Music of the Holocaust

Erich Frost (1900–1987), a musician and devout Jehovah’s Witness, was active in the religious resistance to Hitler’s authority. Caught smuggling pamphlets from Switzerland to Germany, he was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin where he composed this song in 1942. Later deported to a labor camp at Alderney, Channel Islands, Frost survived the war and returned to Germany to serve the Watchtower Society. 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 (Adolphe Arnold) and mother were arrested and sent to concentration and detention camps while she was placed in a correctional institution for “nonconformist” youth. Liebster has published an autobiography, Facing the Lion: Memoirs of a Young Girl in Nazi Europe.

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 song, failing to grasp its coded reference to the downfall of the National Socialist regime. Disseminated outside the camp by relocated prisoners, and outside the country by refugees, The Soldiers of the Moor stood as an international emblem of spiritual resistance to Nazi oppression. The song has been translated into several languages. In English, it is usually known as The Peat Bog Soldiers. The prominent singer and stage actor Ernst Busch, a political refugee from Nazi Germany, brought the song with him when he fought with the antifascist International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. He recorded this arrangement by fellow political exile Hanns Eisler in Barcelona in 1937.

In the Vilna ghetto, educator Rakhele Pupko-Krinski and poet Shmerke Kaczerginski were members of the “Paper Brigade”—a 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. Pupko-Krinski's sympathetic Polish housekeeper, Wiktoria Rodziewicz, raised Sarah as her own. Fearing betrayal by acquaintances, Rodziewicz eventually moved to a nearby village where she could live in relative safety. After years spent in the ghetto and several labor camps, Pupko-Krinski reunited with her daughter, who no longer remembered her. Kaczerginski recorded the song in a displaced persons camp in Bavaria ca. 1946, dedicating his performance to Sarah and Rakhele. Some 50 years later, Sarah heard this recording for the first time while visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Wexner Learning Center.

Frieda Bursztyn Radasky learned There Lies Treblinka in 1943 while working in the kitchen at a coal depot in the Praga district of Warsaw, outside the ghetto area. The kitchen workers, mostly young women, witnessed countless Jews being deported from the ghetto. Many deportees believed the Nazi propaganda that the trains were headed to work camps, where survival was possible. Radasky and her coworkers knew the trains led to death camps. There Lies Treblinka was their way of acknowledging the horrible truth. According to Radasky, There Lies Treblinka was written over a period of time with each worker contributing to the lyrics. The song survives in a number of variant forms; Radasky recorded her version around 1990 during an oral history session with her daughter, whose voice can occasionally be heard on the recording.

Given the proper conditions, theater and music could flourish in the ghettos, where talented individuals, crowded together with little meaningful work to do, might be called on to entertain a captive audience. Established in January 1942, the Vilna ghetto theater mounted productions of Yiddish and European classics as well as original plays and revues based on ghetto themes. The novelty song Yisrolik, about a tough but sentimental child entrepreneur, was created by writer Leyb Rozental (1916–1945) and composer-conductor Misha Veksler (1907–1943) especially for performance in the ghetto theater. It was introduced by Rozental's sister, Chayela (1924–1979), who went on to a successful postwar career as a stage actress in South Africa and on Broadway. She recorded Yisrolik in Paris, ca. 1948. Chayela took to heart Yisrolik’s admonition “not to speak of sadness” (in the song’s last verse), and never discussed her wartime experiences with her children. The theme of her mother’s silence was treated by Chayela’s daughter, Naava Piatka, in her own musical play, Better Don't Talk.

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 of the Holocaust, but Gebirtig had hoped its message (“Don't stand there, brothers, douse the fire!”) would be heard as an urgent call to action. He was reportedly gratified to learn, during the war, that rakow’s underground Jewish resistance had adopted Our Town is Burning as its anthem. The song Our Town is Burning remains a popular recital piece that is performed at Holocaust commemoration ceremonies around the world.

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 commemoration ceremonies worldwide. This early recording of Never Say That You Have Reached the Final Road features vocalist Betty Segal, who later became a well-known Israeli stage and cinema actress. A native of Vilna and a survivor of the Vilna ghetto and several labor camps, Segal recorded Never Say That You Have Reached the Final Road for the Munich Jewish Historical Commission, ca. 1946.

Survivors in the displaced persons camps hungered for culture and were eager to restore a sense of normalcy to their lives. Entertainment played an increasingly important role as survivors joined together to form theatrical and musical troupes, some of which toured extensively through the occupied zones of Germany. Born in Lodz, Poland, to a family of professional musicians and trained on violin and saxophone, Henry Baigelman performed with the Lodz Ghetto Orchestra under the direction of his eldest brother Dovid, a noted composer and conductor. After the war, Baigelman, together with seven fellow surviving musicians from Lodz, formed the touring jazz band The Happy Boys. The band was renowned for its lively arrangements and agreeable mixture of prewar hits, light classics, Jewish selections, and original songs about the lives and concerns of Jewish displaced persons. Baigelman and his wife Gita immigrated to the United States in 1949.

Born in 1906 in Suwałki, Poland, Ben Stonehill (Steinberg) immigrated with his large family to Rochester, New York, while still a young child. In 1929 he moved to New York City, where he found work installing carpet and linoleum, and was soon the proprietor of a small floor-servicing business. A fluent Yiddish speaker who cherished his cultural heritage, Stonehill was also a devoted zamler, a collector of folklore. In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, he sought to preserve the repertoire of European Jewish songs he felt was in danger of being forever lost. An opportunity arrived in 1948, when he learned of a major gathering point for new refugees: the Hotel Marseilles in upper Manhattan. Lacking recording equipment but determined to pursue his mission, Stonehill took a sales job at a local wire-recorder dealership, and emerged from the showroom with a salesman's demonstration model wire-recorder. Nearly every weekend that summer he hauled this machine by subway from his home in Queens to the Hotel Marseilles in order to record songs and stories from hundreds of survivors he encountered in the hotel lobby. Stonehill documented an unparalleled cross-section of music then current among Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs), from traditional Hasidic nigunim (religious melodies) to prewar folk and popular songs in Polish, Yiddish, and Russian; from Soviet propagandist ballads to Zionist pioneer anthems; from songs recalled from ghettos and camps to lyrics relating the experiences of recent DPs. The inventory he eventually drew up lists 1,054 separate titles. In 1964, Stonehill realized a long-held dream by delivering a lecture on folksong at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. The following year, terminally ill, he abandoned his book-in-progress, “Adventures of a Jewish Ballad Hunter,” and bequeathed the field recordings (by then copied to magnetic tape) to YIVO, the Library of Congress, and other collecting institutions. (The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired its set from the Library of Congress in 2005.) This large and diverse collection, rescued for posterity by a modest but remarkably dedicated zamler, remains little known to the general public and the scholarly community.

Jankiel Herszkowicz, a tailor with a gift for lyric writing, chronicled life in the Lodz ghetto in a series of ballads that earned him fame—and needed income—as “Yankele, the street singer.” Herszkowicz's irreverant wit and love of wordplay are evident in his best known song, rumkovski khayim, a broadside aimed at the ghetto's dictatorial chairman, Chaim Rumkowski. (The title puns on Rumkowski's first name, which means “life” in Hebrew.) In the summer of 1944, Herszkowicz was deported first to Auschwitz, then to a labor camp in Braunschweig, Germany, from which he was liberated in May 1945. After the war he returned to Lodz, where he worked at a variety of jobs and actively participated in the cultural affairs of the city's Jewish community. Herszkowicz was deeply anguished by the mass exodus of Jews from Poland following the antisemitic purges that began in 1968. Increasingly isolated and insecure, yet finally unwilling to join his friends in emigration, the 61-year-old Herszkowicz ended his own life on March 25, 1972.

The historian Joseph Wulf was born in Chemnitz, Poland, in 1912, raised in Krakow, and educated in Poland and France. After the German takeover of Poland he was confined to the Krakow ghetto but later escaped and joined the underground resistance. Captured by the Gestapo in 1943, Wulf was sent to the slave labor camp Auschwitz III (Buna-Monowitz) where he helped organize concerts and cultural gatherings to raise the morale of the prisoners. Wulf was liberated on a death march in January 1945 and reunited with his wife and son, who had lived out the war in hiding. At Auschwitz, Wulf had sworn that should he survive he would dedicate his life to exposing the criminal history of the Third Reich. In Krakow he served as an executive member of the Jewish Historical Commission, gathering and publishing data on German atrocities. He continued this work at the Center for Polish Jewish History in Paris, and as an independent researcher in Berlin, where he settled in 1950. Wulf’s major contribution to Holocaust scholarship is his landmark series of “document studies.” Launched in 1955 with Das Dritte Reich und die Juden (The Third Reich and the Jews; written with Leon Poliakov), the series explored the impact of Nazi ideology and policies on a range of subjects, including literature, theater, film, music, and art. For many years Wulf campaigned to establish a documentation center at Wannsee Villa, near Berlin, where Nazi leaders convened in 1942 to plot the “Final Solution,” the extermination of Jewish life and culture in Europe. Few German officials were ready to support Wulf's forward-looking project, however, and in 1974, succumbing to despair, he took his own life. Wulf's vision of a memorial at Wannsee was finally realized in 1992 with the opening of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site; its library has been named in his honor. Between October 1966 and February 1967, Wulf, accompanied by pianist Friedrich Scholz, recorded nine songs at a theater auditorium in West Berlin. These include a work by Yiddish folk poet Mordecai Gebirtig, whom Wulf had known in Krakow, and two chasidic melodies. Wulf also recorded two songs by Polish composer Jakub Weingarten, little of whose music has survived, and two songs he himself had written and performed at Auschwitz III.