Ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2025, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Holocaust Centre North is proud to announce the publication of its first-ever poetry collection, Poetry After Auschwitz: Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde, by writer, historian and educator Ben Barkow CBE. This collection offers a deeply personal and intimate reflection on the Holocaust, drawing from Barkow’s own family experiences.
Barkow was the Director of the Wiener Holocaust Library until 2019 – the world’s oldest centre for the study of the Holocaust and antisemitism. He has published several books on the subject. However, this marks his first collection of poetry. Written over the past two and a half years from his home in Cornwall, Barkow found inspiration in the rugged Cornish landscape, a stark contrast to the dark subject matter.
Like many descendants of Holocaust survivors, Barkow grew up with little knowledge of the facts, surrounded by an atmosphere of unspoken pain. Over the years, especially following his parents' passing, he pieced together his family’s history. Lacking extensive family correspondence and archival material, he struggled to write about it coherently and was faced with a fragmented and incomplete legacy. But after retiring to Cornwall four years ago, he found an unexpected solution.
Barkow recalls “In November 2021, after living here for around nine months, I woke one night with words and phrases running through my mind. I got up, wrote for an hour, and knew immediately that I had found my way forward. What I had written was poetry. Over the next two and a half years, I composed around 30–35 poems, resulting in this collection. The form uniquely suited the exploration of my family’s fragmented history. Cornwall—with its rapidly changing weather, its constant proximity to the sea, and its landscapes shaped by human toil and suffering—became the ideal place to walk, think, and write.”
The poems transport readers alongside Barkow to places imbued with his family’s story: Berlin, his birthplace; Ramat Gan in Israel; Jerusalem; Neve Tsedek; New York; Orkney; and California. They journey from the stark beauty of rural England to the atrocities of the death camps, raising questions about the universality of the Holocaust and the weight poetry can carry. The title itself serves as both a provocation and a statement of intent.
This collection of 20 poems introduces readers to his mother Friederike Barkow née Laubhardt, father Nick (Horst) Barkow, maternal grandparents Charlotte (Nanni) and Rudolf Laubhardt, his paternal grandparents Charlotte (Lottchen) and Gustav Barkow, and Rudolf's three sisters, Ilse Moos (and her husband Ludwig), Hilde Rosenthal Laubhardt (and her husband Friedrich (Fritz)), and Eva Laubhardt (Sister Placida).
Decades ago, his great-aunt, Sister Placida, entrusted Barkow with copies of letters she had written to her sister Lise Ilse in 1945–46, soon after her release from the Ravensbrück and Malchow concentration camps. When giving him these letters, she cautioned, “Mach damit kein Mist”—a German phrase meaning “don’t make mischief” (or literally, manure) with them. This collection of poems is a tribute to these individuals and a gesture of love for them. Upon completing the collection, Barkow remarked, “I dare to hope she wouldn’t judge them as Mist.”
Dr Alessandro Bucci, Director of Holocaust Centre North, comments, “When you begin engaging with the materials in an archive––and the Holocaust Centre North Archive is no exception––you encounter complexities and nuances that traditional historiography doesn’t always capture—complexities that are often difficult to express in words alone. Artistic responses to our collections help us push beyond the limits of language, creating a space for reflection and questioning. They encourage us to confront difficult questions about how we remember the legacies of the Holocaust, how its memory affects people across generations, and how that understanding is shared and to what end. I was delighted when Ben Barkow, a world-renowned Holocaust expert, approached us with his first poetry collection. There were so many synergies between our approaches, beliefs, and his powerful collection.”
Poetry After Auschwitz: Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde is published on December 4 by Holocaust Centre North. It is available for pre-order here: https://holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/shop/
