Music in the Camps and Ghettos

Music in the camps and ghettos was a documented form of Jewish cultural and spiritual resistance. The substantial documentary record includes the songs composed and performed in the Warsaw, Łódź, Vilna and other ghettos; the substantial musical activity at Theresienstadt, where the Germans permitted concert performance as part of the camp’s propaganda function; the small chamber-music ensembles at Auschwitz I and at Birkenau (the women’s orchestra under Alma Rosé); and the substantial body of post-war research that has recovered, transcribed and recorded the surviving repertoire. The historiographical work of Shirli Gilbert, Bret Werb at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has substantially established the surviving music as a documented historical source on victim experience.

The ghetto repertoires

The Warsaw ghetto produced a substantial body of original music, almost all of it in Yiddish. The principal song-writers included Mordechai Gebirtig (whose Es brent, written in 1938 about an earlier pogrom, became the unofficial anthem of the Warsaw ghetto and of Jewish resistance generally; Gebirtig was killed at Bełżec in 1942), Hirsh Glick (whose partisan song Zog nit keynmol, written in the Vilna ghetto in 1943, became the post-war anthem of the surviving Yiddish-speaking world), and many others whose songs survived because they had been performed in public and remembered. The Warsaw ghetto historians’ team led by Emanuel Ringelblum had collected substantial folk-song material from the ghetto population through 1941 and 1942; portions of this material survived in the Oneg Shabbat archive.

The Łódź ghetto produced substantial material in a similar pattern, with the additional documentary value that the Łódź ghetto chronicle (kept day by day from 1941 to 1944 by an internal archive department) recorded performances and song repertoires in detail. The Vilna ghetto, the largest of the surviving Yiddish-cultural centres into 1942 and 1943, produced a substantial body of partisan song and a documented underground theatre that performed throughout 1942.

Theresienstadt

The substantial musical activity at Theresienstadt was conducted under the German policy of permitting cultural performance at the camp as part of its propaganda function. The Germans had decided to present Theresienstadt to the international community (including the 1944 Red Cross visit) as a model camp where Jewish cultural life continued. The substantial body of original Czech-Jewish music composed at the camp included the children’s opera Brundibár by Hans Krása (performed 55 times before the deportation of most of the cast to Auschwitz), the cabaret songs of Karel Švenk, the chamber music of Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása and Viktor Ullmann, and the substantial body of jazz performance through the camp’s Ghetto Swingers ensemble.

The principal composers were almost all killed. Krása, Haas, Klein and Ullmann were deported to Auschwitz on the same transport on 16 October 1944 and gassed on arrival. Krása’s Brundibár survived because the score had been smuggled out of the camp; the work has been performed continuously since the 1990s in substantial Holocaust-commemoration contexts. Ullmann’s opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis, written at Theresienstadt in 1943 to 1944 and never performed there, was reconstructed from the surviving manuscript after the war and has been performed regularly since the 1970s.

The Auschwitz orchestras

The Auschwitz camp complex had substantial musical activity organised by the SS for its own purposes. The men’s orchestra at Auschwitz I, established in 1941, played daily for the work columns leaving and returning to the camp; the playing of cheerful music as the prisoners marched out to and back from the work sites was a documented SS practice. The women’s orchestra at Birkenau, established in 1943 under the Polish-French conductor Alma Rosé (the niece of Gustav Mahler), performed in similar circumstances and also for SS social occasions. Rosé’s death in April 1944 (officially of food poisoning, possibly of murder) was followed by the gradual disbandment of the women’s orchestra; substantial members of both orchestras survived the war and have provided the principal documentary material on the practice.

The post-war recovery

The substantial post-war recovery of the music has been the work of survivors, scholars and performers across several decades. The first substantial recordings of Holocaust music were made by Aleksander Kulisiewicz, the Polish songwriter and former Sachsenhausen prisoner, in the 1960s and 1970s. The substantial scholarly work has been the project of the Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from the 1980s onwards, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s music collection from the 1990s, and the work of individual performers including Yale Strom, the Hilliard Ensemble (whose 1995 recording Holocaust Cantata brought camp music to a wider classical audience) and the substantial body of contemporary Yiddish revival musicians.

The historiographical position is that the surviving music is one of the most substantial documentary sources on victim experience that the post-war recovery work has produced. The songs were composed in conditions where the act of composition was itself an assertion against the regime. The performances were given in conditions where the act of performance was a documented form of cultural resistance. The substantial post-war recovery of the music is part of what was not destroyed.

See also

Sources

  • Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps, Oxford University Press, 2005
  • Joža Karas, Music in Terezín 1941-1945, Pendragon Press, 1985
  • Bret Werb (ed), Songs of the Łódź Ghetto, USHMM, multiple recordings and publications
  • Richard Newman with Karen Kirtley, Alma Rosé: Vienna to Auschwitz, Amadeus Press, 2000
  • Fania Fénelon, Playing for Time, Atheneum, 1977 (the principal women’s orchestra survivor memoir)
  • Aleksander Kulisiewicz, Adolf Hitler’s Concentration Camps: Songs from the Depths of Hell, Folkways Records, 1979 (the foundational recording project)
  • Jewish Music Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, https://www.jewish-music.huji.ac.il
  • USHMM Music Collection, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog?f%5Bobject_type%5D%5B%5D=Sound