Songs from Testimonies

In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews across Europe heeded a strongly-felt imperative to document ‘the most tragic page in the history of our nation’. Numerous initiatives were launched to collect witness testimonies alongside photographs, documents, and other remnants of the communities that had been destroyed. In this critical post-war undertaking songs played a crucial role, both as historical sources that would enable researchers to reconstruct what had happened and as artefacts that could help preserve the voices, and thereby the memory, of the victims. As one impassioned collector, the Vilna poet and partisan Shmerke Katsherginski, put it, the ‘bloody’ musical folklore that he and others were labouring to salvage would ‘help future history-writers and researchers as well as readers to fathom the soul of our people.’

In the intervening decades, the songs collected by Katsherginski and others have mostly been gathering dust in archives, unknown by historians, musicians, filmmakers, teachers, and the general public. This, despite having survived in their hundreds. The songs are rich and complex documents, reflecting the tumultuous historical moment at which they were forged as well as the diversity of their creators. Thrown together under Nazi internment, the Nazis’ victims represented nationalities, languages, religious beliefs, and political affiliations from across the European continent. In a world where newspapers, radios, and other forms of communication had in effect ceased functioning, songs were one powerful way for them to interpret what was happening, to record, to share emotions and responses.

The perspective the songs offer is not a retrospective but rather a contemporary one: that of victims making sense of lived reality without knowledge of what was around the corner. The songs also reflect the diverse range of responses one would expect across such a vast population. A handful are anthems of resistance. Some are nostalgic, connecting people with memories of home and community. Some are lullabies; others use sardonic humour to make light of the situation; yet others criticize the Jewish leadership in the ghettos or Kapos in the camps. They bring to light countless different voices: some optimistic, some defiant, some fearful, some critical—all struggling in different ways to make sense of a frightening and unpredictable reality.

This third volume of the Fortunoff Video Archive’s ‘Songs from Testimonies’ project contributes to the restoration and dissemination of this precious and plentiful archive. The album contains thirteen songs in Yiddish, Ladino, Hebrew, Polish, Czech, and Greek, recalled by survivors in their oral testimonies for the Archive and masterfully brought to life here in new musical arrangements by Zisl Slepovitch, performed by a group of talented and dedicated musicians. The songs embrace a dizzying array of musical styles, from Hassidic niggunim and Yiddish folk songs to liturgical music, Czech marches, and the ever-popular tango—further testament to the cultural diversity of the Nazis’ Jewish victims.

The songs testify, too, to a wide range of responses. In ‘Di bone’ we witness the despair of beggars in the Warsaw ghetto; in ‘Geto, getunyu’, the sardonic humour of Lodz troubadour Jankele Herszkowicz (‘Whoever wears a ‘badge’, / Gets the nicest and the best of everything, / Even a position of the highest order. / But if you’re an intellectual, / Without a cent, / You drag yourself around like a corpse / Without bread and without an address’). The Jewish police-collaborators who exploit their fellow inmates in Salonika are the target of the extraordinary ‘Yinete prosklitiryo ke Stavrou Voutira’ [There Was a Bugle Call on Stavrou Voutira Street]. Morale-raising comes in the form of ‘Zog shoyn lekho doydi’ [Now say ‘Lekho Doydi’], a song by a Bobov Hassid based on the well-known paraliturgical Sabbath poem, on one end of the cultural spectrum, and the jaunty ‘Pochod neutrálu’ [The March of the Neutral] by the popular (non-Jewish) Czechoslovak jazz composer Jaroslav Ježek, on the other.

These are not simply texts. By virtue of their very form, songs offer a space of rich potential for understanding and remembering the Holocaust. Unlike the piles of glasses and shoes displayed at some museums, which represent the victims only by their absence, the songs are relics of the past that, symbolically, can still sing. They cannot replace what was lost, of course, but they can speak in the present, restoring some voice and agency to those who did not live to recount their stories. They are also a reminder of the range and vitality of Jewish life in a world that was largely destroyed. There is so much here for researchers to mine and for listeners to savour.

-Shirli Gilbert, University College London, January 2023

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Singing Songs of Dark Days

The sufferings of Jews under the Nazi regime were reflected in their music and musical life. Music offered women and men interned in ghettos and camps a way to express their humanity in inhuman conditions, to escape, revolt and cry for freedom. The act of singing is a human act of artistic performance that creates another world for the singer and the audience. The 13 songs selected here were recalled by survivors telling their stories and singing – words and music – probably for the first time since their liberation. These songs describe and witness places, ghettos, camps, deportations, slave labor and other harsh circumstances the survivors had to struggle with. When these songs are sung – both now and then – they create moments of relief and comfort for the singers and their listeners.

In addition to private occasions on which Jews played music, sang and even danced, music was performed publicly in some ghettos. Street singers performed in Łódź, Warsaw, and Kraków. Professional musical performance was censored and controlled by the authorities, but theater revue shows took place and concerts of classical music were performed in several ghettos. In Warsaw, Adam Furmanski (1883-1943) organized small orchestras in cafés and soup kitchens. A symphonic orchestra played in the ghetto until April 1942, when the Nazi authorities closed it down for performing works by German composers. In Łódź, the head of the Jewish Council, Chayim Rumkowski, oversaw musical activities. The culture center was especially adapted for musical and theatrical performances by a revue theater, a symphony orchestra, and the Zamir choral society. In the Kraków ghetto, chamber and liturgical musical selections were performed. The Vilna ghetto had an extensive program of musical activities, with a symphony orchestra, several choirs, and a conservatory with 100 students. A revue theater presented many popular songs about ghetto life.

Most of the music scores and songs did not survive. But as soon as the war ended, songs were collected, transcribed and published. A few recordings of Yiddish songs were made during the 1940s – by Shmerke Kaczerginski in 1946 in Europe and by Ben Stonehill in 1948 in America. The musicologist Ruth Rubin recorded Holocaust survivors in Canada and America in the early 1950s. The recordings are kept in several archives, but most of these songs were neither performed nor recorded again. In the early 1980s, I began to record survivors of the Holocaust singing Yiddish songs in Israel and America. However, many songs were forgotten, as most of the survivors – even when recalling songs in their diaries or memories – recall the lyrics but not the music. Therefore, the oral history testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies provides a great source for additional songs to be discovered, studied and performed.

For this album 13 songs were selected for a new musical arrangement and performance. The songs were sung by survivors in three languages: Yiddish, Polish and French. The singers sang the songs during their interview with a smile on their face. Some of the songs are humorous, some realistic, and some are pre-war songs that received new meanings as a few songs are parodies (contrafact) i.e., new lyrics to known melodies are created to express the circumstances and emotions of that time.

The lyrics commented on reality while the music – the melodies – was taken from pre-war Yiddish folk songs, Yiddish popular songs, Polish traditional songs and French folk songs – familiar melodies that provided comfort and hope. Several songs in this CD are sung to a tango or a waltz rhythm, both of which were popular in the interwar period. A few melodies recall Jewish synagogue and klezmer tunes, while others are taken from the non-Jewish repertoire, as music has no borders and Ashkenazi Jews were often multilingual and multicultural.  Which can be heard in these songs.

The act of singing in ghettos and camps was an act of creation. It was an assertion of freedom as well as of life and of community. The ghetto and camp songs in this CD symbolize survival – life and not death. Even when the song-text expresses despair and fear of death, the melody elevates the text to another world, another time, and brings hope. The songs and their singing in ghettos and camps tell the story of the spiritual resistance of the survivors and the victims – of a human community during an inhuman period.

-Dr. Gila Flam, Director, Music Department and Sound Archives of the National Library of Israel

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The songs presented on this album provide a series of insights into the Holocaust survivors’ experiences both during World War II and in the period preceding the war, which were documented by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. The widely diverse compositions presented on the album form a timeline that helps recreate a multidimensional image of people’s lives and the multiple identities they carried — as Jews by faith and roots, and as European citizens — Poles, Germans, Russians– by culture. These identities were shaped during the vibrant and dynamic interwar period, which is represented by several songs on this album. The core of this collection, however, conveys the ways people managed to survive during the Holocaust, not in the least thanks to the support they gained through the songs they wrote and sang in the ghettos and concentration camps all across Central and Eastern Europe.

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