Christoph Hackethal, Germany, biography

Summary

Christoph Hackethal was born in 1899 in Hannover, Germany. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in Hildesheim in 1923. On April 18, 1941, the Gestapo came to his presbytery in Bündheim and arrested him for “actions harmful to the state and defeatist utterances.” He was first brought to the notorious Lager 21 at Salzgitter-Hallendorf. On July 26, 1941, he was transported to Dachau and registered there on August 8 as prisoner number 26,888. Here he was assigned to the Arbeitskommando “Kräuterplantage” (work detail “Herb Plantation”), but the hard labor, moving earth in all kinds of weather, was too much for the priest, whose health was already frail. Hackethal died of a pulmonary infection on August 25, 1942, after an illness lasting twenty-one days.

On the forty-fifth anniversary of his death, documents were found in the parish hall of St.-Gregor in Bündheim. The yellowed letters, handwritten poems, diary entries over forty years old, and photographs formed a harrowing testimony. “Premonition of Death,” the poem reproduced here, was also part of that collection.

Todesahnung

Blumige Wiese

im Abendstein—

Hauchest den Duft

deines Blühens mir ein—

Grüßest mich heute

zum letzten Mal:

Morgen trifft dich

des Schnitters Stahl.

Dachau 1942

Premonition of Death

Blossoming meadow

in the stony evening,

it's your flower's scent

that I still breathe.

Today you greet me

for the very last time.

Tomorrow you'll meet

the steel scythe.

Dachau 1942—Translated by Alistair Noon