While I Am Drawing Breath

The experience of living in the Chernovtsy ghetto under the Nazis remains a dark undertow of all the poetry Ausländer wrote, though she rarely addresses it explicitly. The hardships of a life in hiding, the constant fear of Nazi terror, the horror of the concentration camps are all present in many of the poems. Other poems speak indirectly of the mother for whose sake she endured these hardships. Her late poetry, represented in this collection, brought her prizes and acclaim, and established her extraordinary simplicity as a distinctive voice in German poetry.