Paul Celan Holocaust Poem: You Were My Death

You Were My Death by Paul Celan loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch You were my death; I could hold you when everything abandoned me— even breath. Paul Celan (1920-1970) was a Romanian Jew who wrote poems in German. He survived the Holocaust, despite the loss of his mother and father, to become one of the major German-language poets of the post–World War II era. His parents' deaths and the horrors of the Holocaust have been called the "defining forces" in Celan's poetry. Keywords/Tags: Paul Celan, Holocaust poems, Holocaust poetry, Shoah, German, translation, death, breath, abandoned, abandonment, absence, hold, holding, Germany, racism, antisemitism, injustice, brutality, genocide, ethnic cleansing, horror, abuse, murder, war, World War II, world conflicts