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Erasing Cultural Memory: Music and Discussion on the Impact of War

Campus Lecture
Janusz Korczak poses with the children's orchestra at the Krochmalna street orphanage. Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, courtesy of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot

Janusz Korczak poses with the children's orchestra at the Krochmalna street orphanage. Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, courtesy of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot

Life in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust was characterized by intense deprivation and a struggle to survive, but for a time, the Ghetto was also home to a thriving musical culture. This lecture will explore the wide range of songs. Ghetto residents used familiar music to find a sense of stability in an unstable and dangerous environment and to fight to preserve their own cultural existence.  

Cultural Erasure, Cultural Endurance: Music in the Warsaw Ghetto
Speaker
Julia Riegel, PhD Candidate, Indiana University Bloomington

Musical Performers
Connie Gitlin, Vancouver-based Clarinetist and Principal Clarinetist, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra
Orontes, Syrian Guitar Quartet

For more information, please contact the University of Victoria School of Music’s Office at 250.721.7903 or via email at concert@uvic.ca.

This program is made possible by the Campus Outreach Lecture Program of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, supported by the Anne and Harry Chinitz Campus Outreach Lecture Fund.

Related

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    During the Holocaust, the creation of ghettos was a key step in the Nazi process of brutally separating, persecuting, and ultimately destroying Europe's Jews. Ghettos were often enclosed districts that isolated Jews from the non-Jewish population and from other Jewish communities. Living conditions were miserable. 

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  • Music of the Holocaust

    Music was heard in many ghettos, concentration camps, and partisan outposts of Nazi-controlled Europe. While popular songs dating from before the war remained attractive as escapist fare, the ghetto, camp, and partisan settings also gave rise to a repertoire of new works. These included topical songs inspired by the latest gossip and news, and songs of personal expression that often concerned the loss of family and home.

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  • Warsaw

    The city of Warsaw, capital of Poland, flanks both banks of the Vistula River. Before World War II, the city was a major center of Jewish life and culture in Poland. Warsaw's prewar Jewish population of more than 350,000 constituted about 30 percent of the city's total population. The Warsaw Jewish community was the largest in both Poland and Europe, and was the second largest in the world, second only to New York City.

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