A metropolis of death

Stephen Yeo is moved by the remarkable story of a poem

by Stephen Yeo 24th January 2014

The story of Theresienstadt ‘ghetto’ or dystopic propaganda camp and of the deportation and murder of Jews from Czechoslovakia and elsewhere by the Nazis in Auschwitz is well known. Much less so is an extraordinary poem I Would Sooner Perish by a Czech woman of about twenty years old who handed it, among a sheaf of papers, to one of the superintending ‘kapos’ (themselves Jewish) just as she was entering the gas chamber at Auschwitz.