Paul Celan

Paul Celan was the most frequently used pseudonym of Paul Antschel (the pseudonym adopts an anagram of his surname in Romanian, Ancel) (November 23, 1920 – approximately April 20, 1970), who is considered one of the few major poets of the post-World War II era. He was born in Romania, lived in Austria and later in France, and wrote in German. In additional to the composition of his poetry, he was an extremely active translator, translating literature from Romanian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and English into German.

Romanian Army came back

On arrival in July 1941 the German SS Einsatzkommando and their Romanian allies burned down the city's six-hundred-year-old Great Synagogue, deporting a number of Jews and forcing the rest of the community into a ghetto, where Celan was exposed to Yiddish songs, translated Shakespeare's sonnets, and continued to write his own poetry. Before the ghetto was dissolved in the fall of that year, Celan was pressed into labor cleaning up first the debris of a demolished post office and then gathering and destroying Russian books.

Related Topics:
SS - Einsatzkommando - Yiddish - Shakespeare

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The local mayor mitigated these arrangements until the governor of Bukovina began to have Jews rounded up and deported starting with the Saturday nights of June 1942. Accounts of his whereabouts on that night vary, but it is certain that Celan was not with his parents when they were taken from their home on June 27 1942 and sent by truck and then train to an internment camp in Transnistria, where two-thirds of the deportees perished.

Related Topics:
Bukovina - June 27 - 1942 - Internment camp - Transnistria

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Later taken by forced march to labour camps in Wallachia and Moldavia, he received reports in the late fall or winter of 1942-1943 that his father died of typhus in fall 1942 and his mother was later shot dead after being exhausted beyond further forced labour.

Related Topics:
Wallachia - Moldavia - 1943 - Typhus

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Paul escaped from the labour camps until February 1944, when the Red Army's advance caused the Germans to abandon them, returning to Czernowitz shortly before the Soviets returned to reassert their control. Early versions of "Todesfuge" were circulated at this time, demonstrating that the poem relied on accounts coming from the camps in Poland liberated by the Soviets. Friends from this period recall expression of immense guilt on his separation from his parents before their death.

Related Topics:
Czernowitz - Poland

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