Foreword to the English-Language Edition

Summary

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.