Poetry and contemporary witnesses on the day of liberation
The victory over Nazi rule was celebrated in the Abraxas cultural center
By Frank Heindl
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was born a hundred years ago, in February 1924. In 1941 she wrote a “poem” whose central line is: “I want to live”. A year later, on December 16, 1942, at the age of 18, she died in the Romanian forced labor camp Mikhailovka. “Then they come and choke me,” her poem continued, and: “I die overnight.”
They all wanted to live, but hundreds of thousands and millions of them were murdered. In order to remember the victims of National Socialism – or at least a few of them – and to save a few names from oblivion, the liberation from German Nazism was celebrated in the Abraxas cultural center on Tuesday evening. It was actually a day too early, because the unconditional surrender of the German Reich only came into force on May 8, 1945 – but the signing of the surrender treaty, 79 years ago on May 7, 1945, is also reason enough to celebrate.
“The war is over!” – The trio “Text wants sounds” performed poetry for the day of liberation in a kitsch-free urgency. – Photo: Frank Heindl
The evening was accompanied musically and textually by the ensemble “Text will sounds”. Actress Karla Andrä had selected poems by victims and survivors of the Holocaust and recited them to the appropriately calm, sensitive but completely non-cheesy sound of Josef Holzhauser (composition and guitar) and Johannes Ochsenbauer (bass). Gerald Fiebig, head of abraxas, moderated the evening, and there were also short contributions from Marcella Reinhardt from the Regional Association of Sinti and Roma, Vitaliy Levin, Vice President of the Jewish Community, and cultural advisor Jürgen Enninger.
Never again become immature through your own fault
Enninger recalled that on the day of liberation, the memory must also go to those “who redeemed us from the reign of terror” – and pointed out that the abraxas, built during Nazi times, was built after the war by the liberators, the US occupying power was used. With regard to Immanuel Kant, he appeals that we should never again “become immature through our own fault.”
This was followed by short conversations with contemporary witnesses of the Nazi era. The Sinto Hugo Höllnreiner reported on his grandfather of the same name, who had survived Auschwitz. “What we experienced,” the grandson quotes him, “is in our souls and will never leave.” Höllnreiner is pleased that a street in Munich has now been named after his grandfather, who died in 2015, and another in Ingolstadt is to follow.
Henry Landman is also no longer alive. The Jew, born Heinz Landmann in Augsburg in 1920, managed to escape to the USA after being interned in the Dachau concentration camp. Monika Müller from the Jewish Cultural Museum shows an interview recorded by the Shoah Foundation in 1996 in which Landman reports how he relived Augsburg as a soldier shortly after the end of the war. He speaks with emotion about his return, about his missing aunt, about the destroyed city and about meeting fellow citizens again who had helped him before he fled.
Concerned looks towards the past and future: Ernst Grube, survivor of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in conversation with Carmen Reichert, director of the Jewish Museum Augsburg Swabia. – Photo: Frank Heindl
A lifelong question: What will happen to us?
Ernst Grube, who was born in Munich in 1932, spoke most intensively in a conversation with Carmen Reichert from the Jewish Museum. As the son of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, he was separated from his parents and deported to a children’s home in Munich. 23 child carers from this home were shot in Lithuania in 1941. Kolbe himself ended up in the Theresienstadt concentration camp via a camp in Milbertshofen, where he experienced liberation by the Red Army. “What will happen to us?” – Grube remembers this anxious question several times in an unfortunately too short conversation. He was a twelve-year-old boy when he was able to leave the concentration camp – but the 91-year-old is still concerned about the topic today, given social developments.
For Grube, like many survivors, talking about what happened has remained a need throughout his life and to this day. Karla Andrä had quoted the appropriate poem for this endeavor. The poet Karl Schnog wanted to free himself from what he had experienced in Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald by telling stories: “Only when I say what I saw / Only when I write what happened / Am I cleansed of the dirt” says his poem “Naked Statement”. It was initially difficult for many Nazi victims to be truly happy about the “good end” of all the torment on the day of liberation – the losses were too great and the murdered friends and relatives were too numerous. Freedom had won, but far too late. For many, it took decades before they could see May 8, 1945 as a real liberation like the poet Dagmar Hilarová, who was deported to Theresienstadt by the National Socialists. “Spring wind / Blown away the last pain / From the chest,” she wrote, “It was May / And everything blossomed into freedom.”
Article from May 9, 2024 | Author: Frank Heindl
Category: anti-Semitism, society, culture, reading, literature, music, politics, racism, theater