Tadeusz Borowski was born in 1922 in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. Beginning in 1933 Borowski lived in Poland, working as a builder and studying Polish philology at the underground University of Warsaw. He became later active as a prose writer, journalist, and poet. He was arrested in February 1943 and deported to Auschwitz soon after. Borowski was brought to Natzweiler- Daumergen concentration camp in August 1944, and later was taken to Allach, an external camp of Dachau. After his liberation in April 1945 he was brought to the displaced persons camp at Freimann, near Munich. There he met his fellow sufferer and writer, Stanisław Wygodzki (see pp. 178–79), to whom he dedicated the poem “Do ***” (To ***; pp. 220–21).

Borowski's poetry collection Namen der Strömung was published in Munich in 1945, and Bei uns in Auschwitz, an account written in cooperation with two fellow prisoners, followed in 1946. He returned to Poland in June 1946, working as an editor in Warsaw.

In 1949–50 he was a correspondent in Berlin. In 1951, not yet twenty-nine years old, he committed suicide in Warsaw. Borowski left behind an extensive body of poetry and prose, Utwory Zebrane (Collected Works, 1954), which is the source for most of the poems excerpted here. In a letter to his former fellow student, Zofia Świdwińska, dated October 6, 1945, he describes the conditions in which he was transported to Dachau concentration camp, how he escaped execution twice, and what he did to survive after liberation:

Léon Boutbien was born in 1915 in Paris. He became a doctor of medicine; he was arrested in 1943 and in July deported to Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp as a Nacht und Nebel prisoner. He was later evacuated from Erzingen, an external camp of Natzweiler-Struthof, to Allach, an external camp of Dachau, in a brutal forced march in April 1945. Here, Boutbien worked as a doctor until his liberation, as is also clear from the poem reproduced here, which was first printed in a brochure titled “Natzweiler Struthof.” After his liberation Boutbien published several books and, as a socialist, was involved for a time in French politics. He died in Lanloup, France, in 2001.

Léon Boutbien's poem refers toward the end to a very specific incident that occurred the day Dachau concentration camp was liberated, April 29, 1945. The incident is described in another source in the following way: “American shells, which were targeted at German anti-aircraft fire, hit the periphery of the Allach camp and the Jewish camp, wounding and killing some of the prisoners, who were waiting for their liberation. A Jewish doctor who was standing next to Dr. Boutbien during an operation met a tragic end in this way….”

TWENTY YEARS AGO the German-language edition of My Shadow in Dachau (Mein Schatten in Dachau) was published—following eight years of painstaking detective work by Dorothea Heiser, a resident of the small Bavarian town indelibly associated with the first Nazi concentration camp, who was inspired by a poem by a seventeen-year-old inmate, Nevio Vitelli, to contact survivors or the families of the deceased and to compile an anthology of German translations of “poems from Dachau” (an Italian compilation came in 1997). Even before this, in fact, Dorothea had become aware of her historical responsibility as a German when she spent time as a schoolgirl in the late 1950s in Roundhay, a residential area of the English city of Leeds with a significant Jewish population. Here, and during the years that followed, she came to understand the importance of mutual understanding between peoples and nations, and of the way her own biography had been shaped by the Nazi past—her father, a German soldier, had been killed in Egypt in 1942, and a brother of her grandmother had been interned in Dachau concentration camp. Dorothea's work on the “Dachau poems” has been accompanied by a commitment to personal and national reconciliation, including establishing twinning arrangements between schools in Dachau and elsewhere in Bavaria and schools in France.

In this present edition, we present sixty-eight poems in English translation. In this way, we hope to honor, and continue, Frau Heiser's commitment to the preservation of these documentations of the inhumanity of the Nazi camps and of the trauma endured even after “liberation.”

I am grateful to Frau Heiser for drawing my attention to these lyric responses to experiences that were, in themselves, anything but poetic. Dorothea visited the University of Leeds in May 2011 to introduce the poems to undergraduate and postgraduate students and to work with them on translating extracts into English. Some of those students have been involved in the preparation of this edition as translators, editors, and formatters: Matthew Beaumont, Winnie Smith, and Rachael Plant. I am also beholden to the thirteen translators who—in their own time, and without compensation—lent us their expertise and created the carefully crafted English verses that fill this volume.

Rupko Godec was born in 1925 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Godec was initially interned in Perugia and then afterwards deported to Dachau on October 11, 1943 (prisoner number 56,271). Here he became co-editor of the Dachau camp paper “Dawn,” secretly conceived for the Slovenian youth. This paper, in spite of all dangers connected with publishing it, appeared twice.

The following poem was written in 1946 and finally finished on October 18, 1947, and is dedicated to the fellow prisoners who tragically perished in Dachau. The typewritten original manuscript is still in the possession of the author.

László Salamon was born in 1891 in Oradea, Romania. He began writing his first poems in his mother tongue, Hungarian, while he was a grammar school pupil. He was seriously injured in the First World War, where he served as an officer. After the war, during the time of the declaration of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, among other independent socialist or anarchist republics (or soviets) across parts of central and eastern Europe, he worked closely alongside the philosopher György Lukács as a professor of Hungarian, Latin, and philosophy and was sentenced to four years imprisonment by the Court of the Counterrevolution. After his release, he was the founder of several socialist journals, such as Auróra and A Másik Ut. He also worked as editor of the culture section of the journal Új Kelet until it was banned in 1940, as well as on numerous Hungarian and foreign journals. Over twenty volumes of his poems and essays have appeared in Hungarian.

His wife, Ella Salamon, tells of his detention and deportation: “When the Gestapo came to Cluj-Napoca … he was immediately arrested and taken to prison. Then he was taken to the ghetto and from there deported to Auschwitz, and later to other concentration camps including Dachau and its external camp of Kaufering near Landsberg, where he created some of his poems. It's worth mentioning that the Gestapo only learnt after his deportation that he was the author and publisher of a 1933 satirical epic about Adolf Hitler. The Gestapo then tried in vain to reach the train, but it had already left….”

In spite of the most adverse circumstances, Salamon witnessed the liberation of Dachau from the external camp of Allach and then returned to his homeland.

His wife offered the following explication of his poems, which she presented for this collection: “The bitter tone of many of his poems, which he wrote in Kaufering, is explained by the fact that he had been told that his loved ones—including his wife—had been killed….”

Fortunately, on his return he found his spouse, whom he had presumed dead, alive. He lived with her and their daughter in Cluj-Napoca until his death in 1983.

Karel Parcer was born in 1906 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. On May 8, 1944, he was deported to Dachau as prisoner number 67,808, and was still a prisoner in the camp when it was liberated in 1945. Before his deportation he worked as a bank consultant. The following text has its origins in 1944 and was written in the camp. It is the second part of a longer poetic work entitled “Dachau,” which begins with the motif of Hell from Dante's Divine Comedy. The author gave the typewritten manuscript to the Museum of the People's Revolution (now the National Museum of Contemporary History) in Slovenia, where it is stored in the “Dachau” file.

Ob vstopu v taborišče smrti

Nedelja je bila, ko smo vstopili

v ta tabor smrti s težkimi koraki

kot v težkem snu Matjaževi vojščaki,

potem ko smo prostosti sled zgubili.

Zdaj dvignil sem pogled, glej čredo gosto,

neskončno množico na levi strani:

izstradani, zbledeli, razcapani

so se trpini zbirali v sprejem na prosto!

Glej, da bi dih svoj in pa čas zaustavil,

da v en mah bi preštel te ljudske trope

ter vase vse sprejel poglede tope

iz vrst tega špalirja—kaj bi stavil!

Bili so vsi enaki, smrtnobledi,

vsi v progastih oblekah modro-belih,

vsak v rokah držal je trpljenja kelih

in vprašujoči b'li so njih pogledi.

Kaj vprašate nas le, oči neštete?

Da li prišli smo iz svobode,

da li naj to poslednja četa bode,

ki k vam prišla je iz prostosti svete?

Zdaj ugledal v njih očeh sem soj solzeni:

mi zanje smo še ravnokar živeli

v svetu, ki za njim so koprneli

že mesece in leta v sužnji temi.

In v vrvenje množic je posvetil

odsev iz naših vrst, spomin na domovino,

ki tisto jutro še vso sinjino

nam je blestela, ko je zor zasvetil.

Še dih njen blagoslovljen nas je obdajal,

na čevljih še domače grude sledi

in njena še toplota v naši sredi!

Ves ta privid je množico naslajal.

Kaj je narodov stalo tu pred nami?!

Zdaj v eno vse so misli se strnile:

v spominu svetle domovine mile

vsi so jeziki eno govorili z nami.

On Entering the Death Camp

It was Sunday when we entered

this death camp, with steps as heavy

as the dreams of King Matjaž's warriors,

having lost our trace of freedom.

THE YEARS AFTER LIBERATION brought no respite: to this day, the survivors of Dachau, like those of the other concentration camps, continue to be traumatized by their extreme experiences. This trauma became a noticeable feature of survivors’ daily lives, but it also surfaced in their poetry written years or even decades afterwards. Even now, many of the survivors suffer from nightmares, and almost all are racked by feelings of guilt toward those who lost their lives in the concentration camps. A not insignificant number—including Sylvain Gutmacker, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and Bruno Bettelheim, who was also imprisoned in Dachau until 1938—were no longer able to bear this trauma and committed suicide, often years or decades afterwards.

Edmond Michelet described his experience of Dachau and its consequences:

Everybody who has been imprisoned in a concentration camp has the right to draw the conclusions he or she sees fit from it. These conclusions are determined just as much by the particular circumstances of an individual experience as by the nature of the person who experienced it.

Feliks Rak was born in 1903 in Borowiecz, Poland. Rak was arrested by the Gestapo in the spring of 1940 and initially imprisoned in Kielce. In July 1940 he was deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, then was moved to Dachau on September 5 of the same year, where he was registered as prisoner number 18,425. He was still interned in Dachau at its liberation in April 1945. Rak was a leading member of a secret organization in the camp. Many of the poems that he wrote during his incarceration in the concentration camps were read there at secret gatherings. Following liberation he compiled his memoirs and published them together with other material. Feliks Rak died in 1992.

Dachau wśród słońca

Poznałem piekło Dachau wśród słońca

Obóz, baraki stojące tu w rząd.

Płot murowany, rów, zasieki z drutu,

Jest w nim podłączony zabójczy prąd.

I krematorium tu co dzień i w nocy

Dymi bez przerwy i zatruwa życie.

Słychać też strzały, gdzieś w pobliżu, w lesie

rozstrzeliwują więźniów już o świcie.

Co dzień nas budzą nie poranne zorze,

Lecz judaszowska ręka esesmana.

Koncentracyjny obóz tu poznałem.

Do dziś w historii to rzecz nieznana.

Dachau 1941

Dachau beneath the Sun

Beneath the sun I discovered Dachau—

the camp with its barracks laid out in rows,

its brick walls, ditch, and barbed wire

plugged in to a deadly current.

All day and night smoke

from the crematorium poisons lives;

while, close by, you hear the prisoners

being shot at dawn in the forest.

Mirco Giuseppe Camia was born in 1925 in Milan, Italy. While a student of classical languages, Camia was arrested for membership in a resistance group. He was sent to a prison in Milan, transferred from there to a camp near Bolzano, and then deported to Flossenbürg concentration camp. On October 10, 1944 he was transferred to Dachau and registered as prisoner number 116,354. Camia was then transferred to the external camp of Dachau, Kempten-Kottern, and finally liberated from Dachau on April 29, 1945. He returned to Italy in June 1945, still seriously ill. Following his recovery, Camia completed his studies. He settled near Milan and died there in 1997.

In the 1980s, Camia returned to Dachau for the first time and the past confronted him anew. In 1989, he spoke about this experience: “My return to Flossenbürg and Dachau was one of the most significant experiences of my life: victory in the war I waged against myself for many years; meeting people, friends, who had driven out the spirits who dwelt there, who existed, in such a confusing way, where death has its dominion….”

On his return to Dachau for the fortieth anniversary of liberation in 1985, the poems Camia had brought with him provided the inspiration for this anthology. These were his own poetry and the sole poem of a former fellow prisoner, the seventeen-year-old Nevio Vitelli. Speaking about the young Vitelli's poem, which he had preserved for almost forty years, Mirco Giuseppe Camia said: “The discovery of this poem was undoubtedly one of the most significant experiences, or rather the most significant experience of my life, an experience of the kind that leads one to steer his future on a better course. Nevio enabled me to rediscover myself in his unknown poem ‘My Shadow in Dachau’” (see pp. 175, 177).

Mirco Giuseppe Camia, who was already writing poetry before his deportation, recounted that he never had any opportunity during his incarceration to put his thoughts into writing. He recalls his personal experience of that time: “I knew only one prisoner in the camp who was actually able to use a pen: the block clerk, who registered new arrivals and deleted the names of the dead….” Nevertheless, these are precisely the thoughts and emotions, the impressions of that time, that recur in Camia's poetry, written during various spells in hospital after his liberation.

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.

Nevio Vitelli was born in 1928 in Fiume, then Italy. In April 1944, at age 16, Vitelli arrived alone in Germany, and in September of the same year attempted a risky journey to return home to his parents. It was during this attempt that he was arrested by the Gestapo and, owing to the antifascist propaganda he was carrying with him, sent on September 27, 1944, to Dachau (prisoner number 111,785). He lived to see the liberation of the camp in April 1945, returned home in spite of illness resulting from his imprisonment, and died in 1948, after almost continuous hospitalization, at barely twenty years old.

In his short life, Nevio Vitelli wrote only this single poem, “My Shadow in Dachau,” in a hospital in the town of Dachau, which he was taken to after the liberation. In 1989 Mirco Giuseppe Camia (biography, pp. 56–57) recalled his encounter with Nevio Vitelli in that hospital:

AS THE EXPERIENCE OF LIBERATION was confined to a brief space of time, the number of poems in this section is comparatively small. Yet these poems offer a crucial perspective for understanding the inner experience of those who survived to see liberation, affording occasional glimpses of how hard, after all the prisoners had gone through, a return to the world outside would be.

According to the last roll-call there were 32,335 prisoners remaining in Dachau on April 29, 1945.

Viktor Frankl described the experience of liberation from his personal perspective:

IN THE BEGINNING: two names, two numbers. Nevio Vitelli—111,785. Mirco Giuseppe Camia—116,354. Two people who experienced Dachau concentration camp. One, Vitelli, still almost a child, wrote a poem after his liberation: “My Shadow in Dachau,” his only poem. It is the monologue of a victim condemned to death, addressed to his mother: “What have I done, Mum? Do you know? Tell me and kiss me in my sleep, so lightly, that I wouldn't even dare to kiss you back, like when you used to cry about me, the naughty boy.”

Nevio Vitelli, born 1928, died—as a delayed consequence of a disease contracted in the concentration camp—in 1948. He was twenty years old.

The other, Mirco Giuseppe Camia, born 1925, a survivor, walks through Dachau once more forty years after his liberation. In his briefcase, as well as his own poetry of remembrance, he carries the poem written by Nevio Vitelli, his fellow prisoner, at whose side he spent time in a hospital room after the camp was freed.

Two men, one poem, a few stanzas, and then one woman, Dorothea Heiser, whose anthology passes on to us what has survived: testimonies from Dachau and its external camps, collected in Europe, compiled with the help of survivors, to bring the past into the present, sensing that nostra res agitur, that what happened concerns us all.

The result is remembrance in many languages and the preservation of the indispensable.

Secret messages were scribbled on gutta-percha latex, scraps of newsprint, toilet paper, secret letters buried under a cement floor, hidden in a lock of hair, engraved on the brain; all in the hope that, one day, when the gates were flung open, they would be able to write down, with perfect recall, all that had happened in Dachau. Writing as a form of prayer, as Kafka put it. Poetry as an expression of the survival instinct; verse as testimony and tribute to the will and strength to resist.

In the midst of the throng in which the prisoners, dressed only in dehumanizing zebra stripes, were reduced to numbers, a single piece of poetry said: I am still me, I am still an individual. However faceless the guards might be, reduced to their sole function, to torture and kill—I am able to cry and suffer and pray, unmistakable and, as a unique being, irreplaceable.