Poesia de Los Campos de Concentracion

These poems offer a special opportunity for reflection on human barbarity, because they do not speak about the victims, but have been written by them. The feelings of those who suffer, impossible to capture in a history book, the individual stories that bring their protagonists out of anonymity, have a much deeper impact through poetry. Reading these texts is overwhelming. It is a kind of anguish that one experiences when one sees or knows how brutal, cruel, and inhuman the treatment of human beings can be. And it is the anguish of seeing how, even in the most desperate situation, someone tries to resist and preserve their dignity. Where writing could cost one's life and there were no writing materials, the content had to be compressed into extremely concise language. Poeticism was secondary to the urgency of the message and the circumstances in which it was created. "The secret of salvation is called memory," a reminder of the individual fates affected by the Nazi extermination machine, which the editors remind us of with this anthology of poetry. The volume presents a selection of poems that Germanist Michael Moll has compiled in a first systematic collection. They are personal legacies of prisoners of the Nazi extermination camps who wrote against the forgetting of the terrible inhumanity they suffered.