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

Ben Barkow, former director of the Shoah archive, has now written an anthology confronting his family secrets

February 24, 2025 12:15
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6 min read

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.