Abraham Sutzkever's The Little Boy With His Hands Up

In today’s society, children are viewed as precious cherubs with glowing auras of innocence and youthfulness enveloping them. We idolize them as beacons of hope and love. Seeing them in pain is something that we as human beings should not ignore. Therefore, the poem “The Little Boy with His Hands Up” came as a shock to me. The lack of humanity towards children during the Holocaust is painstakingly eye-opening to the deterioration of human life. Knowing this, Abraham Sutzkever delineates a fine line between the value of human life and how easy it was to overlook it in the midst of the Holocaust. Yala Korwin’s “The Little Boy with His Hands Up” depicts the grotesque horrors of the Holocaust with themes of violent manipulation and psychological

To put oneself in the shoes of these children would be utterly petrifying. I cannot begin to fathom the barbaric atrocities that became so familiar to each child of the Holocaust. In the lines, “No need to brand the very young. / They will meekly follow their mothers,” Korwin engraves a sense of complete compliance to the Nazi regime simply because the young, innocent children have no means of fending for themselves. “Like a lost lamb you are standing / Apart and forlorn beholding your own fate,” is yet another example that shows how children were molded into scared beings that were alone and without guidance, other than that of the Nazi regime. With the line, “Or are you orphaned already?”, Korwin is throwing the reader headfirst into the mindset that a child would have had, most of the time after losing their parents, “Or are you orphaned already?” All concern for the human lives, children’s lives, was nonexistent. It is so mind boggling to me to process that this actually happened. “The Little Boy with His Hands Up” shows just how the Nazis manipulated the minds of the children with this quote. It shows how they broke each child down, one by one, until they were alone not only physically, but