Extracts

Here are some examples of Harry’s poetry which puts forward a vivid picture of the times during the Second World War…

A Night Set Cold Ablaze

…the shattered, splintered, uncut glass of window fronts and shops

Crunched crystal in the burning light of synagogues that dreadful night,

remembered to this day…

A German diplomat lay shot and the assassin was a Jew … ‘ Revenge’!

…Revenge, well planned, ran through the land taught to obey

each torchlit hand…

"Night Set Cold Ablaze’ is a poem which reminiscences the Night of Broken Glass, the day which saw the unleashing of unprecedented violence against the Jews in Germany and Austria. More than thirty thousand Jewish men were rounded up who were later sent to concentration camps.

Harry was half German. Therefore, he had to always live under a cloud of despair and worry. “Report next month!” is a recollection of that harrowing experience where uncertainty reigned in his life.

"We don’t want you people here. Why have you not yet left the Reich.? Answer me!"

No time to think, words tumble scared: "I try, I try!" my plaintive cry "I have applied, we are not rich. I’ve really tried

to get away" … (God, if I could, I’d run to-day) …

Harry lost a lot during the Second World War. He was in fact in a disturbing position where he fought for the allies and lost his cousins at the German Battlefront where they served for the Reich. Harry’s next poem is a tribute to his fallen cousins.

One Voice – No Choice

"Truth is judgment, compass-vision.

It shuns any condemnation, ill-considered, quick conceived.

Blinkered eyes, stirred by emotions,

fall from judgement harsh perceived…

It is almost 70 years since the outbreak of the Second World War. For many refugees from Nazism the memories were too painful to bear. They had lost most, if not all, of their family and friends in the Holocaust. A wall of silence encompassed them for decades. In that period, Harry continued to reflect on his experiences under Hitler and his wartime service in the British Army. It affected him deeply. He has said on many occasions, ‘none of us escaped some kind of psychological trauma.’ Over the decades, he composed an extraordinary collection of poems which form the basis of this book. He used his creative talent to record for posterity his own experiences of a horrific period of European history, responses and experiences which future generations of historians will be unable to reconstruct from official documentation.