"Music of the Holocaust" web exhibition

Identifier: irn721911
Language of Description: English
Level of Description: Collection
Source: EHRI Partner

Web Source

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn721911

Scope and Content

Songs included in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's web exhibition, "Music of the Holocaust" https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/music/. Music was heard in many ghettos, concentration camps, and partisan outposts of Nazi-controlled Europe. While popular songs dating from before the war remained attractive as escapist fare, the ghetto, camp, and partisan settings also gave rise to a repertoire of new works. These included topical songs inspired by the latest gossip and news, and songs of personal expression that often concerned the loss of family and home. Classical music—instrumental works, art songs, opera—was also produced and performed during this period, notably by prisoners at the Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto and transit camp in Czechoslovakia, as well as in several other ghettos and camps. For many victims of Nazi brutality, music was an important means of preserving and asserting their humanity. Such music—particularly the topical songs—also serves as a form of historical documentation. Like “audio snapshots,” these works offer a telling glimpse into the events and emotions that their creators and original audiences experienced firsthand.

Genre

Collection

This description is derived directly from structured data provided to EHRI by a partner institution. This collection holding institution considers this description as an accurate reflection of the archival holdings to which it refers at the moment of data transfer.

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Displaying items 1 to 20 of 35

Khotsh Though
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671443
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
The song was written by Zelik Barditshever (1898-1937), an itinerant teacher, poet, and playwright from Belts, Bessarabia (present-day Bălții, Moldava). Collected by the Yiddish writer Leibu Levin, it first appeared in a volume of Barditshever's works published in Czernowitz, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) in 1939.
A Child of Our Time
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671444
- English
- 1941
- Updated 7 months ago
English composer Michael Tippett (1905-1997), a committed pacifist, conceived the oratorio A Child of Our Time after he learned of the November 1938 Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) pogrom in Germany and Austria. Wishing to communicate a universal message of tolerance, Tippett omitted any reference to current events in his libretto. He drew musical inspiration from baroque-era composers Bach and Handel and from African American spirituals. A Child of Our Time, named after a novel by anti-Nazi writer Odon von Horwath, was completed in 1941 and first performed in London in March 1944. Th...
Undzer shtetl brent Our Town Is Burning
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671445
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
Mordecai Gebirtig, born in Krakow in 1877, made his living as a carpenter but was celebrated throughout the Yiddish-speaking world as a folk poet and songwriter-the "troubadour of the Jewish people." During World War II, he continued to write and perform, using the medium of song to chronicle his experiences under the German occupation. In June 1942, Gebirtig, age 65, was shot and killed by German soldiers when he refused to comply with a deportation order. Gebirtig wrote Our Town is Burning in response to a 1936 pogrom in the Polish town of Przytyk. In retrospect, the song seems prophetic ...
Czarny Böhm Black Böhm
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671446
- English
- 1942
- Updated 7 months ago
Wilhelm Böhm, nicknamed "Czarny" (black) Böhm, was among the more grisly denizens of Sachsenhausen camp. Short and hunchbacked, with long, ape-like arms, Böhm, a camp Kapo, was also distinctly charred in appearance due to his work as a cremation specialist. Wildly enthusiastic about his job, Böhm had been known to cry out to passing prisoners, "Come to Böhm! You'll surely be coming my way soon, so why not now?" Kulisiewicz reports that in 1941-1942 Böhm helped cremate some 18,000 Soviet prisoners of war murdered at Sachsenhausen. He is thought to have died of a contagious infection in 1943....
Dos Zangl The Cornstalk
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671447
- English
- 1943
- Updated 7 months ago
Hirsh Glik, "the partisan poet," created the Polish folk song "The Cornstalk" in early 1943 at the Lithuanian forced labor camp Biała-Waka, where he worked mining peat from the surrounding swampland. The song's romantic, optimistic lyrics-while seemingly incongruous-greatly pleased an audience in need of escapist fare. When the Germans shut down Biała-Waka, Glik and other prisoners were sent to the nearby Vilna ghetto, and the song became popular there as well. Stonehill's recording captures a lively performance by an unnamed Yiddish folk duo (a power fluctuation resulted in the loss of a f...
Heil, Sachsenhausen
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671448
- English
- 1943
- Updated 7 months ago
Kulisiewicz recalls that a local tragedy sparked the creation of "Heil, Sachsenhausen." The event took place in July 1943 in the Sachsenhausen subcamp of Oranienburg, where Hans Zahn, director of the camp motor pool, and his 15-year-old daughter Eliza were arrested for forwarding letters from a Polish prisoner. Accused of having had "intimate contacts" with Poles, Eliza was interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo. She died soon afterward, a possible suicide. "Heil Sachsenhausen" protests Nazi "racial" laws, specifically the ban on Rassenschande ("race defilement" or "mixing"). Sexual relat...
Dos einte kind The Lonely Child
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671449
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
In the Vilna ghetto, educator Rakhele Pupko-Krinski and poet Shmerke Kaczerginski were members of the "Paper Brigade"- group of intellectuals who risked their lives to conceal Vilna's Judaic treasures from Nazi vandals. After learning that Pupko-Krinski had hidden her child, Sarah, outside of the ghetto, Kaczerginski wrote The Lonely Child as a tribute to Sarah and all Jewish children who had been forced into hiding by the war. The poem was set to music by composer Yankl Krimski, a theater artist who is believed to have been murdered in an Estonian labor camp toward the end of the war. Pupk...
Baym geto toyerl By the Ghetto Gate
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671450
- English
- 1941
- Updated 7 months ago
A topical song about food smuggling in the Kovno ghetto, By the Ghetto Gate draws on the melody of the much-loved "Yiddish alphabet song," Oyfn pripetshik (At the Hearth). Lyricist Avrom Akselrod, a refugee who had fled Poland at the start of World War II, wrote a number of parodic verses in the ghetto. He was killed in July 1944, when German militiamen set fire to his underground hiding place.
From Land to Land
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671451
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
Joseph Wulf sings "From Land to Land" (in Yiddish) by Jakub Weingarten
Aušvits Auschwitz
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671452
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
Between 1933 and 1945, Roma (Gypsies) suffered greatly as victims of Nazi persecution and mass murder. Building on long-held prejudices, the Nazi regime viewed Gypsies both as "asocials" (outside so-called normal society) and as "racial inferiors"-believed to threaten the biological purity and strength of the "Aryan" majority. During World War II, the Nazis and their collaborators killed up to 220,000 Gypsy men, women, and children across German-occupied Europe. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi killing center, was the site of a special Gypsy "family camp." Established in February 1943, ...
Dort baym breg fun veldl At the Edge of a Forest
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671453
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
Strange and wonderful is the picture before me: I see heroes made hard as oaks by life in the forest, strong men who wouldn't blink an eye when the time came to kill, slaughter, destroy. And here in the twilight, they turn sentimental as women, and pour their feelings of love and longing into songs they created themselves or had refashioned from pre-war tunes. Vanya sang more passionately than the rest-although many had finer voices. From him, I learned a song that I now sing all the time. I even translated it, with slight changes, into Yiddish. Now our other comrades sing it constantly, to...
Hunger-marsh Hunger March
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671454
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
Hunger March commemorates the food riots that took place during the summer of 1940 in the Łódź ghetto. Staged within the first few months of the ghetto's existence, these demonstrations on behalf of the starving populace caught the Jewish administration by surprise. German forces, assisted by the Jewish police, quelled the riots, but chairman Rumkowski soon yielded to the protesters' demands and created a Department of Relief to help support the poorest households. (It is Rumkowski who is addressed in song stanza 2; his reply appears in stanza 3.) The present recording of Jankiel Herszkowic...
Dort in dem lager There in the Camp
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671455
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
Recorded by Dr. David Boder in 1946 at a Displaced Persons Camp near Tradate, Italy.
Die Moorsoldaten The Soldiers of the Moor
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671456
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
The 5,000 inmates of the Börgermoor concentration camp, mostly political prisoners, labored in the wetlands near the Dutch border, extracting peat (a fossil fuel) from the marshy soil. To add to their ordeal, Nazi guards would force the prisoners to sing cheerful songs during their two-hour march to and from the moor. A group of prisoners retaliated by writing a song that truthfully reflected the workers' situation. Introduced in August 1933, The Soldiers of the Moor, with its catchy melody and evocative lyrics, became an immediate hit among camp inmates. The camp guards also enjoyed the so...
Repeta Second Helping
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671457
- English
- 1941
- Updated 7 months ago
Aleksander Kulisiewicz recalled that mealtimes at Sachsenhausen offered camp Kapos a special opportunity to torment their fellow prisoners. Second Helping evokes one such scene, where a near-starved prisoner is forced not only to consume rotting turnips, but also to endure beatings while doing so. Kulisiewicz wrote the song while quarantined with typhus, and noted that it became "enormously popular" in the camp. Performed with guitar accompaniment, it would conclude with a so-called "Parade March"- a burlesque promenade around an imaginary cauldron of turnips. Music by: "Precz, precz od nas...
Fest steht Stand Fast
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671458
- English
- 1942
- Updated 7 months ago
Fest steht, reworked in English as Forward, You Witnesses, is among the most popular of Jehovah's Witness hymns. This performance, evoking some of the song's original spirit, took place under Frost's direction at an event held in Wiesbaden, Germany, during the 1960s. Simone Arnold Liebster, who sings the English version of the song, was born in 1930 in Mulhouse, French Alsace. After the incorporation of Alsace into the German Reich during World War II, Liebster's family suffered increasing harrassment from the Nazis for following the Jehovah's Witness faith. Eventually both her father (Adol...
Moja brama My Gate
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671459
- English
- 1944
- Updated 7 months ago
Moja Brama is Kulisiewicz's reminder of the sadistic "sporting competitions" held at Sachsenhausen. During these sessions, SS-men commanded prisoners to perform the so-called "Indian Dance," forcing inmates to quickly and repeatedly raise their arms, stare at the sky, twist their bodies, drop to the ground, and stand up again. Many prisoners became dizzy or ill or fell exhausted after such "exercise." Kulisiewicz's coping mechanism was to focus on the camp gate, much as a ballet dancer might spot a distant object to remain balanced while turning. The image of the gate burned into Kulisiewic...
Kartofl Potato
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671460
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
Hunger is the theme of many songs from Łódź ghetto. In Potato, Herszkowicz, characteristically finding farce within misfortune, addresses the precious vegetable in the mock-intimate tones of a badkhn (Jewish traditional wedding entertainer) crooning to an anxious bride. The ghetto audience would have understood the line "Instead I'll get a visa" (stanza 2) to mean "Instead, I'll go to the graveyard," or, still less euphemistically, "I'll starve to death." Herszkowicz recorded the song for Polish radio in 1965.
Weingarten
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671461
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
Joseph Wulf narrates (in Yiddish) a short biographical statement about Weingarten.
Zog nit keynmol az du geyst dem letstn veg Never Say That You Have Reached the Final Road
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- irn671462
- English
- Updated 7 months ago
News of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April 1943 inspired the Vilna poet and underground fighter Hirsh Glik (ca. 1921-ca. 1944) to write Never Say That You Have Reached the Final Road (the Yiddish title is often shortened to Zog nit keynmol). With a melody taken from a march tune composed for the Soviet cinema, the song spread quickly beyond the ghetto walls and was soon adopted as the official anthem of the Jewish partisans. Glik was later deported to an Estonian labor camp and is presumed to have lost his life during an escape attempt. His song remains a favorite at Holocaust commemoratio...