Holocaust museum launches poetry collection inspired by one man’s family history
Historian Ben Barkow commemorates his family Shoah testimony with 20 heart-felt poems
Holocaust Centre North is publishing its first poetry collection ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day in January, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
‘Poetry After Auschwitz: Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde‘ is written by writer, historian and educator Ben Barkow and is drawn from his own family experiences.
Barkow was director of the Wiener Holocaust Library, the world’s oldest centre for the study of the Holocaust and antisemitism, until 2019. Like many descendants of Holocaust survivors, he grew up with little knowledge of what happened to his family.
Over the years, especially following his parents’ death, he pieced together his history. Lacking extensive family correspondence and archival material, he struggled to write about it until retiring to Cornwall four years ago.
Barkow said: “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.”
Now, his collection of 20 poems transports readers to places imbued with Barkow’s family’s story: his birthplace of Berlin; Ramat Gan, Jerusalem, Neve Tsedek, New York, Orkney and California.
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” with them. Barkow hopes the resulting collection is both a tribute to his family and a gesture of love.
Dr Alessandro Bucci, director of Holocaust Centre North, said: “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 available to order here.
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