I am a sensitive person … and it was with this frame of mind that I arrived in Dachau concentration camp … in this hellish, seemingly unreal world … in this anus mundi … I was in the same position as someone who has fallen into a bog and is forced to try to get his feet on solid ground to keep his head above water. I surmised that every move, every attempt to rest and recover meant certain death. All around me there were thousands of people in the same situation, and yet I was all alone among this sea of people.

Nevertheless—I do not know how—I did find a friend there, or he found me … other friends, previously strangers, followed … these people and I thought in the same way. I ceased to be lonely in the sea of people; these friends helped me, especially by making me part of a “work kommando” [i.e., work detail]…. I started on the “plantations” [i.e., the herb gardens], later I shifted potato sacks in another kommando, then moved to another work group yet again, wielding pickaxes and pouring cement, … and finally ended up in the “working unit” of the SS-Wirtschaftsbetriebe [i.e., SS-economic concerns]…. Here I endured dysentery and found writing materials and a place to hide all that I had written.

Finally, I saw a way of giving testimony to those who were going to succeed us, testimony about what I had seen and suffered through, all through the most powerful medium available, the medium of poetry.