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International Holocaust Remembrance Day has been celebrated on January 27th since 2005. This date was chosen because on January 27, 1945 the Auschwitz extermination camp was liberated by Red Army units. More than a million people were murdered in Auschwitz alone, most of them Jews.
The millions of sufferings caused by National Socialism and the cruelty of industrial mass murder are beyond imagination. Commemorative events show again and again how difficult it is to find appropriate words for it. But there are people who have found words. Contrary to Adorno’s dictum that “writing a poem after Auschwitz” is “barbaric”, poets in particular have summed up the horrors of the 20th century in impressive texts. Some of these texts form the basis of a poem collage in sound and image that the theater group of the Scheffel-Gymnasium developed in memory of the deportation of the Jews from Baden 80 years ago.
The film is headlined with a line of poetry by Dan Pagis: “Written in pencil in the sealed wagon”. The pupils found strong images for the poignant texts and show on a symbolic level how the circle around the persecuted people tightened, how names and faces disappeared behind numbers and were finally erased.
45 Lahr residents were affected by the deportation in October 1940. 23 of them were abducted directly from Lahr, the rest were living in other Baden towns at the time. Unoccupied France, which seemed to many persecuted people during the Nazi era to be an often unreliable gateway to freedom, meant imprisonment, hunger and illness for the Jews of Baden and the Saar Palatinate. They were imprisoned in the Gurs internment camp at the foot of the Pyrenees. Many old and weak people did not survive the first winter in Gurs. For the rest, inconceivably enough, it was to get worse. Thousands of Jewish people were taken from Gurs to the extermination camps in Majdanek, Sobibor or Auschwitz.
On the occasion of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, the city of Lahr will publish the film “Written in pencil in the sealed wagon” on its website at www.lahr.de and the social media channels.
More articles from press release Stadt Lahr (1)
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