Orpheus Raising Hell: Memories of the late Aleksander Kulisiewicz
By Peter Wortsman
The late Aleksander Kulisiewicz (Alex to his friends) lived in a world turned topsy turvy. While others did backward somersaults of denial to compensate for the rude disruption to their everyday lives, turning a blind eye to the unsightly reality, thereby deflecting attention from themselves and feigning normalcy, Alex had the effrontery (foolish or courageous—take your pick) to stand upright and look the lies and liars in the eye.
Neither Jew nor Gypsy, Communist, homosexual, Jehovah's Witness, high profile Polish intellectual or other likely candidate for the Nazi roster of undesirables, he could, like most of his contemporaries, have kept his mouth shut and bit his tongue to still the hunger and disgust, but Alex stuck out his tongue.
“Genug Hitler, Heil Butter!” (Enough Hitler, Heil Butter!) he wrote in an anonymous jibe entitled “Homemade Hitlerisms” in a student newspaper subsequently traced by the Gestapo back to its author. He was arrested in 1939, at the age of 22, and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the grim finishing school, where he spent the next five years (or more precisely, 66 months in Hell) and found his true calling as a modern day Orpheus, a troubadour of the unutterable. In 54 of his own songs composed and first performed surreptitiously during his incarceration, Alex snubbed his nose at the German authorities to amuse and boost the morale of his fellow inmates. He also committed to memory hundreds of other songs and poems gathered from those who suspected that their own end was near. Following an informant's denunciation and the subsequent brutal interrogation, he was injected with diphtheria bacilli to shut him up for good. But thanks to medicines smuggled into sickbay, Alex lived to go on singing.
Following liberation, back in his native Krakow, once the tragic farce of the Third Reich had played itself out and amnesia was the new norm, Alex once again found himself out of step with the times. While postwar Poland engaged in a whole new regimen of compliance and denial dictated by Moscow, Alex took his cues from conscience and memory. And though the doctors at the TB clinic where he was laid up diagnosed his restless muttering as a mark of madness, more indulgent nurses took dictation. Out poured 617 songs. He once suggested that the resolve "to spit out the songs as long as I have the breath left in my lungs to do so" may well have helped him battle the deadly bacilli. The disembodied voices deposited in his memory clamored to be heard. For Alex, the will to live was inextricably bound up with the need to remember.
“There was a time when I wanted to forget about all this and live a normal life,” he confided, “but at night these songs kept coming back to me.” At the cost of his livelihood, the professional journalistic career he'd commenced following his convalescence, and at the cost of his marriage—what woman in her right mind could stand to share her husband with a bevy of bellowing hellhounds?—Alex took his music to the stage.
At one of his first public appearances at a festival in Italy in 1965, "Le Musiche della Resistenza" (Music of the Resistance), Neo-Fascists planted a bomb, which, fortunately, was discovered and defused in the nick of time. He went on to sing his songs throughout Europe, with frequent appearances in Germany (East and West), where he always emphasized that "the youth are not guilty, only the bastards who committed the crimes." Alex was not out to settle any scores. His single-minded purpose was to deliver the precious messages with which he'd been entrusted. Accepting no remuneration, except travel expenses, he sang on till death finally silenced him in 1982.
I was privileged to meet and interview Alex in Warsaw in 1975 and subsequently published a short profile, "A Singer From Hell." (1) The article stirred some interest and a reader in Milwaukee with connections in Jewish cultural circles arranged to bring him to the States for a concert tour. In New York, I introduced him to the late Moe Asch, founder of Folkways Records, for whom Alex taped and I produced the album, "Songs From the Depths of Hell" (Folkways, 1978; reissued by Smithsonian Folkways in 1993) which included historical liner notes to each song and my translations.
While in New York, Alex stayed in my parents' house. Of his visit, I remember most vividly one Passover Seder, his first, I believe. The Yarmulkah sat ever so slightly off kilter on the crown of his big head with gray hairs poking forth helter-skelter like weeds beneath a welcome mat. Our's has always been a free-wheeling Seder with plenty of laughter and mayhem mixed in with the ritual. Alex felt very much at home. His wide open face glowed with an almost boyish glee. My father took pains to explain every last detail. Alex soaked it all up and could, I'm quite sure, thereafter, have sung the traditional Passover folk songs by heart. He basked in the family circle of affection, especially that of my aunt Risa, who did not, alas, return his romantic interest. (His sober life's mission notwithstanding, Alex remained a hopeless romantic. He had once in his youth run off with a circus to follow a dancing girl he fancied and hadn't lost his eye for the ladies.)
"This is the bread of poverty," my father pointed to the matzah, the unleavened bread, reading aloud from the Haggadah, the sacred script of that holiday of liberation. "Let all who are hungry enter and eat.... This year we are slaves, next year may we be free men." The words were greatly enriched by the presence of our guest.
"Remember, Alex?" I asked. It was the same bread of poverty he'd acquired, god knows how, in Warsaw Pact Poland, and pulled out of a drawer to break with me the day we met.
Alex nodded and for a fleeting instant the veil of sadness lifted and he smiled.
Permit me a personal digression and reflection here, if only to establish my credibility as a source.
Age 21 at the time of my first meeting with Alex, armed with a faulty tape recorder and a fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation—the same folks, as I later learned, whose illustrious forebear, the founder of I.B.M., furnished Hitler with the cutting edge technology he needed to systematize the registry and round-up of the Jews and assorted other personae non grata—I spent a year traveling around Eastern Europe digging into the unhappy history that sent my Viennese-Jewish parents packing.
Among the many issues that troubled me at the time was the worthiness and worth of civilization in general, and Western Civilization in particular, in the wake of that total collapse of conscience and accountability we call the Holocaust—a manmade cataclysm unique in extent, not intent (ethnic cleansing is still in vogue). I questioned the intrinsic value of artistic creation of whatever derivation—for Germany was not the only place where leaders and their lackeys fiddled while the world burned. If the sublime symphonies of Beethoven merely served to soothe and anaesthetize the planners and executioners in between transports—the infamous Joseph Mengele, devil doctor of Auschwitz, was a great Beethoven fan!—then concert halls, I reasoned, are little better than ante-rooms to crematoria. Hermann Goering, Hitler's right hand man, was an astute connoisseur of the artwork he stole from the finest museums, which he prized along with his pet leopard and his morphine fix. The actor and director Gustaf Gründgens (later fictionalized in the Istvan Szabo movie "Mephisto") managed to tailor Goethe's "Faust" to the taste of his Mephistopholean audience. Had not Luigi Pirandello, the great Italian playwright and novelist, and Ezra Pound, America's most erudite modern bard, played for the Black Shirts?
Had not a twisted artistry itself played an unsettling role in a world order conceived by a would-be painter with a passion for Wagnerian opera; a world order propagandized by a two bit novelist with literary pretensions, Dr. Joseph Goebbels; built to last by the Fuehrer's personal architect, Albert Speer; and filmed for optimal effect and a wink at posterity by the sinister cinematic genius Leni Riefenstahl? What Hollywood studio set could compete for nostalgic appeal with the potted flowers and rural train station facade at Bergen Belsen, or was it Treblinka? Indeed, one might well read the very schema of the concentration camps as a grand spectacle a la D.W. Griffith with a cast of millions: a Roman Coliseum with Jews impersonating early Christians in the pit, or a Ring Cycle staged with wild operatic excess and wit—"To Each His Own," read the diabolical tongue-in-cheek logo above the entrance to Sachenshausen, "Work Makes You Free," read the sign over the portal at Auschwitz—terrific entertainment value for a select audience.
And beyond any question of compliance, complacency or complicity, there remained the troubling fact of the impotence of art as an antidote to evil. Even such sublime verse as Rainer Maria Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus," poetic harbinger of things to come, which I had learned by heart in college and loved to declaim, seemed to me, in the light of what followed, little more than a perfumed fart subsumed by the blast of the furnaces. (Remember, I was 21 at the time and might, therefore, be forgiven such a strident stance.)
In the many interviews I conducted in the course of my research throughout Eastern Europe and Israel with men and women who had survived the pit of civilization, I kept coming back to the same question: Did anyone pause to make music, art, poetry at the threshold of death? A few of my respondents remembered stray verses, a tune hummed, a popular prewar ditty that served as a piece of flotsam in the flood, a tenuous straw to suck. Most often, however, they just shrugged and threw up their hands. "Who the hell had time for such frivolous nonsense? We were busy staying alive!"
All responses seemed to support my suspicion that art was at best nothing but a vanity dresser full of costume jewellry, at worst a cunning camouflage for atrocities, canned music to jam out the screams. Then a cultivated doctor in Krakow, himself a survivor whose name I can't recall, suggested I look up Aleksander Kulisiewicz.
Rather than rehash and risk dulling the vivid impression of that first encounter, I quote freely from my 1977 recollection, "A Singer From Hell (2):"
"Warsaw. A hotel room. A suitcase, a singer and myself. We break bread together. The dry, hard bread of affliction. Matzah in Warsaw 1975.
Alex stutters German, "Lager Deutsch," the lingua franca of Sachsenhausen, the Nazi concentration camp in which he spent six years. His sad, soft eyes have not forgotten what they saw. At 59, Aleksander Kulisiewicz, born in Krakow, Poland, is the oldest and perhaps sole surviving concentration camp singer. (3) His songs—so many disembodied voices—are the only real survivors. Some of them he wrote; others he remembered, each with a face and a story. "Alex," someone whispers, "is there room in your head for my song too?"
"Now," Alex sighs, "I have to go back...there." He shuts his eyes. Silence. Then like a faraway echo, a deep voice floods the room. It moans in basso profundo a terrible-beautiful song. "Lullaby for My Little Son in the Crematorium." This is no lullaby to fall asleep on. This is Aaron Liebeskind's song. The young clockmaker from Bilgoraj, who watched in Treblinka while they shot his wife Edith, while they swung his little boy head first against a wall. The man who tried to sing his son awake. Who could not and turned gray overnight. Who fled Treblinka and, with a borrowed name, found his way to Berlin. Who was arrested again, sent to Sachsenhausen and on to Auschwitz. Who could not finally escape the gas.
I glance down at my tape-recorder. The spools are not turning. I look closer. They have not been turning. They have recorded nothing. I groan and feel sick in the stomach. Alex finishes his song. He looks from me to the machine. I am about to cry. He takes a deep breath and speaks without anger. "Don't think I sing for you or for myself...No!...I sing for Aaron Liebeskind." We fix the spools. He sings the song again from the beginning with even greater tenderness."
An astounding performer—though the word, "performer," with its underlying hint of counterfeit effect, belied the painful honesty of his "act" and he never knowingly tried to astound—Alex was a one-man choir-orchestra who never needed a microphone to fill a space of whatever size with his voice. He spilled his guts and gave his all every time he opened his mouth, whether on an outdoor stage, in a concert hall, a recording studio, or a hotel room.
Rage, joy, terror, revulsion, love and longing, all these emotions and more welled up in his dark sunken eyes and colored his infinitely flexible, melifluous baritone voice. The effect was admittedly a bit uncanny, like that of a medium at a seance. Alex was a macabre ventriloquist who could bring forth a complete musical spectrum of voices from the pit of his gut. Enjoined not to applaud, the listener had no other recourse but to tremble.
"Every time I sing I return to this damned concentration camp," he once wrote. "Once again I have to experience this, not only to reproduce the sounds, but also all the horror included in the songs. I must not be an actor. The line between documentary retrospection and the singer's theatrical art growing into mannerism is very tenuous. In Germany, they would say: 'What a good actor!' Nobody would believe the authenticity."
In none of the songs in his repertoire is this versatility of range and painstaking authenticity more evident than in Alex's seering rendition of "Jueddischer Todessang" (Jewish Deathsong), a work written and orchestrated by his fellow Sachsenhausen inmate, the German-Jewish composer Rosebery d'Arguto, who organized and directed a clandestine Jewish camp choir. All 25 singers and their director were later sent off to Auschwitz and silenced in the gas chamber. Alex was the only surviving witness to the last rehearsal in 1942. Suddenly SS-men burst into the barracks screaming, "Alle raus!" (Everybody out!), as Alex recalls in his version of the song, which manages to evoke, not only every voice in the choir, from tenor to bass, but also the thump of the human heart, the creak of the floorboards, the shriek of the SS and the deathlike silence that followed.
Perhaps the most striking (and for us, indeed, unsettling) feature of the songs he himself wrote in Sachsenhausen is the comic element. His own lyrics can get raucous and downright raunchy, as in "Heil, Sachsenhausen!," in which the singer, "a shit-caked Polish clod," imagines buying himself "a nice German girl:"
"She, the sweet young mommy.
Me, the stupid daddy,
We'll make a few striped babies—
Black and white and red!"
Things can also get side-splittingly hilarious, as in "Mister C," in which a mythic Mister C (Churchill) snuffs out his cigar and proposes to pay for Adolf's funeral, these words written in 1940, when the end was nowhere in sight. In the camp, we must imagine Alex as a tragi-comic clown, a Charlie Chaplin in pinstripes who could elicit tears or titters with a wink or a yowl. And while he discouraged applause at his postwar performances and a chuckle would have been unthinkable, mirth was surely the richest gift he gave to his comrades, a riproaring belly laugh that ventilated their pent up rage and let them at least pretend to be alive.
Even death could be a quasi-comic relief, an escape hatch, as he once implied in a letter:
"In the camp I had much, so much to do with death—endlessly. I was, among other tasks, a corpse-bearer. On occasion, we carted off people who appeared to be dead and afterwards, in the cellar where we stacked them, suddenly came back to life. There was nothing awful about this for us. We were so damned hardened. And in each case, these 99% dead told us (or indicated with their lips) that we should let them die, they were mad that we'd awakened them. One of them said: 'It was so pleasant...'"
In the camp, he longed for the future with the trompe l'oeil of laughter as the only escape from a suffocating present. Afterwards, he looked back in grief to embrace the inescapable and reaffirm life. A latter day Orpheus, Alex peered fearlessly into the pit, eyes and ears open wide, to retrieve in each of his songs the imprint of life as the consummate memento of love. "To believe in love in a concentration camp, that was not easy," he recalled. "But we had to believe." Thus the eerie surreal vision of a song like "The Living Stones," anonymously composed in the quarry of the camp Mauthhausen-Gusen, in Austria:
"We are the living stones
goddamned alive to hell
Though slaves we still must believe
in people, in people and love..."
You may by now have gathered that my once wavering faith in the value of cultural artifact, Occidental or other, has since returned, fortified in large part by Alex's example. What are we humans but scavengers in the great rubble heap of history, memory-burdened creatures re-building our anthills at the site of past destruction? (Every morning I peer out the window in search of the felled Twin Towers that once filled the view.) Our very DNA, the recipe of our survival as a species, is a recycled gift from the dead. Or as Alex put it in a letter to my mother mourning my father's death: "What remains of us all? Only memory."
Now Alex is the stuff of memory too. He wafts forth in the odor of musty brown envelopes pockmarked with faded postage stamps from pre-Walesa Polska. He crumbles between my fingers as I shuffle through his letters, most written in long hand on brittle acidic sheets of Warsaw Pact paper.
I experienced a sudden burst of déja vu at the library of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where I sat one afternoon in March, 2002, perusing the Polish index to the holdings of The Aleksander Kulisiwicz Collection to stoke my more than 20-year-old recollections of the man. The index made reference to a "Konzert" in New York. What New York concert? As far as I could remember, Alex's only public appearance in the New York Metropolitan Area was a performance at Nassau Community College on November 5, 1979, at which I presented and interpreted for him. Imagine my surprise when the first audible voice on the tape to which the Polish index made reference turned out to be my own.
And then it came back in a rush, the impromptu concert I'd arranged in 1979 at my Greenwich Village studio packed to the rafters with a Downtown crowd of artists, actors and writers, seated cross-legged on the parquet floor, leaning against the walls and spilling out through the open door into the hallway and down the stairs, listening, speechless, practically breathless, clinging to Alex's every sung and spoken word. The walls took a while to stop shaking. Alex himself savored the memory. As he later recalled in a letter with all the pride of a masterful performer and a hint of black humor: "Ich hab' sie fertig gemacht, nichtwar!" (I knocked 'em dead, didn't I!)
Back to the airy realm of art and letters, without which we mortals would never be able to digest bitter reality. The cow has a second stomach to help grind the grass. We depend on poetry and art.
In "The Singing Bone," a lesser known, albeit profound, fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm, a wandering shepherd-turned-minstrel finds a little white bone out of which he carves a mouthpiece for his flute or horn. But the bone won't play the tune the minstrel intends, it has its own repertoire:
"Oh dear little shepherd boy,
The bone you blow on knows no joy,
My brother slayed me.
Beneath the bridge he lay me.
All for the wild boar's hide,
To make the king's daughter his bride." (4)
No mere accomodating instrument this, no cheap pennywhistle to accompany idle chatter, no mouthpiece for a ditty—the bone cannot help but echo the cries of the misdeed that did its "I" in. The shepherd's breath, like an author's ink or a paleontologist's glue, literally re-members the dismembered.
Alex accompanied himself on such an enchanted instrument. "I don't play it," he once said of his guitar, "it plays me." Sometimes the guitar played sympathetic comrade to his lonely voice, sometimes a clown to mock the futility of his song, sometimes a taskmaster whipping the crooning slave shackled to it, sometimes a rhythmic, ominous reminder of the end. The guitar had a history of its own—several histories! Alex's accounts of the instrument's origins varied. (Every true artist inevitably weaves a web of mystery around himself to hide behind and enhance his myth.) In one version Alex liked to tell, it belonged to an old Jew, a merchant or a musician, who took it with him on his last tour to destinations unknown. "You won't be needing this where you're going," an SS-guard snickered and relieved the old man of his burden. The same guard, later detailed to Sachsenhausen, panicked as the Allied armies approached. "Hold this!" he said to Alex. The guard disappeared and Alex held on to the guitar. A somewhat more prosaic provenance might well have been the depot of abandoned objects immediately following the camp's liberation. Wherever he got the guitar, none who heard it play can deny the richness of its timbre and the haunting music Alex was able to coax out of its belly. Part Sancho Panza, part Rosinante, the guitar was his true companion in life.
Alex is gone now, but we've got his music, his singing bones, still ringing in our ears. The ordinary world keeps tilting to the left and to the right, blindly following the marching orders of demagogues of every ilk. No music meant for easy listening, these songs were written and sung to raise hell.
NOTES
1. Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine Vol. 26, No. 3, 1977
2. Op Cit
3. This remark was based on the author's limited information in 1977. Other surviving singers have since come forward to tell their tales and sing their songs.
4. Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, 1812. The translation is my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Wortsman is the author of a book of short fiction A Modern Way To Die and a stageplay The Tattooed Man Tells All, among other works. His original song "A Nursery Rhyme for Dead Children," first published in Yes, We Sang! by Shoshana Kalisch, has been sung around the world. His interviews with survivors conducted in 1975 in Austria, Poland and Israel comprise "The Peter Wortsman Collection" at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
