"Bit of a Jew": Holocaustic Images in the works of Sylvia Plath
             While reading Sylvia Plath's poems "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" one cannot help but be struck down by the prominent visual images and deeply emotional reflections both poems force upon the reader. While stylistically different, connecting these two poems is the inclusion of references to the Holocaust. What is interesting is that Plath never lived through the horrors of the Holocaust and was actually not even Jewish, yet she states that she is in these poems. While not wholly influenced by her education, in Plath's academic life the Holocaust seems to have been a constant topic in both high school and university. One of her classmates recalls how Plath's history teacher at Wellesley High School, confronted his class:
             "Weary of our affluent, teenaged complacency, [he] had photographic blow-ups made of the inmates of Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, Dachau and Auschwitz. These tragic, skeletal inmates looking out from their packed bunk beds in their ragged striped pyjamas stared down upon our crisply shampooed heads, giving us the shudders." (Strangeways, 371)
             Her teacher used the images of the Holocaust in a similar way that Plath would later in her poetry-to shock, steal innocence away, and to make her "peanut-crunching crowd" (Lazarus, 26) "shudder". While at Smith College, Plath's study of Nazism permeated many courses she took as her professors tried to relate Nazism with the American thrust towards individualism at the time (Strangeways, 371). Plath uses the horrible atrocity as a metaphor and a powerful tool in articulating her feelings about certain events in her life, most notably her relationship with her father and her attempts at suicide.
             Her poem "Daddy" uses images of the Holocaust to successfully express her feelings towards her father. Contrasting where the poem en...