Sonia Weitz: My Black Messiah

The poem of Sonia Weitz's that I chose was called "My Black Messiah", and it was about Ms. Weitz's experience of seeing a black GI who was one of the troops who liberated the camp she was held in.

I annotated this poem by simply writing down what I thought some of the metaphorical sentences meant. I also found a possible theme for the poem, and that theme was "confused", mainly because the GI seemed shocked and confused at what he saw before his eyes, as anyone who didn't know what was happening to the Jews would.

One part of the poem that stood out to me a bit more than the rest was this small section: " He didn't weep, he didn't cry

But deep within his gentle eyes

... A flood of devastating pain,

his innocence forever slain."

Now, the reason this part caught my eye was that it was a particularly touching part of the poem, which described how devastated the GI was when he saw the camp, and that that would be a memory forever stamped into the man's mind, and also, it is saying that his naivety would disappear, and that he would have a new, possibly worse, outlook on the world.

You may be wondering why I say that he might have had a worse outlook on the world, so here's why I think that. I said that because this GI might have come to realize how cruel and merciless some humans can be if they get the chance, and it may have scarred him permanently and even made him ashamed to be part of a species that could do something so horrid to a minority group.

In all honesty, I cannot make a personal connection to this poem other than that when I first learned of the whole Holocaust thing, I felt just as shocked and surprised as the GI did.

This poem made me feel quite sad, because it is meant to be a sobering story of how Ms. Weitz was liberated from the camp, and the reaction of the GI and how he was crushed by what he saw. I must say, I feel quite sorry for the poor GI (and all the Jews and other people affected by the Holocaust, of course), because before he liberated the camp he was probably a carefree late-teens or early 20's guy, but after seeing the camp and the people held within and the conditions they had to live in, he was scarred for life, and would never forget the awful things he saw that day.