Photo Haiku from Auschwitz e simili, by Toni Piccini

Toni Piccini

The Haiku Foundation honors the work of contemporary masters of the dual art of haiga: visual image wedded to haiku. This month’s featured artist is Toni Piccini.

Toni Piccini was born in Trieste, Italy, where he lives. You can find personal information on Toni in his previous gallery.

Of this new collection, the artist writes:

It is impossible to estimate with precision the number of civilians exterminated by the Nazi regime before and during the Second World War. In the stalags about 12,000,000 were killed, of whom some 6,000,000 were Jews

— on January 20, 1942, the extermination of all the Jews in Europe was agreed upon and scheduled at the Wannsee conference

as well as other groups of people considered inferior or loathed by the Nazi regime, primarily Gypsies (Roma), homosexuals, the disabled, and, of course, political opponents (the first of which were locked up in Dachau, March 22, 1933).

The haiku present in this haiga gallery are contained in Toni’s book Auschwitz e simili, with text in Italian, English, German and Hebrew, and informatively annotated.

You can watch a video of this collection, featured in HaikuLife, The Haiku Foundation’s Haiku Film Festival, in 2021.