The collection of poems
The White Color of the Clouds Right Alongside

Hned vedle bílá barva mráčků

In December 2010, Přírodní škola (the Nature School), Terezínská štafeta (the Terezin Legacy), and Baobab Publishing released a poetry book by Hanuš Hachenburg titled “Hned vedle bílá barva mráčků” (“Right Next to It, the White Color of Clouds”). The second English-Czech edition of the poetry collection was published by the same publishing house in 2013. In addition to the poems themselves, the book includes a foreword by Marie Rút Křížková and Mrs. Madeleine Albright.

Hanuš Hachenburg was an exceptionally talented young man who was a frequent and prominent contributor to the magazine VEDEM and was murdered in July 1944 in Birkenau. He lived in an orphanage in Prague and in Domov 1 in Terezín, where he could express his emotions, opinions, and feelings. He concealed everything in little poems that were published in the underground magazine Vedem. After reading them, you will feel an unprecedented chill and warmth of the ghetto – you sense the darkness, but you also know that the sun occasionally shone in Terezín. We have prepared all thirty of his surviving poems, which were mainly written in the Terezín Ghetto in 1943, for publication in collaboration with Marie Rút Křížková.

Hanuš Hachenburg

Hanuš Hachenburg? We do not know his appearance or his fate before being deported to the Terezín Ghetto, and yet the depth of his verses sends chills down one’s spine. The poems of Hanuš Hachenburg, of which more than a third are being published for the first time, were written as contributions to the magazine Vedem, secretly published by thirteen to sixteen-year-old boys in the Terezín Ghetto from 1942 to 1944. We understand their revival and publication as a tribute to the boys who, despite the times and circumstances, sought goodness and light and still have something to say.