Universes in Universe

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Longings

Info / context to the poems

In the lamenting dialogue with one's own emotional situation, the fear of death is given a name. By naming the fear, it becomes possible to capture it in the poetic form. The verbal exchange that occurs in writing poetry has immediate therapeutic value, for the self comes into direct contact with itself and searchs for creative forms of self-description. The real situation, of course, could not be altered. In poetic speak, a longing that is still alive finds its place of expression. The closed form of the poem preserves the desire for escape as if in a "vessel." It helps in naming as well as overcoming the inner state of deadly paralysis in that the invoking search for a vis-à-vis is not abandoned. (C. Jaiser)

Authors - biographies

Grażyna Chrostowska

Poland, 1921 - 1942

Grażyna Chrostowska was born in Lublin on October 21, 1921. Already in her school years she writes poems and short stories. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, she becomes active in the resistance against the German occupation, the Polish Border Defense Corps (KOP). She is 19 years old when, on May 8, 1941, together with her father, she goes to the Gestapo post "Pod zegarem" (Gestapo: secret police in the German Reich) to visit her sister Apolonia, two years older than her, who is imprisoned there. Grażyna is arrested on the spot. With the Lublin transport of September 12, 1941, the Gestapo deports her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. There she was given prisoner number 7714 and had to work in the straw shoe weaving factory. During the roll call, which often lasted for hours, she wrote poetry. Fellow prisoners memorize many of her texts to distract themselves from the torment. On April 18, 1942, men of the SS (Schutzstaffel, the Nazis' most important terror and oppression organization) shoot Grażyna Chrostowska along with her sister Apolonia and other Polish women and girls. She was 20 years old. Her poems were preserved because shortly before her execution she gave them to her friend Nina Iwanicka, who memorized them for fear of discovery, and later on in France published the poems in French.

See also her poems: The Stranger, and Restlessness, her last one.

Stefanie Kunke

Austria

Stefanie Kunke, née Jelinek, (24.12.1908-14.2.1943), was a teacher and poet in Vienna and worked together with her husband Hans Kunke in the illegal Central Committee of the United Socialist Party. She wrote a children's book and poetry. Two months after the "annexation" of Austria to the National Socialist German Reich, on May 20, 1938, the couple was imprisoned and sent to concentration camps without a court sentence, Stefanie Kunke first to the women's concentration camp Lichtenburg and, from May 1939, to the women's concentration camp Ravensbrück. For not reporting a criminal act committed by one of her block seniors, she was given a two-year punishment block. The punishment block had to build the Ravensbrück camp at that time. In spring 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz. There are diverging statements about the cause of death of Stefanie Kunke, ranging from typhoid fever to death by bludgeoning. Her husband was shot in Buchenwald concentration camp on October 30, 1940.

Katarina Miklavova

Slovenia

All that is currently known about Katarina Miklavova is that she was born in Haderlap (Eisenkappel), Slovenia and died in Ravensbrück on 7-1-1944. Her poem "Zima 1944" ("Winter 1944") has been preserved.

Charlotte Serre

France

On January 22, 1944, Charlotte Serre was arrested with her husband Charles Serre and interned first in Fresnes and then in Romainville. In May, she was deported to Ravensbruck (n° 37 999), where she had to work for a long time as a so-called "available" (assigned to different, mainly hard, tasks every day). When she was liberated on April 5, 1945, she weighed 34 kilograms. She wrote poetry already in the camp and after her return published an extensive work with poems from and after the camp time as well as autobiographical writings.

Katja Spurova

Slovenia

Katja Spurova, born in Gornji Krapju in 1908, comes from a Slovenian family of day workers who travel from farm to farm. She studies at various schools, later universities, receives her diploma as a Slavicist at the philosophical faculty in Ljubljana in 1936 and works as a journalist in the following years. On account of her participation in the Slovenian Battle for the Liberation of the People, Katja Spurova is arrested and displaced to Ravensbrück in January 1944, then to the satellite camp Barth on the Baltic Sea where she must perform forced labor in the Heinkel airplane factories. After liberation she is able to return home. Alongside the resumption of her journalistic work, with special involvement in human rights, she also works at the Ministry of Agriculture. She concerns herself with questions of socialist structures. Over the years she publishes several works, predominantly poetry.