Josef Massetkin, Russia, biography

Summary

Josef Massetkin, was born in 1918 in Saratov, Russia. The Russian physician was imprisoned in Dachau on March 1, 1944 (prisoner number 64,734). In 1945 he and his fellow prisoner and colleague, the Austrian physician Dr. Ella Lingens, were allocated the roles of medical co-supervisors of the small women's camp, which was opened in the last few months before the liberation next to the disinfection barracks of the Dachau camp. All of Massetkin's poems published in this collection were kept in Dr. Lingens's possession. The poems were written partly in Russian and partly in French, in which the author was able to speak directly to his friends. And so Massetkin was also mentioned by Arthur Haulot (p. 149) in Haulot's camp diary, because on February 6, 1945, he had dedicated a poem in French to Haulot in attempt to comfort him. Haulot thanked him in his diary with the words: “Dear old Josef! What a heart you possess, that knows mine so precisely.”

For his Austrian colleague Dr. Lingens, one of the few female prisoners in Dachau, Massetkin also wrote a poem so as to comfort her: “Mutti kommt in Sommer” (Mother Is Coming in the Summer).

Massetkin's other poems, including “Take Me In!,” were written after the liberation of the camp on April 29, 1945, during the period when the “freed prisoners” still had to remain there under quarantine, some of them until June 1945.

Josef Massetkin's later fate, after his liberation from Dachau concentration camp, continued in tragedy, as he, like many of his fellow countrymen who returned from German imprisonment, was taken to further camps in Russia, something he himself had already anticipated. Later he lived in Gorky and then worked as a dermatologist in Perm, where he died in early 1990.

Despite the thousands of Russian deportees who were imprisoned in Dachau, Yosef Massetkin's poems are the only testimonies in Russian that, thanks to the help of Dr. Lingens, could be made accessible to this collection.