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Alice Beer, Berta Freistadt, Anne Kind, Lotte Kramer,
Gerda Mayer, Pam Zinnemann-Hope
Introduction by Dilys Wood

Women poets who escaped from Hitler’s ‘evil empire’, came to this country and wrote their poetry in English, represent an important stream of talent and experience coming into poetry here. They were also a key group in the general struggle of women poets to break into the writing scene after WW2, contributing serious poetry about persecution and war (though not only that).

Some poets arrived with the Kinder Transport arrangements for letting a quota of Jewish children enter the UK without their parents. Others were resident here when persecution became acute and stayed on. When – often many years later – they began to write, they faced a major challenge. They were writing in a new language, often had to overcome a truncated formal education and to find enough self-confidence to set down and publish intrinsically difficult material.

Blows to self-esteem included, not only loneliness, loss and grief but the ‘put-downs’ exiles can experience, including poverty and being forced initially into menial jobs. However, reading their poems convinces me that these poets’ strong natural talents may have been reinforced by the selfreliance often necessitated at a very young age. One heavy responsibility might be to try to get relatives out. Alice Beer rescued her father when an otherwise hopeless search for a guarantor ended with a receptive listener on a train journey. When he came, ‘he looked a lot older and thinner... it was months later he told us of his arrest by the Gestapo’, how they had brutally beaten him and threatened him with the camps. Realism, toughness, irony in these writers’ work needs no explanation.

We can also appreciate the width of themes covered. For those who survived, the practical, emotional and philosophical issues have been life-long, with, sometimes, a radically changed focus as time went on. Decisions about whether to visit their native countries, how to respond to attitudes there, what reconciliation might mean, all feature in this work. For a particularly complete picture of all aspects, we must be especially grateful to the University of Sussex for working with Lotte Kramer to rearrange 60 poems from many collections in a broadly chronological account: Kinder Transport, Before and After, Elegy and Celebration (published by the Centre for German Jewish Studies, University of Sussex, 2007). The book begins with the rise of Hitler and the way young children in the class-room were drawn into the excitement and the issues, leading on through all aspects of Kramer’s experience, including the old age of the kinder: “The same faces with stencilled age / We are the survivors of circles of hell / Having slid through some six decades”.

One generation is clearly not enough to exorcise the experience of pogroms, exile and horrific family stories, and it is sometimes the next two generations who feel they must seek some kind of catharsis.  Pam Zinnemann-Hope and Berta Freistadt write about such a legacy below. There are very moving accounts of relatives’ experience in Stevie Krayer’s Voices from a Burning Boat (Salzburg University Press, 1997). Myra Schneider has written a series of poems about the experiences of her husband and mother-in-law, Paula Schneider (see article “How Long Does It Take To Write A Poem”).

We would like to invite readers with any experiences of persecution and exile (self, family, close friends) to write to us for possible inclusion in a follow-up article in ARTEMISpoetry Issue 3.  We are particularly interested in aspects not already covered, particularly those relating to how the writer’s work or life as a poet has been affected.

Please send submissions to Dilys Wood, 9 Greendale Close, London, SE22 8TG.

ANNE KIND WRITES:

I was eleven years old when Hitler came to power and came to England in 1934. Hille, a childhood non-Jewish friend, came to stay with us in England. When she returned to Berlin someone must have reported her. The Gestapo arrived and went to her room, found my letters and photographs and warned her to never get in touch with me again. My great-aunt Mathilde also came to stay with us. We all begged her to remain but she insisted on going back. In 1992 the International Red Cross told me she was transported to Theresienstadt, then to a concentration camp. By then I had joined a creative writing class. My first published poem (1978) was about Mathilde. I had plenty of material but found it painful to write. My husband – an English, non-Jewish doctor I married in 1943 – found it sad that, at times, I still felt like a visitor here. My focus slowly changed after I visited Berlin for the first time after fifty years. Slowly, after three more visits, I became reconciled, able to love my childhood home and feel comfortable in Berlin. But I am also British now, with children, grandchildren and great-grand-children.

Great Aunt Mathilde

Gentle, dainty
darling of my childhood,
fairy tales, Anderson and Grimm
did the horror come true for you?
We begged you to stay here
where it was safe
but no, you would go back to Berlin
and your old age pension
didn't want to bother us
left us full of guilt.

You with your white hair
piled high like a castle
black silk dress
white lace jabot
high button boots
smiling eyes
darling of my childhood.

                             Anne Kind

LOTTE KRAMER WRITES:

I was born in Mainz, Germany, in 1923 and came to England with the Kinder Transport in 1939. I had a good grounding in English in school in Germany but no more schooling in England. I had to obtain work as a lady’s companion, laundry-hand, dress-shop assistant, while studying art and history of art in evening classes. I began to write poetry in the 1970s and have since published 12 collections, including a bilingual (German/English) book in Germany and one in Japan. Reactions to my being a foreigner caused pain for a long time. During the war a girl in a laundry where I worked attacked me when her husband was killed, not aware that I was anti-Nazi. When we moved out of London to the country, the isolation brought back the time of my emigration and the childhood memories I had buried for thirty to forty years. My aim in writing about that time was to record everything. I write not only on holocaust-related themes, but also about landscapes, relationships etc. Even so, I am stereotyped as a ‘holocaust poet’. I have always kept a sane relationship with Germany, as we had very good faithful Christian friends there. I am between languages and traditions and always will be. I express this in my poem, Bilingual. *

Equation

As a child I began
To fear the word ‘Jew’.
Ears were too sensitive.
That heritage was
Almost a burden.

Then broke the years of war
In a strange country.
This time they sneered at me
‘German’ as a blemish,
And sealed a balance.

                                   Lotte Kramer

* a recording of Bilingual, read by Lotte Kramer, can be accessed on the SLN website: www.secondlightlive.co.uk (link on the right-side menu)

GERDA MAYER WRITES:

When I was young, I was determined not to turn into a professional refugee. Willy-nilly though, that is what I seem to have become.

I was born in the Sudeten, the once-German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. I came over at the age of eleven and, as I was surrounded by English speakers, my reading had caught up with my own age group before three months were out. In any case, I was reading Browning’s Pied Piper to myself and, came the summer holidays, What Katy Did. Conversely, my mother, in a letter from Prague, fretted that my German was deteriorating.

If I had caught up linguistically, poetically there was a time-lag. My first English poem, written at the age of twelve was no better than one I had composed (in my pre-literacy days) at the age of four (proud parents had entered this into my ‘Baby’s Diary’) and a poem I wrote at the age of sixteen was on a level with one I had written at the age of eleven, just before leaving home.

However, a change of language is only one of many handicaps that may beset the aspiring poet. There is work, a lack of privacy, living on the margin of things and, yes, even courtship, to hinder and distract one.

I have written extensively but not exclusively about the past. The past is profoundly with me. My first return visit to my home town was deeply moving – and quite productive!

Yet ultimately I’d like to be thought of as an English poet – however obscure a one. And to end on a cheerful note – I have written square poems, pointed poems, star-shaped poems – my poems have been a-round.

Fragment

My father lifted
a mouthorgan up
to the wind on a hill

and the wind of Bohemia
sighed a few
frail and blue notes

man and child
in a harebell light
frail ghosts... faint tune

                      Gerda Mayer
                      Fragment, first published in Ariel, 1971

ALICE BEER WRITES:

It is a horrible thing to say that it was lucky for my father – and the family – that my Mother died when she did; a little more than a week after Hitler’s Army marched into Austria. I had gone to England for a year to improve my spoken English, working as a cook general to support my studies. Being Jewish, and seeing that war was inevitable, the family spread – Israel, Miami, Saõ Paulo, or to wait in Belgium – and I stayed in England, anxious to rescue, somehow, my father from the Nazi Regime. After what seemed a hopeless search for a guarantor, we (my boyfriend had joined me), were assisted by a Headmistress who overheard us discussing the matter. When, finally, he arrived in England, he looked much older and thinner. It was months before he told us that he had been arrested, spat on, starved and beaten, kicked with their shiny boots. The close family was lucky. Of the rest, several – uncles, aunts, three children – were killed in the extermination camps.

I did not start to write poetry until some forty years later, after the death of my husband. Somehow, I never did write it in German and, somehow, do not write a great deal about the pain and anxiety, about the exile, about my lost family members, though one poem, written as a contribution to Holocaust Memorial Day, 2008, speaks about my father’s experience and how he owed his life to the kindness of a stranger on a train.

I do write a great deal about inhumanity, or rather the need for humanity, and suspect that this, as well as my joining the Quaker movement, owes much to that experience, and I find that it does feature in my poetry in subtle ways.

November 5th

We have gathered sticks,
twigs, bits of decaying wood
for this bonfire night.

Sparks dance, thin blue wisps
of smoke curl as they rise high,
well past my window,

my hopes, dreams of peace,
freedom and justice soaring
as I watch the flames.

Next morning, grey, cold,
I sift the blackened cinders
from the soft ashes.

                              Alice Beer

BERTA FREISTADT WRITES:

My earliest memory of anything to do with the Holocaust was my refusal to say the word ‘German’. At this distance, I wonder what my mother actually told me about my father's survival. Whatever it was, it fixed scenes so unrelentingly terrible in my young head that my imagination was in effect stained for life. Even though my father never spoke to me about his experience, even though I cannot remember what my mother told me, I inherited some of his pain, just as I inherited the shape of his lips.

The Song of the Father’s Daughter          (extract)

This is the song of the father’s daughter
this is the song of the woe is me tears

This is the song of the father’s daughter
in the boneyard of the woe is me fears
her toes keep tapping, her shoes run red
she dances till her legs are shorter
her smiles are stretched around her head...

This is the song of the father’s daughter
who wakes at nights to sights she cannot relish
to sounds of trains on unknown tracks
no station names, no helpful porter,
the suitcase left upon the rack...

                                                  Berta Freidstadt

PAM ZINNEMANN-HOPE WRITES:

Although I grew up between two languages, English and German, what was often spoken at home was a mixture of the two, “Pass the Käse, bitte.”

And for me, that is the language of the home I started from. But I also grew up with the presence of an untold story and with what is now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). My parents would hardly ever speak about their experiences in Germany, or in Russia where they had been in the Stalin Purges. The need to find and write that story after their deaths became almost a question of survival for me, so drove me back to writing after a gap.

The only way I could write the story was through poetry – a gateway to my unconscious. Many of the key poems in the sequence, called On Cigarette Papers, began their life in German and then I translated them. Through German I could access parts of myself and my family that English couldn’t reach. Making this piece and finding a life for it has helped me to integrate my background, the Jewish and German parts of me, (including a Nazi grandfather), into my sense of identity. Exile and loss will always inform a part of my writing but not all; I also have an identity as an English writer, writing in English.

Translations from the ‘Mysterium’ *

In the library
where the carved mice lie in wait
on each oak chair,
I’m trying to understand how the cold front
leaks down over me from the forests of Pomerania.
I’m trying to make translations
from the ‘Mysterium’...

                        Wenn man in den Eiszapfen schaut

If you look into the icicle,
into the transparent world of its ice and the water melting on its
                                                                                          surface,
perhaps you can see a story

Der Winter ist eisig kalt.
Der Schnee liegt vielleicht hübsch auf dem Grund,
aber das Herz der Menschen ist gefroren

The winter is ice-cold.
The snow may look beautiful underfoot
but the heart of the people is frozen;
even my beaver lamb jacket
cannot keep mine warm...

What’s the use of translation?

...Why am I here on this hill?
They think I’m still on the train.
I can hold down my hat
and cling to the fence;
the wind beating me in the dark
knows I’m here
and all this white stuff coming down.

It keeps coming down.

                                      Pam Zinneman-Hope

* ‘The Mysterium’ – a Book of Mysteries