Dachau - Michael Groißmeier was a boy, ten years old when he saw the wagons.
A look he has never forgotten.
Because the farmer's wagons were loaded with half-decomposed corpses - with people who perished in the Dachau concentration camp.
“That haunts me to this day,” says the 86-year-old.
"A hand waved from a load of dead, as if it wanted to ask for a piece of bread from me":
This is how the writer described the sad and inhuman experience in the poem “Bread, May 1945”. It is one of the poems from Groißmeier's current book “Die Aschenstadt. Dachau in a poem ”.
It is not an easy read.
On the contrary: it is painful, relentless, ruthless and often brutal.
The poems in the book were written between 1973 and 2020 and have one thing in common: They deal with the Nazi era in Dachau.
Over the past few decades, Groißmeier has repeatedly dealt with the Holocaust and the suffering of the prisoners in the concentration camp in his works.
"I can't get it out of my head how something like this could happen," he says.
This is one of the reasons why he paints Dachau as a city that is still marked by the dark ages.
"Living in a city that is blackened by ashes, the word burns up in my mouth: I speak ashes," he writes in his work "Ash Poems", for example.
He repeatedly takes up the motif of ashes as a symbol of annihilation.
He also deals intensively with the subject of shame.
“I am of the opinion that we cannot get rid of a certain shame,” he says.
“It is the basic obligation of our people that the memory does not fade.” For him, the time of that time still plays an important role in his life.
This is also shown by some very personal works.
For example the poem "KZ-Friedhof auf der Leit'n" from 2020. Again Groißmeier reports there from the encounter with the wagon full of corpses.
“I smelled rotten meat.
My belief in humanity, mercy, ”he wrote.
"Time doesn't heal the wound either."
The book
“The ash city.
Dachau im Gedicht ”by Michael Groißmeier has been published by Allitera-Verlag and costs twelve euros (ISBN 978-3-96233-244-0).
