Gertrud Kolmar was born in 1894 in Berlin and disappeared on the last transport to Auschwitz in February 1943. Her cousin, Walter Benjamin, professed admiration for her writings, and he was one of only a handful of people with whom she shared her unpublished work
With the coming of the Nazis, Gertrud Kolmar knew what her own fate would be. As early as 1933-1934 she had a nightmarish poetic vision: And I can feel the fist that drops my weeping head toward the hill of ashes. Still more startling, in the same years when news of the camps was still scattered and uncertain, she wrote the poem "The Camp" (Das Lager): Those who walk about here are but bodies And have no longer any soul, Are only names in books. Imprisoned: Men and boys and women, And their eyes stare emptily....
Insensate, gray, degenerate they toil, Cut off from human life, Stiff, wounded, branded with official stamps, They wait like slaughter cattle for the knife. . . .11
Gertrud Kolmar was born in 1894 in Berlin and disappeared on the last transport to Auschwitz in February 1943. Her cousin, Walter Benjamin, professed admiration for her writings, and he was one of only a handful of people with whom she shared her unpublished work
ReplyDeleteWith the coming of the Nazis, Gertrud Kolmar knew what her own fate would be. As early as 1933-1934 she had a nightmarish poetic vision:
And I can feel the fist that drops my weeping head toward the hill of ashes.
Still more startling, in the same years when news of the camps was still scattered and uncertain, she wrote the poem "The Camp" (Das Lager):
Those who walk about here are but bodies
And have no longer any soul,
Are only names in books.
Imprisoned: Men and boys and women,
And their eyes stare emptily....
Insensate, gray, degenerate they toil,
Cut off from human life,
Stiff, wounded, branded with official stamps,
They wait like slaughter cattle for the knife. . . .11