Published: 19 January, 2012

On the cover of Wanda Barford’s first volume of poetry, Sweet Wine and Bitter Herbs, are faded photographs of her family.

Seven of them – grandparents, uncles, cousins – died in Auschwitz.

“It is the thought of the killing of the children that is the worst,” she says. “My cousins. Little twin girls, five years old. They were experimented on by Mengele. They ended up, with the others,  in the gas chambers.”

She calls that first collection of poems, the first of five, her personal contribution to Holocaust literature.

They are sometimes terrible, sometimes beautiful, always heart-rending, but above all they are about exile, and flight.

Wanda Barford was one of the lucky ones who was able to take flight.

In 1936, when she was six years old and living in Italy, her father saw what was coming, and acted fast.

The family had come from their native Rhodes, then part of the Ottoman Empire, to live in Milan.

They flourished there, and lived in some style in an apartment in a grand avenue.

But one day Wanda was sent home from school. The Jewish school she went to next was closed.

That was enough. Her father packed up everything he could, and took the family across the border to Lausanne, and then on to an uncle in Paris. “He managed to fit us all into his small flat. And every night, we would spread a map of the world out on the table, and say, ‘Where shall we go now?’ It was the cry of Jews all over Europe.”

They went eventually to Southern Rhodesia, where Wanda went to school and where she grew up. By 1949 she had enough of what she saw as provincial life, and she threatened to walk to Europe.

Her parents did in fact pay for her passage to England. “It was grey and foggy, and I loved it.”

Other members of her family, who had stayed in Rhodes, had not fared so well.

In 1944, her grandfather, a respected magistrate, was among the 2,000 Jews rounded up by the Germans, herded into cattle trucks, and taken to Auschwitz.

There is much in Wanda Barford’s poetry about those trucks: “My grandfather never got there./ For defying his SS guard/ He was kicked to death on the train.”

She finds it hard to believe that there are people – even in this green and pleasant land that she has adopted as her own – who deny that this hell has ever existed. That is why, however painful, we must remember.

“Remember me…”, she has called her poetry recital, which will take place in Hampstead on the eve of Holocaust Day.

Joining her are other distinguished poets. Dannie Abse laughs wryly when he remembers his 1930s boyhood when Jewish children sang in the streets: “Austria and Romania and Russia too/All combine to persecute the Jew.”

He fears there have not been great changes. He looks around him at society today, at gangs turning on the innocent, at the attack on Stephen Lawrence, and sees what he calls the danger of crowds. “We are all metaphorical survivors.”

Alan Brownjohn knows that no one of his generation will ever forget the news that came out of Belsen and Buchenwald when he was a boy in his teens. “It seemed a nightmare beyond belief. I was sitting in the garden on a mild day in May, and I saw the headlines in the paper – and the pictures. I have carried those images forever.”

In his poem called “A Night Out”, Dannie Abse recollects those images: a young couple in post-war London, innocently going to see a recommended Polish film at the Academy cinema in Oxford Street, see what he calls “the spotlit drama of our nightmares… human obscenity in close-up.” Years later he writes that “Auschwitz made me more of a Jew than Moses did.”

You do not have to be a Jew, says non-Jew Alan Brownjohn, to feel passionately that we must not forget what happened. And Piers Plowright, who will introduce the poetry recital, says he has just discovered Polish- Jewish great-grandparents, “and connections with the diaspora that I never dreamed of”. He feels honoured, he says, to have been asked to introduce the evening.

There is intrinsic and inevitable tragedy in much of the work that will be read. But there are gentler poems, says Alan Brownjohn. And hopeful poems, too.

American poet Lynne Hjelmgaard and Hungarian George Szirtes will read some of their work, and there will be a solo violin – the plaintive sound of flight, displacement, and survival.

• Remember Me… will take place on Holocaust Eve, Thursday, January 26, at 7.30pm, at Burgh House, New End Square, Hampstead, 020 7431 0144. Entrance is free, and there will be refreshments.