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from Part I - Camp Life: The Reality 1933–1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2018
Henri Pouzol was born in 1914 in Jarnac, France. He was transferred to the concentration camp at Dachau from Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen on July 17, 1944 and was registered as prisoner number 80,598.
Until 1942, when he was arrested on account of his membership in the French Resistance, Pouzol had worked as a grammar school teacher for French language and literature. He was detained, interned, and then deported to the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camp and to Augsburg-Pfersee and Lauingen, external camps of Dachau. Pouzol had also written poetry prior to his deportation, but it remained unpublished. He was liberated from Dachau in April 1945.
Following his return to France, Pouzol published numerous volumes of poetry as well as a work on concentration camp poetry: La Poésie Concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1975), which was the source for the poem reproduced here. For around ten years, Pouzol worked on editing a volume of poetry composed in camps across Europe, which appeared in 1995: Ces voix toujours pré senťes: Anthologie de la poé sie europé enne concentrationnaire, présentée et préparée par Henri Pouzol (Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims et Fédération Nationale des Déportés et Internés Résistants et Patriotes, 1995). Henri Pouzol lived in Royan. He died there in 2000.
Like so many other authors, Henri Pouzol had absolutely no opportunity to write during his incarceration. The following poem was written when he was leaving the concentration camp, but it is certain that it was composed mentally before that time.
In 1989, Pouzol wrote about the specific incident that inspired this poem:
“Dawn at Block 30 in Dachau” had been engraved onto my consciousness ever since 16 March 1945. Together with around 100 other living corpses, I was loaded onto an open truck at Augsburg like filthy material and transported to Dachau. On our arrival, the dead were dragged off and those apparently still alive unloaded and taken to Block 30, the death block. There, our identification numbers were written onto our chests. The night … completely naked. No straw, nothing but a piece of cloth, covered in excrement, as a blanket. The night … knowing that it can only be my last…. But I am not afraid. I have faith in my inner strength.
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