The Poetry of the Concentration Camp: An Encounter with Individual Fate

IN TIMES OF SUFFERING, poetry is like a song that liberates and penetrates right to the very bottom of the truth….” This characterization of poetry, written in the extreme conditions of the camp experience, came from the pen of the French journalist and survivor of Dachau concentration camp, Fabien Lacombe.

His testimony touches all that is fundamental to the poems presented here, written by people of different nationalities, whose fates were shaped by their experiences of Dachau concentration camp.

Between 1933 and 1945, over 200,000 people were forced to spend a part of their lifetime in this concentration camp; there were people from twenty-seven different nations with many different mother tongues.

Over 30,000 deaths were registered in the concentration camp of Dachau (p. 269), but there were also an unknown number of unaccounted deaths, for example, during evacuation transports and death marches; by so-called “special treatments.”

Just how many individual fates lie behind these numbers is hard to grasp. Might the poems here perhaps present to us such individual fates and tell us more about what happened than facts and figures?

In the poems that follow, we may discover many of the thoughts, wishes and hopes of all those who did not survive the inferno; but numerous poems that were written by survivors in the years after their liberation continued to be dedicated to their experiences in the camps. Although it was forbidden for prisoners to keep personal records during their time in the concentration camp, diaries, reports, and poems were written in secret. Many of them remained in private hands before being published decades later, including some of the poems in this anthology.

This collection of poems allows thirty-two authors from fourteen different nations, all of whom were imprisoned at Dachau, to have their say. The poems, written in ten different languages, were conceived by the authors either during the time of their imprisonment in Dachau or in the years following their liberation.

In 1985, Mirco Giuseppe Camia, a former Italian deportee, handed over to me, together with his own poetry, the single poem of a seventeen-year- old fellow prisoner. Because it carried for him a deep significance and importance, Mirco Camia had preserved this text for over forty years.