Dancing on a Powder Keg

Endorsed by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, as a unique document with literary value, Ilse Weber’s letters and poems, 1933-1944, record with vivid immediacy the lives of her small family during a time of increasing danger, when Europe descended from peace to the chaos of war and genocide. Ilse wrote to her Swedish friend, Lilian, who lived in London, and from 1939, also to her older son whom the Webers sent to Lilian on a Kindertransport. In 1942, Ilse, her husband and younger son, were deported to the Thersienstadt ghetto. Working there in the children's infirmary, Ilse eased the daily suffering of her patients and fellow inmates with songs she wrote and set to music, accompanying herself on her contraband guitar. These more than 60 songs and poems that trace Ilse’s last years, have been performed by various artists and ensembles from around the world, having become symbols of ghetto life under Nazi occupation.

Translated from the German, and Foreword, by Michal Schwartz

Ilse Weber's letters and poems, 1933-1944, record with vivid immediacy the lives of her small family during a time of increasing danger, when Europe descended from peace to the chaos of war and genocide. Ilse wrote to her Swedish friend, Lilian, who lived in London, and from 1939, also to her older son whom the Webers sent to Lilian on a Kindertransport. In 1942, Ilse, her husband and younger son, were deported to the Thersienstadt ghetto. Working there in the children's infirmary, Ilse eased the daily suffering of her patients and fellow inmates with songs she wrote and set to music, accompanying herself on her contraband guitar. These more than 60 songs and poems that trace Ilse's last years, have been performed by various artists and ensembles from around the world, having become symbols of ghetto life under Nazi occupation.Ilse Weber was born in 1903 in Vitkovice, in northern Czechoslovakia. A Jewish poet, she wrote in German and published children's books and radio scripts. In 1930 she married Willi Weber. In 1931 she gave birth to her first son, Hanus, and in 1934 to Tommy. In 1938, Hitler's Third Reich annexed Vitkovice and soon after, it occupied all of Czechoslovakia. In the spring of 1939, the Webers sent Hanus with a Kindertransport to England. In 1942, Ilse, Willi and Tommy were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Ilse worked there with sick children, and in 1944, as the entire infirmary was deported, she refused to abandon the children and voluntarily registered to the transport to Auschwitz, where she and her younger son were murdered. Ilse's husband survived and retrieved her poems. The letters were fortuitously discovered decades later, when a London attic was emptied.AUTHOR HOME: Vitkovice / Prague, Czechoslovakia