The young poet Hanuš Hachenburg

In the 1940’s HanuŠ Hachenburg, 1929 - 1943/44, and other young boys, aged twelve to fifteen,

lived in Barracks L417 from 1942 to 1944, or Home One, which the boys referred to as the Republic of Shkid.

The Jewish boys secretly produced a weekly magazine called Vedem (In the Lead) at the model concentration camp, Terezin.

   Reflection meetings

Athem of The Republic of Škid Oh, what glory; all are cheering The whole of One is on its feet Government has come to being Of the Republic of Škid Every man is our brother Christian or Jewish kid United we march under the banner Of the Republic of Škid Insult us no one shall dare No one shall dare to hit To work hard we swear To honor the Republic of Škid. Theresienstadt In Tereziń Hanuš wrote a puppet play, ‘We are Looking for a Monster’, but it was never performed. Over Valtr Eisinger en In the lead (Vedem) - A Teacher's Guide Terezin boy who dreamt of flying to Moon to escape horrors of Earth Hans Krása's Brundibár, and the Surreal Cultural Life of Theresienstadt" We Are Children Just the Same: Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of Terezín - Bol.com Website Vedem Anne Frank Timeline

Vedem - HanuŠ droeg samen met andere jongens uit Huis Nummer Eén (L417) in Terezín bij aan de inhoud van de wekelijkse ondergrondse magazine Vedem, opgericht door Petr Ginz. De grote en bijzonder gewaardeerde bijdrage van Hanuš Hachenburg voor Vedem bestond meestal uit gedichten. De dichterlijke, gevoelige en enigszins eenzelvige teener was ook buitengewoon goed belezen en geïnformeerd. Er is weinig van Hanuš bekend. Het meeste wat men van hem weet, komt van zijn vriend in die tijd, Zdenek Ornest, die Terezín (Theresiënstadt) en Auschwitz overleefde. Hij herinnerde jaren nadien nog levendig zijn ogen in het bleke gezicht. Hanuš verkeerde in een lichamelijk slechte conditie. Hun vriendschap had zo z'n ups and downs en z'n crisissen. Ze hadden vaak ruzie met elkaar, maar ook hele interessante discussies. Zdenek werd geïmponeerd door de gedichten die Hanuš maakte. Hanuš werd op 12 juli 1929 geboren en woonde bij zijn moeder in Praag. Mogelijk heeft hij zijn vader nooit gekend. Eén van zijn eerste dichterlijke probeersels, Heroica, schreef hij in het Praagse Weeshuis. Op 24 oktober 1942 werd hij vanuit het Praagse Weeshuis naar Terezín gedeporteerd. Aanvankelijk werd hij in Huis Nummer Twee geplaatst. Valtr Eisinger, die de jongens van Huis Nummer Een onder zijn hoede had, realiseerde zich spoedig dat Hanuš een ongewoon getalenteerde jongen was en slaagde erin Hanuš naar Huis Nummer Een over te laten plaatsen. Op 18 december 1943 werd Hanuš op transport naar het Oosten (Auschwitz) gezet en heeft daar nog enige tijd in het "Gezinskamp" gezeten. Hij ging daar door met het schrijven van een aantal gedichten. Zijn laatste gedicht heette De Gong, dat zo populair werd, dat gevangenen het uit hun hoofd kenden. Het was gebaseerd op het morgenappèl. De gong deed de gevangenen wreed ontwaken uit hun dromen over terugkeer naar huis en bracht hen terug naar de genadeloze realiteit van het concentratiekamp met de honger, de vervuiling en de voortdurende dreiging met de dood. De gedichten van Hanuš, vertaald in het Engels, klinken goed, soms ook door de afwisselende Romaanse en Germaanse klanken die het Engels kenmerkt. Zie wat betreft de afwisseling van Germaanse en Romaanse klanken in Engelse gedichten o.a. "De Glanzende Kiemcel" van S. Vestdijk. Behalve dat lijkt er tijdens het vertalen met zorg met de klanken omgegaan te zijn, reden te meer om deze in het Engels te laten staan. Hieronder de namen van de jongens tussen de 12 en 15 jaar, die samen met Hanuš en hun twee oudere begeleiders, onder wie Valtr Eisinger, in de jaren 1942--1944 de op één na laatste periode van hun leven in "Huis Nummer Een" op vaak zeer angstige, maar op moedige en creatieve wijze hebben doorgebracht. Als zovelen zijn zij en Valtr Eisinger in Auschwitz door de nazis omgebracht. De weinigen die het overleefd hebben, zijn hieronder ook vermeld. Om de moed erin te houden stichtten de jongens hun eigen republiek, de Republiek van Skhid, waarin eenieder recht van leven heeft. Valtr Eisinger: I do not want to give you ready answers. That would be too easy. Nor do I wish to say straight out: let us love these and hate those. I shall try to outline a method that is less easy, one that will force you to think and draw your own conclusions.(..) Let me quote some of Goethe's sayings, that they might become the basis for our thoughts and our conclusions! (..) "National hatred is altogether a strange thing. It is at its most powerful and most vehement on the lowest levels of culture. But there is a level where it completely disappears and where to some extent we stand above nations, and feel the fortunes or misfortunes of neighbouring nations as if they were our own. This cultural level is consistent with my nature."

The Republic of Shkid

Questions and Answers

What good to mankind is the beauty of science?

What good is the beauty of pretty girls?

What good is a world when there are no rights?

What good is the sun when there is no day?

What good is God? Is he only to punish?

Or to make life better for mankind?

Or are we beasts, vainly to suffer

And rot beneath the yoke of our feelings?

What good is life, when the living suffer?

Why is my world surrounded by walls?

Know son, this is here for a reason:

To make you fight and conquer all!

                                                                      Ha - (Hanuš Hachenburg)

For children / My country

We are all children, little ones,
Playing with a coloured ball.
We cry easily with ruddy cheeks
And then, with glowing faces
We look at silvery world,
At green hillsides,
At Life. We look ahead


We are soft deer,
Complaining to crows
We think that we live
But merely accept blows
We are all children,
Playing with the globe,
Water sprites
Pursing our lips
To receive our mother's milk,
peace,
life.

We are all people,
That is, we are matter.
The millwheel of time turns
Our feathers are drying, drying.
We scratch away in the night
Over our blouses
That take away our eyes




And in the day we are only in darkness.
We are all people
Gambling for the globe,
And the globe turns in blood
And turns and turns
And we reach out





For the small lights in the night
We children, children
Of a great revolution
We want to learn
So that from the earth we might
Freely drink
Live
Triumph

                                                                          Ha - (Hanuš Hachenburg)

My Country

I kiss my land and caress it,
Passing much time in its presence.
This land is not on this earth
Yet it is within us everywhere.


It is in the heavens, in the stars above,
Wherever the bird nation lives.
I se it again in my soul today,
And my heart is heavy with tears.


One day I shall fly tot the heights above,
Free from my body's encumbrance,
Free in expansiveness, free in distance,
And free with me, my country.


Today it is small. A handful of dreams
Encloses its distant horizons
And through the heavy dreams
Shimmer the furies of war.


One day I shall enter my country,
I shall rejoin my motherland
There is my country! There is yours!
There is no "I" and no misery.

                                                                    Ha - (Hanuš Hachenburg)

Life and death / Thoughts

Life and death, that is the whole world,
A ray of sunlight,
A fiery day,
A violent tempest on the endless sea,
Blood of the living earth - eternal love.


When the trees are in full leaf
When Monday always follow Sunday
When summer breezes list
Through the heart's innumerable pages,
When the sailor young and strong
Fights death in the ocean deep…


Eternally red, life blood
Battles against stone-cold walls,
Ever the world's people
Struggle upwards
Learning to live.


The centre is dark. This nothing - this circle -
This nothing is law, space, God.
Next to the whiteness of the clouds,
The poison gas of mocking laughter,
And next to Justice, brown earth,
And then, then bright red love, a dream!


Everything is colour: the grey river,
The green fishpond, its nymph,
The yellow rock, the longing
Black circle, the imprisoning universe,
The bright blue sky,
The black and red execution.


Time passed: strangely it twists,
Like a black thread in a constant spiral,
As time goes by, across the ruins
They sing a song of life
Or again, when death strangles them,
They sing the sad song of death.


From the womb of earth life was born
To devour itself, to submit, to fertilize,
Once a cell looked round
To live and die.
Life conquered space
To live and become God.


That was man. And man became the master
Over life and death, his loins, his shoulders.
Time passes and time twists constantly,
Strangely in a circle, in a spiral.


Today death holds his filthy hand
Over the world and over my soul
But the cup, fashioned of skulls,
With brains shrivelled and dried,
Will overflow, and all
The bones, the blood, the muscles call:
"Life! Life! Life!?"


Time presses forward,
The spiral turns,
People are born and die,
History happens, and seems to happen,
At the end of the chain of time
Freed from fetters, from money,
At the end of its wild spiral
Love twists into eternity.

                                                                Ha - (Hanuš Hachenburg)

Thoughts

I stood at the corner and looked int het window
To a place where heart is divided from heart
On the bed lay Had's limp shadows,
When a madman suddenly lifted his hand, crying:
"Mummy!…

Mummy, come here, let's play together
And kiss and talk to each other!"
Poor people, madmen, miserable figures,
Wrapped against the weather, they went
Shivering with cold, and wanting to shout
Before their days were done:

"Mummy, hold me, I'm leaf about to fall,
Look how I wither, I feel so cold!"
As the awful chorale echoed across the barracks,
I - swept up in it - sing along with them.

Ha - (Hanuš Hachenburg)

Remembrance / The heart

In that grey house, an old woman

Suffered on her bed. No one knew her.

And as she shrivelled away, with God her only succour

She secretly hugged something to her.





A kind of cardboard box, and when she dies

The ghetto will be her only heir.

And how she cried, that helpless woman.

She wanted to live to see her children one time more.

She did not want to die;

She wrung her hands (or clung to her faded souvenir)

Then in the night, dry for lack of water, died.

I was upset for fully half a day.

When they came for her things in the morning -

Such a beautiful balmy day -

All they found was four simple flowers

And a picture of her son clapsed

Tightly in her twisted, stiffened hands.

They took it from her, clumsily, roughly,

And tore it up.

I look at her.

I learned nothing more. But I believe -

I hope,

That mother and son were burned together.

                                                         Ha - (Hanuš Hachenburg)

The Heart

There’s probably a tiny room

Where a man cherishes his “I”

Like a ring on his little finger.

A terrible burden I cherish there,

So many feelings without a name

And

In every heart, in a nameless corner

 I cannot express them.

I am an echo in the wind.

My child, when he is born,

Eager to live, will be a man

May he never live through

What I have seen and suffered.

I do not know what name to give

To my small room with its small door,

Perhaps a bird will whisper a message

In my ear like an echo.

Perhaps my child will say:

“Dad, I know how you are.”

My heart is so cruel to me

It will not let me dream,

But always says:

“My good man -

How would you put me in words?”

Today I said: the heart is a fire,

I have no strength to put it out.

Academy (Hanuš Hachenburg)