‘I was working at the Wiener Library but didn’t realise I had my own Holocaust story to tell’

One night in November 2021, Ben Barkow found himself awake at 3am, with words spinning round his head.

He got up and frantically wrote them down. These words, about walking along a coastal path, would become part of his first anthology, Poetry after Auschwitz: Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde. It is collection of 20 powerful and beautifully crafted poems, reflecting on the experiences of his ancestors on both sides during and after World War Two.

Its title may not be the most succinct, but, as he says, in order to convey his family’s complex connection to the Holocaust (more on that later), he needed to ground himself – quite literally - to the rugged cliffs of Cornwall, where he and his second wife had retired to from London just a few months prior to his burst of nocturnal creativity.

“Cornwall was the trigger for the whole thing. The change of scenery and lifestyle and walking along the coastal path in wild and extraordinary weather stimulated it,” says Barlow from his home near Penzance.

In the midst of his project, whenever he found himself struggling to write the next line, he would walk by the sea “and have the answer”.

Barkow, 68, is a historian, educator and writer, but he is best known in the Jewish community for being the former director of the Wiener Holocaust Library, a role he held from 2000 to 2019.

Founded in 1933, it houses the one of the world’s largest archives on the Holocaust, the Nazi era and genocide. The library contains hundreds upon hundreds of testimonies of survivors and refugees, but when Barkow started working there, he was completely unaware that he too had a family story from the Holocaust to tell.

Ben Barkow's mother, Friederike, with her parents, Rudolf and Charlotte Laubhardt, in the 1950s[Missing Credit]

Born in Berlin in 1956, he was three when he and his family moved to the UK. “So, I grew up in north London as a German boy, when there was an enormous amount of prejudice against Germans. I was called ‘Nazi’ at school, and I knew Germany had done terrible things. I had a huge sense of shame.”

This was compounded by the fact that his mother and father never spoke to him about what had happened to their families, so his awareness of events was limited to “conversations my parents would have with their friends, when I would occasionally overhear the words ‘Nazis’ and ‘concentration camps’.”

It was only when he was in his 30s, that he discovered his background was “much more complicated” than he had previously thought, when his maternal aunt, Eva Laubhardt, gave him a set of copies of letters, which she had written between 1946 and 1947 to her sister, Ilse Moos, who was living in Palestine.

These letters became the catalyst for discovering that one of his maternal great-grandfathers, Ernst Loewenthal, had, in fact, been Jewish. Working as a lawyer in Berlin, he was appointed as a county court judge. He promptly converted to Protestantism and baptised his four children – three girls and a boy. “[Conversion] wasn’t required, but I think he did it to secure a 'quiet life' for himself and his family,” says Barkow. He also changed the family name to the less Jewish-sounding Laubhardt around that time.

Later on, two of his daughters, Ilse, and Hilde, were drawn to their Jewish roots, undergoing conversions after studying with the highly acclaimed rabbi, Leo Baeck. In 1933, they both moved to Palestine.

After four years, Hilde returned to Germany, where she married a Jewish man and started working in a Jewish school in Berlin.

At the end of 1942, she and her husband, Fritz, on hearing that they were going to be deported to the east, went into hiding, using money and papers provided by the third sister, Eva, who had become a nun.

“A group of friends and acquaintances helped to hide them, but it turned out that someone from the group was from the Gestapo and reported them a few months later,” says Barkow.

The couple had stashed away some poison on the understanding that they would take it if they were caught. Fritz died after taking it, but Aunt Hilde didn’t take hers and was deported to Terezin Ghetto before being transferred to Auschwitz. There, she was murdered in October 1944.

Ben Barkow's Great-Aunt Hilde, who was murdered in Auschwitz[Missing Credit]

Other family members on his mother’s side, including Barkow’s grandfather, Rudolf Laubhardt, were considered “mischling” (someone of Jewish and non-Jewish ancestry) and sent to slave labour camps, but survived.

Barkow’s mother, Friederike Laubhardt, and his grandmother, Charlotte Laubhardt, who was protestant, spent the war years being hidden by different friends.

Discovering his Jewish background was akin to finding the missing pieces of a puzzle. “Now things made more sense,” he says.

But growing up in a house of secrets had taken its toll on him. “One side of my family had been victims and the other had been bystanders, but what was so disturbing as a child was knowing something was wrong but not knowing what it was. This unspoken family history left a great wound.”

Later in life, he found some comfort in discovering that his paternal grandfather, Gustav Barkow, who is also in the book and “whose family was pure Aryan as far as the Nazis were concerned”, had helped his Jewish best friends to flee. “He got their belongings together and sold them, and they were able to use the money to escape to America.”

It was in the 1980s, before he knew the story of his Jewish background, that Barkow “blundered into” the Wiener Holocaust Library as a freelancer, having studied the history of science and medicine before getting a job at the Wellcome Trust.

Poetry After Auschwitz by Ben Barkow is the first anthology to be published by the Holocaust Centre North[Missing Credit]

He had initially planned to work at the Wiener just temporarily, while looking elsewhere for full-time work.

But, burdened by the guilt of his German background and, at the time, married to the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, he came to realise that “for many families, World War Two never came to an end, and the descendants ha–ve to live with it. Because of this, I realised that there was nowhere better for me to work than the Wiener Library as these were my people - people who were also grappling to come to terms with their history.”

He persuaded his employers to take him on full time and spent some years in charge of the photo archives before being made director of the whole institution.

What struck Barkow profoundly was how the library’s volunteers – many of whom were Jewish Holocaust survivors and refugees – treated him, knowing about his German roots, but, like him, not about his Jewish ones. “They took me in and made me feel very welcome, like I was one of them. It was as if they sensed something in me that I wasn’t even aware of.”

Sometime later, the daughter of friends of his parents started volunteering at the library. “When I was little, my parents used to take us to visit a very old couple, who, I think, lived in Willesden. He was known as Onkel Bo and had the magic trick of squeezing his hands together to make squeaking and farting noises, which delighted me.”

The Wiener Holocaust Library (Photo: The Wiener Holocaust Library)[Missing Credit]

“It wasn't until decades later that I worked out that this couple were Jewish refugees from Germany who had been friends of my Mum's parents. This was confirmed for me when I met their daughter at the Wiener Library long after they had died.”

Once he discovered the truth about his family history, Barkow felt compelled “to get it off my chest” and started writing a memoir. “But I found it so boring that I realised prose wouldn’t do it for me.”

Poetry, on the other hand, which he had only briefly dabbled in as a teenager, “allows you to connect with emotions in a way that prose generally doesn’t. It is very, very compressed and precise. You can express something without completely analysing it.”

The book, which is the first anthology to be published by the Holocaust Centre North, takes readers on a journey from the stark beauty of rural Cornwall to the horrors of the death camps, while also visiting Berlin, New York, Ramat Gan and other places connected to Barkow’s family.

Ludwig Moos, the husband Ben Barkow's great-aunt Ilse, and whose story is in the anthology[Missing Credit]

Describing the collection as “not saccharine, and even brutal in parts”, Barkow says that the poem about his mother, who was raped by a Russian soldier at the end of the war and underwent a self-administered abortion, was “overwhelmingly painful” to write and took him over five weeks to get down on paper.

Nonetheless, after years of being kept in the dark about a complex and distressing family history, Barkow says the experience of being able to finally share it through poetry has been a cathartic one. “I have been able to express myself in a way that honours their memory and is a gesture of love to them. I now feel at peace.”

Poetry After Auschwitz: Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde

By Ben Barkow

Holocaust Centre North

£12.50

You can purchase the book here