Karen Gershon, born Kaethe Loewenthal (1923 – 1993) was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

-born British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 writer and poet. She escaped to Britain in December 1938.

Her book We came as Children: A Collective Autobiography uses a number of testimonies of kindertransport

Kindertransport

Kindertransport is the name given to the rescue mission that took place nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig...

 to construct a single account.

One of her best-known poems, I was not there, describes her feelings of guilt at not being there when her parents were murdered by the Nazis.

Works

UK

Poetry

• THE RELENTLESS YEAR New Poets 1959, Eyre & Spottiswoode 1960
• SELECTED POEMS Gollancz 1966
• LEGACIES AND ENCOUNTERS Gollancz 1972
• MY DAUGHTERS, MY SISTERS Gollancz 1975
• COMING BACK FROM BABYLON Gollancz 1979
• COLLECTED POEMS Macmillan, Papermac 1990
• GRACE NOTES (with drawings by Stella Tripp), Happy Dragons Press, 2002

Non-Fiction

• WE CAME AS CHILDREN London, Gollancz 1966, republished Macmillan, Papermac 1989
• POSTSCRIPT: A Collective Account of the Lives of Jews in West Germany Since the Second World War Gollancz 1969
• A LESSER CHILD (Autobiography, Vol.1) Peter Owen 1993

Fiction

• BURN HELEN Harvester Press 1980
• THE BREAD OF EXILE Gollancz 1985
• THE FIFTH GENERATION Gollancz 1987

U.S.A.

• WE CAME AS CHILDREN Harcourt Brace & World 1967
• SELECTED POEMS Harcourt Brace & World 1967
• A TEMPERED WIND (Autobiography, Vol.2, 1938–1943) Northwestern University Press 2009

Germany

• WIR KAMEN ALS KINDER Alibaba Verlag 1988
• DIE FÜNFTE GENERATION Alibaba Verlag 1988
• DAS UNTERKIND Rowohlt 1992
• MICH NUR ZU TRÖSTEN BESTIMMT Karin Fischer, Edition Roter Stein 2000

External links

• Shmuel Huppert, Biography of Karen Gershon, Jewish Women's Archive
• Website of Stella Tripp, daughter of Karen Gershon, executor of literary estate of Karen Gershon
• Website of Naomi Shmuel, daughter of Karen Gershon, site contains further information about Karen Gershon

Sources

• Peter Lawson (2006): Anglo-Jewish Poetry from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein. Pub. Vallentine Mitchell.
• J. M. Ritchie, German-speaking Exiles in Great Britain, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2001, ISBN 90-420-1537-3.
• Literary estate of Karen Gershon (see External Links).