in the Jewish section of the city. Her mother, Adela Finder Schreiber, was a dedicated housewife and her father, Janek (Jacob) Schreiber, was a middle-class businessman who owned a small leather goods shop. Sonia was only eleven when the Germans invaded Poland. In 1941, Sonia and her family were forced to enter the Kraków ghetto. Her mother was taken from the ghetto and sent to the Belzec death camp, where she was killed. In 1943, Sonia, her older sister Blanca, and their father, were sent to Plaszów, a slave labor camp south of Kraków. Sonia and Blanca were then sent to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Venusberg, and finally to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp where they were liberated in May 1945 by American soldiers. They spent three years in a displaced-persons camp after the war, waiting for relatives to claim them, but no other family members survived. In 1948, she emigrated to the United States and settled in Boston where she became a history teacher. Her memoir, I Promise I Would Tell You, recounts her experiences in the Holocaust. It contains the following poem. Sonia Weitz passed away on June 23, 2010. 

The Black Messiah  

A black GI stood by the door 
(I never saw a black before) 
He’ll set me free before I die, 
I thought, he must be the Messiah. 

A black Messiah came for me . . . 
He stared with eyes that didn’t see, 
He never heard a single word 
Which hung absurd upon my tongue. 

And then he simply froze in place 
The shock, the horror on his face, 
He didn’t weep, he didn’t cry 
But deep within his gentle eyes 
. . . A flood of devastating pain, 
his innocence forever slain. 

For me, with yet another dawn 
I found my black Messiah gone 
And on we went our separate ways 
For many years without a trace. 

But there’s a special bond we share 
Which has grown strong because we dare 
To live, to hope, to smile…and yet 
We vow not ever to forget. 

— Sonia Weitz 

Discussion Questions

1. Who is the "Black Messiah" described in the poem, and why does the speaker refer to him that way? 

2. What is the significance of the line “I never saw a black before” in the context of the poem? 

3. How does the speaker’s perception of the Black GI change throughout the poem? 

4. What is the "flood of devastating pain" the soldier experiences, and what might have caused it? 

5. Why does the poet emphasize that the Messiah "didn’t weep, he didn’t cry"? 

6. How does the poem convey the idea of trauma—both personal and collective? 

7. What does the poet mean when she writes in the last stanza that they share a bond because they both “dare to live?” 


 

Source

Dissident Voices: The Poetry of Resistance
https://dissidentpoetry.wordpress.com/2017/03/19/the-black-messiah/