To an unknown reader in 1947

Literary Review, Spring, 2004 by Henia Karmel, Ilona Karmel

Henia and Ilona Karmel were born in Poland. During World War II they, as Jews, were slave laborers in munitions plants, exposed to hunger, typhus and terror. Most of their poems were written on shreds of scavenged paper. On the death march from Buchenwald, Henia, Ilona and their mother were crushed by a German tank, pushed into a field of corpses and abandoned. A Polish prisoner got them to a hospital near Leipzig where the sisters each had a leg amputated. They survived. The survival of this poetry is just as astonishing.

In 2001 Fanny Howe contacted the artist Arie Galles to translate five of Ilona's poems. They immediately embarked on more translations, having been struck by the strength of the poems, by each sister's erudition, anger and lack of sentimentality. "In translating Henia's and Ilona's poems," writes Galles, "eyes grasp my native tongue, and my heart aches as my hands write in English on tear stained paper." For her part, the poet, Howe states, "In the process of rewriting the translations from the Polish, I am thinning the originals, passing their rhythm, intention and force through my own sense of word and sound. Brecht's poetry is a great inspiration in this project."

It is difficult today from the perspective of two years to contemplate the genesis of these poems.

We look at them in astonishment, powerless before their strangeness. It's as if we were meeting old friends after years of separation. They are known, but foreign because of an impassible chasm--time and distance. Words spat out in a fever, screamed poems, now sound like weak whispers, almost inaudible. Experiences, which we tried to reproduce in all their horrible reality, have slipped into pallid outlines, already almost erased.

When we look at them, before our eyes we see inscriptions upon the walls of prisons and camps, scrawled at the last moment by people who have already passed on. Cries for help, calls for revenge, an unfinished sentence terminated mid-point, maybe only a name and a date, the terror of those days marked clumsily by a weakening hand upon a hard indifferent wall. Today only half-readable traces stay on the wall.

These poems are exactly that: inscriptions on a prison wall. They are feeble efforts to preserve a record. Why make such an effort to leave behind a trace, and to transmit one's experience before it is all over? What forced us to do this? Was it the pain or was it a protest against the absolute end of things?

No. Having been taught by machine guns to think in categories of thousands and millions, we had reconciled ourselves to the unimportance of the individual. So did we write in order to transmit the information and thereby incite people later to vengeance? No. In those days we understood the complete futility of trying to match any punishment to this crime.

And still we did write for people in the future as an act of self-defense. We wanted others later to discover in our suffering a meaning and a purpose: to ensure that we millions did not die in vain as long as our experience was used as a warning for future generations.

These poems, and thousands of other creations, form one cry only: "Remember."

Translated from the Polish by Fanny Howe and Arie Galles

Editor's Note: Translated poems are forthcoming from the Princeton University Press.