Heil, Sachsenhausen
Creator(s)
- Aleksander T. Kulisiewicz (Lyricist)
- Aleksander T. Kulisiewicz (Performer)
- M. Miksne (Composer)
Biographical History
Aleksander (Alexander) Kulisiewicz (1918-1982) was born in Kraków, Poland in 1918. He was a law student in German-occupied Poland when, in October 1939, he was denounced for antifascist writings, arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin. An amateur singer and songwriter, Kulisiewicz composed 54 songs during more than five years of imprisonment at Sachsenhausen. After Russian troops liberated the camp on May 2, 1945, he remembered his songs, as well as those learned from fellow prisoners, dictating hundreds of pages of text to his attending nurse at a Polish infirmary. The majority of Kulisiewicz’s songs are darkly humorous ballads concerning the sadistic treatment of prisoners. Performed at secret gatherings, imbued with biting wit and subversive attitude, these songs helped inmates cope with their hunger and despair, raised morale, and offered hope of survival. Beyond this spiritual and psychological purport, Kulisiewicz also considered the camp song to be a form of documentation. “In the camp,” he wrote, “I tried under all circumstances to create verses that would serve as direct poetical reportage. I used my memory as a living archive. Friends came to me and dictated their songs.” In the 1950s, Kulisiewicz began amassing a private collection of music, poetry, and artwork created by camp prisoners, gathering this material through correspondence and hundreds of hours of recorded interviews. In the 1960s, he inaugurated a series of public recitals of his repertoire of camp songs, and issued several recordings. Kulisiewicz’s major project, a monumental study of the cultural life of the camps and the vital role music played as a means of survival for many prisoners, remained unpublished at the time of his death. He toured both Europe and the United States performing concerts of his works and the works of other Holocaust survivors until about 1980. He died in Kraków, Poland, on March 12, 1982. His archive is the largest extant collection of music composed in the camps.
Scope and Content
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 relations between German "Aryans" and Jews had been illegal since the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935; further decrees enacted during the war also outlawed sexual relations between Germans and (primarily Slavic) prisoners of war, the offenders being subject to stringent penalties. Whether Eliza Zahn was, in fact, tried for "race defilement" remains unclear. To the Gestapo and the camp command, the act of abetting a prisoner to communicate illegally with outsiders may have been the more serious crime. But to Kulisiewicz the charge was Rassenschande, and the incident provoked him to skewer through song many assumptions dear to the Nazi German world view. The German term Kulturkampf ("culture war"), heard in the refrain, originally described the 19th century political struggle between the German government and the Catholic Church; Kulisiewicz uses the word to denote the Nazi effort to destroy Polish culture.
Note(s)
For more information, refer to the Aleksander Kulisiewicz collection of sound recordings in RG-91 or RG-55 at USHMM.
Subjects
- Sachsenhausen.
Genre
- Music.
- Recorded Sound