Holocaust

Reznikoff's subject is one people's suffering at the hands of another. His source materials are the U.S. government's record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. None of the words here are Reznikoff's own: instead he has created, through selection and arrangement of the courtroom testimony, a poem that unfolds in the voices the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust themselves. He lets the terrible history lay itself bare in history's own tongue.