Hanuš Hachenburg 1929-1944
Stephen Yeo remembers an extraordinary poet
In the Friend for 24 January 2014 I introduced a poem by a young woman who was murdered in Auschwitz. The poem, ‘I Would Sooner Perish’, is exceptionally strong, empty of revenge and deeply anti-militaristic. It was translated from the Czech into vivid English by Gerald Turner. I had no idea at the time that Gerald is a Friend living in France, or that he was a member of Brighton Meeting where I used to be an attender. Soon after January he came to Oxford Meeting and got in touch. He then sent me a remarkable body of work in Czech, also translated by him: a book of poems by Hanuš Hachenburg, who died in the fifteenth year of his life – The White Color of the Clouds Right Alongside. In its modern reprint this book has an introduction by Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state who lost many relatives confined, like Hachenburg, in Terezín (Theresienstadt).
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