The Caribbean Island that Sheltered Jews
How Hilde Domin turned exile, loss, and survival into the poetry that defined her life—and found her voice on Dominican soil.
ALACHUA, FL.—The Spanish Civil War of 1936, followed shortly by the outbreak of World War II, forced hundreds of European artists and intellectuals to leave their homelands. Their political beliefs and cultural commitments made them targets, while Jews across the continent became victims of relentless persecution that started with the rise of Nazism. Confronted with this terrifying reality, many families sought safety across the Atlantic, hoping to rebuild their lives in the Americas and escape the growing shadows of exile.
Among these stories of survival is that of André Breton, poet, critic, and father of Surrealism. After the German occupation of Paris in June 1940, Breton fled from Marseille to Martinique. However, his stay was brief: the island was under the control of the collaborationist regime, which Germany effectively ruled. After being detained and forced to leave, he arrived in Santo Domingo, where he connected with a remarkable circle of German-Jewish intellectuals who had also escaped persecution. Among them were the archaeologist Erwin Walter Palm and his wife, the writer Hilde Domin. In her memoirs, Hilde recalls Breton’s visits to their home in the Dominican capital as encounters charged with creative energy—moments suspended between artistic discovery and the wounds of war displacement.
Palm and Domin started their own Via Crucis in 1933, the year the Nazis took control. They met at the University of Heidelberg—he was studying archaeology, she was studying economics, social sciences, and philosophy—and soon realized that their future in Germany was not viable. Their journey into exile first took them to Italy, where Hilde earned her doctorate in Florence; then to England, from which they tried, unsuccessfully, to emigrate to Brazil, Mexico, or the United States. Finally, in 1940, the Dominican Republic opened its doors to them.
But the cost of exile was devastating. In 1941, as the Nazi regime launched the “Final Solution,” Palm’s entire family perished in the Holocaust. Hilde became his only surviving family member, and together they endured fourteen years on Dominican soil. It was there, at age forty-two, that Hilde first began to write poetry. She adopted the literary surname Domin in honor of the land that sheltered her through the darkest years of her life. Her writing—clear, direct, and piercing—became a cry against the hardness and indifference of her time. “Writing is a form of salvation,” she confessed in her memoirs.
After the war, the couple returned to Germany, where Hilde established herself as one of the great poetic voices of the twentieth century. She would come to be known as the “Grand Dame of German Poetry.” Erwin continued his academic and research work until his passing. However, the Dominican Republic preserved its most tender legacy: that of a couple who, forced into exile, found on the island an oasis amid the storm — leaving behind a trail of culture, memory, and a profound love for life.
Among Hilde’s works, “Macabre Run” (Carrera Macabra) is the poem that has moved me the most. In it, she evokes with intimate and overwhelming force the experience of exile, the loss of roots, and the inevitable transformation of identity on foreign soil. Each verse stands as a living testimony of what it means to survive absence and the Holocaust: burned ships, vanished anchors, and a strange tree growing in unfamiliar earth—symbols of life that persist despite desolation. The simplicity and power of her words resonate deeply with her message, turning poetry into a refuge as real as the one she found in Quisqueya, the Dominican Republic.
Macabre Run
By Hilde Domin
(English rendering based on the original Spanish translation)
You spoke of burning ships
—and mine were already ash—
you dreamed of weighing anchor
—and I was already far at sea—
you went from the homeland to the New World
—and I was already buried in foreign soil—
and a tree with a strange name,
a tree like all trees,
grew within me,
as it grows for all the dead,
no matter where.
