Messages in a Bottle

Poems and songs
Vera Hozáková, born 1917, was a young architecture student and member of the Czech Communist Party, as a result of which she was arrested by the Gestapo and transported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp at the age of 24. There, she was made to work for the SS construction office, in which she and Vlasta Kladivová secretly put together material for a book of poems. She also had the opportunity to write down in ink her own poems and those of the others, and to draw illustrations. The poems and songs in this booklet, collected in secret, stem from 11 countries and form the heart of the reading.


The arrival

The night was lit by stars,
and a heart burned still.
The night was lit by stars
and shone above the earth.
There, behind barbed wire, a head inclined
Sore with unrealised love.

A long time I lay wakeful on the dirty straw.
As morning came, sleep caught me, dreamless.
Waking, though, was nightmarish:
the sirens tore me from my sleep.
The first thing that I saw: the hut’s damp walls.

I trembled then with cold and sadness
and peered around for human warmth –
and found no spark among the many there.
That morning, so it seemed, the love
had died away inside the women all around,
as if it was forever gone.

I was so sad.
But that is over now.
For then a shudder ran right through me
and everything had changed.
Now hands were grasping other hands
from woman to woman, on and on.

I was so sad.
But that is over now.

Vera Hozáková, Ravensbrück 1942
Adapted by Wolfgang Fietkau



Listen to the poem "Der Wind weht weinend über die Ebene" [The Wind Wafts Weeping Across the Plains] (mp3) by Katja Spurova, written at Ravensbrück