Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on 27 January: here is a list of 10 songs to remember the horror of the Shoah, of the Holocaust, through music.
There is no anger here, no resignation, no desire for revenge. There is only the duty to rediscover and recount, again and again, stories that, were they to be lost, would be a tragedy. LifeGate can do this through music, by presenting some songs about the Shoah.
A Polish musician, Jozef Kropinski was born in 1913 in Berlin but returned to Poland, where he completed his artistic education. On 7 May 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo for publishing illegal newspapers and sent to Auschwitz. During more than four years of imprisonment in various concentration camps he composed hundreds of poems and songs about the Holocaust. At Buchenwald he befriended the writer Kazimierz Wojtowicz, and together they completed this remarkable musical notebook of Auschwitz and Buchenwald — over 100 musical pieces, including songs about the Shoah, a tango for string quartet, and pieces for piano; a genuine patrimony of humanity. After the war he moved to Breslau, but his work, apart from a 1962 revival when his compositions were published by the Berlin Academy, was gradually forgotten.
From a well-to-do family, the story of this Italian composer is enriched by his passion for folk songs: around 1902 he began systematically collecting the songs of the Cavoretto hills, using some of them, for the first time, in the Danze piemontesi op. 31, performed in 1903 under Toscanini's direction at the Teatro Vittorio Emanuele. Over the course of many years of research that was not always straightforward, the Turin-born musician collected a large number of nearly vanished songs (over 500 melodies and variants), the memory of which only a few "old women" still preserved. His Jewish origins made him a target of Fascist persecution. On 16 May 1944, as the Fascist police were about to arrest him at the Ospedale Mauriziano in Turin — where he had taken refuge with his sister to escape the racial laws — he died of a heart attack.
When it comes to the Nazi persecutions suffered by musicians, the story of composer Gideon Klein is exemplary above all others: he died at the age of 25 in a concentration camp after spending the last four years of his life between the camps of Terezin and Auschwitz. His passion for music allowed this Czechoslovak pianist and composer, even during his imprisonment, to play and compose in inhuman conditions. As an organiser of cultural life in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, he died in obscure circumstances during the liquidation of the Fürstengrube camp in January 1945. He was not the only musician of renown at the time to be interned. Among many others with him were Erwin Schulhoff, a Czechoslovak composer and pianist who died in the Weißenburg camp in August 1942, Pavel Haas, Hermann Leopoldi, Hans Krasa, who died at Auschwitz at the age of 45, the Italian singer Frida Misul, and the Austrian Viktor Ullman, who composed twenty works in the concentration camps before ending up in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Few people know that as early as the spring of 1933, with Hitler barely installed in power, there were already at least three camps in full operation in Germany — described as prison or labour camps, transit camps, assembly camps — at Breitenau, Dachau and Oranienburg. They were filled above all with Communist leaders and militants, and opposition figures, rounded up by the SA following the Reichstag fire. Eisler composed the first movements of the Deutsche Sinfonie, Op. 50 in the immediate aftermath of those events. Awarded a prize at the 15th edition of the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, he was promised that his compositions would be performed at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition. That never happened. The Nazi regime, by pressuring the French government, had the performance cancelled. The Deutsche Sinfonie, Op. 50 was performed in its entirety in a studio recording for the first time only in 1995, by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Lothar Zagrosek.
When the Nazis came to power, Erich Itor Kahn, a great pianist, was relieved of all his positions and forced to flee to Paris with his wife, Frida Rabinowitch. In 1939, at the outbreak of the world conflict, he was interned as an "enemy alien." When Germany occupied France, he found himself already a prisoner. In the camps at Blois and Milles he composed the music for soprano and piano of Psalm XIII, the psalm of David, whose opening lines read "How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?" Another composition by Kahn during his French imprisonment was the hymn "Nenia judaeis qui hac aetate perierunt" for piano and cello — an utterly prophetic funeral lament, given that it was written between 1940 and 1941, when the Holocaust had not yet been carried out, but all its ominous warning signs were evidently already clear — to those who wished to see them. Having escaped to the United States, he composed his celebrated "Ciaccona dei tempi di guerra" for piano in 1943.
The rise of Nazism also marked a period of crisis for Arnold Schoenberg, founder of the Vienna school and a great innovator; Hitler, a devotee of Wagnerian music, opposed him to the point of forcing him to leave Germany, first for France and subsequently for Boston, in the United States. Among his masterpieces is the work of music about the Holocaust entitled A Survivor from Warsaw, written in 1947 with the express intention of evoking the persecution of the Jews. A dramatic composition for narrator, chorus and orchestra. In act 5 it is said: "It was then that I heard the sergeant shouting: 'Count off!' They began slowly and irregularly. One, two, three, four — 'Attention!' the sergeant shouted again, 'Faster! Start all over again! In one minute I want to know how many I have to send to the gas chamber!'".
Luigi Dallapiccola composed the score for Il Prigioniero between January 1944 and May 1948. In truth, the first ideas for a work set in the world of prisons had their origin in the impression made on him by his reading, in 1939, of the story La torture par l'esperance by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, which was subsequently transformed in force by the European political events of those years and, in particular, by the proclamation of the racial laws. Against these, the musician set first and foremost the cycle of compositions known as the Canti di prigionia — three prayers by as many famous prisoners drawing on Jewish songs about the Shoah — to which he coupled the opera Il Prigioniero in an attempt to raise questions (more pertinent than ever, then as now) about the value of human freedom. It received its première in Florence, at the Teatro Comunale, on 20 May 1950.
The voice of Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a survivor of Sachsenhausen, still conveys hope, despite the horror he witnessed. An amateur singer at the time of his imprisonment, Kulisiewicz composed 54 songs over approximately six years in the concentration camp. After liberation, he recalled and transcribed both those songs and ones he had learnt from fellow prisoners, dictating hundreds of pages of music and lyrics to the nurse who was caring for him in a Polish hospital. The agony that seeps through his songs is unmistakable, yet the beauty of musical expression helps to counterbalance the suffering recounted here, and endured by millions of people just as it was by him. The album, released in 1979, is sung in German, Polish, Ukrainian and Yiddish.
Steve Reich was born in 1936 in New York to a Jewish father. While wars and the Holocaust were raging in Europe, he was compelled to make frequent train journeys between New York and Los Angeles owing to his parents' divorce. Many years later, celebrated as one of the fathers of minimalist music, Reich reflected on the fact that the train journeys of his childhood, however nightmarish in his memory, were nothing compared to the routes to the concentration and extermination camps on which so many children like him — European Jews — were crammed. From this reflection came the album Different Trains, whose texts are interviews with people who lived through the years surrounding the war. In the second movement, Paul, Rachel and Rachella — three Jews who survived the Extermination in Europe — speak of the Nazi occupation, of antisemitism at school (the "black crows", that is, the Jews) and of deportation to the camps. In the third, the survivors who took refuge in America, left with the pain and the irrepressible memory of the evil they suffered, and of a young Jewish girl whose splendid voice enchanted even the Nazi soldiers.
The music of Goran Bregovic enriches this film by Romanian director Radu Mihaileanu, a tragicomedy of a journey made under the triple banner of Yiddish humour, a healthy narrative energy and a rhythm of irresistible gaiety. In 1941, to avoid deportation, the inhabitants of a Romanian shtetl assemble a fake railway convoy on which some dress up as German soldiers, in the mad attempt to reach the border with the USSR and from there continue to Palestine and Eretz/Israel, the promised land. They succeed, after tragicomic adventures including an encounter with a group of Romani people who, travelling by lorry, have had the same idea. Italian dialogue by Moni Ovadia. The director manages to stage the dehumanising effects of ideology and power on the individual, showing how a comedy can be more tragic than tragedy itself. As he himself states: "Humour as a Jew is what made me survive, what saved our life and our memory."