“Leaves of Buchenwald”
Selected poems from the book
Forward to the 2003 edition, by Stephane Hessel*
“May the readers of these poems, where a strangely serene soul expressed itself, find in them the emotion our comrade Perkins (his nom de guerre) was able to preserve up until the time of his atrocious death. We were so sure that the war was over, that it was won, that joys awaited us after all the pain, and then our fervent young resistant was felled by executioners’ blows… …these poems in which the poet has the wind playing in the hair of his beloved, something which, there, between the watchtowers of Buchenwald, we all dreamed of at night on our narrow bunks.”
*fellow Buchenwald prisoner and author of Time of Outrage (Indignez-vous! the pamphlet that inspired the Indignados and Occupy movements)