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The book of Holocaust poems was written
by Barbara Wind, the daughter of Holocaust Survivors.
It was translated by Marlen Gabriel, the daughter of a German soldier in the Wehrmacht. His wife and their three young children fled Hamburg during the Allied bombing.
Their book is published by EOS Verlag, (http://www.eos-verlag.de/html/) a Benedictine publishing house that focuses primarily on philosophical
and theological works.
Wind and Gabriel met at a poetry reading in New Jersey. Wind was then the coordinator of the Second Sunday Series at Barnes and Noble, in Livingston, NJ. She invited Daniel Gabriel, a poet and
the husband of Marlen, to read. Marlen Gabriel accompanied her husband to that reading. When the two women met, they discovered that despite their diverse backgrounds they had many things in common. Both were German born; both had their own legacies of the Holocaust; German was the first language of both; and both, having moved to the United States, had experienced displacement. Barbara Wind was then working as a poet, writer and journalist. She was also completing a Master’s degree in Jewish-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University. Wind has since become the Director of the Holocaust Council of MetroWest in Whippany, New Jersey.
Marlen Gabriel, who holds an M.A. in English from the University of Paris, France and an
M.A. in English as a Second Language from Hunter College is a writer. She teaches and coordinates Reading Knowledge in German for Research at the Institute of Fine Arts New York University.
The poem that brought the two together was My Stolen Goose. This poem is based on a German nursery
song that both sang as children. Gabriel asked to translate it and soon forwarded a copy of Meine Gestohlene
Gans. Wind then suggested she might want to translate more of her Holocaust based poems. Gabriel agreed. The non-remunerative process, though arduous and exacting, was also illuminating and transformative. The two women
have become friends.
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