Street Songs
Street songs, a sub genre of ghetto music, emphasized four dominant themes: hunger, corrupt administration, hope for freedom, and a call for revolt. A majority of ghetto street songs were sung to preexisting melodies, a technique known as contra fact. Contra fact became necessary because composers couldn't generate new music fast enough for all of the lyrics being written.
Domestic Songs
In traditional Jewish homes, music has always been a part of the family, a religious rite of the Sabbath, and a fundamental element of holiday tradition. Some traditional occasions in which music plays a central part include the Passover and Yom Kippur. Jewish families gather for a festive meal and sing songs and prayers from the Hagaddah, on Passover. For Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), Jews chant the Kol Nidre, a mournful prayer song that asks God's forgiveness.
Read the lyrics and listen to MIDI renditions of some traditional Jewish selections. Domestic songs tended to be more expressive and explicit in their lyrics than street songs. They expressed themes of hopelessness and helplessness, death and revenge.
Resistance Fighter or Partisan Songs
Of all the songs of all the ghettos, the one which spread like wildfire, was the Song of the Partisans by Hirsh Glik, "Zog nit keynmol az du geyst dem letstn vet" ("Never Say that You Are Trodding the Final Path"). It used a tune by the Soviet brothers Pokras, and it became the official resistance hymn of all the Eastern European partisan brigades. It was translated into Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, and English. It was well known in all the concentration camps.
Read the lyrics and listen to MIDI renditions of two Partisan songs.
Songs of the Camps
Fania Fenelon, describes her experience as a member of a women's orchestra in Auschwitz from January 1944 to liberation in her book Playing for Time. Fenelon states that even though she had clean clothes and daily showers, she had to play "gay, light music and marching music for hours on end while our eyes witnessed the marching of thousands of people to the gas chambers and ovens."
Visit the Resources section to view photographs of camp orchestras.
Listen to Piesn Obozowa "Camp Song" from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum site. Requires Real Audio player.
Anita Lasker-Walfisch was able to survive Auschwitz by playing in the women's orchestra.
Terezín
Terezín (Theresienstadt in German) was a concentration camp located in Czechoslovakia that was created by Hitler as a "model camp" to mislead the world about conditions within the camps and ghettos. Many prominent Jewish artists and musicians were sent here. Because of the large number of musicians and performers, the cultural life at Terezín was very rich. This richness was used by the Germans to convince outsiders that the Nazis were treating the Jews very well, and that the concentration camps were really resettlement areas. Hitler deemed it best not to exterminate prominent Jewish people until he had conquered all of the "lost" German lands. Conditions were no better than at most of the other camps. For most of the prisoners, Terezín was just a transit camp on the way to Auschwitz.
This site on the music and people of Terezín offers biographies of several of the camp musicians and an interview with one of the survivors.
The Terezín Chamber Music Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to assuring the permanence of the music written by composers who perished in the Holocaust. Visit their site for concert schedules, an on-line store, and further information.
"Against All Odds," a performance of music composed at Terezín, by Alex Ross.
For more details on Brundibar, visit this page at the Kansas City Star newspaper archive.
The most famous opera to be written at Terezín is probably The Emperor of Atlantis, by Victor Ullman. The opera is based on the horrors of the concentration camps. The Emperor is Hitler, the Loudspeaker and Drummer-girl cast as Goebbels and Goering. The soldier and young girl are human pawns in the chaos that is war. In its original version, the Emperor had a cast of seven singers: The Emperor, Death, the Harlequin, the young girl, the drummer girl, the soldier, and the loudspeaker. It is orchestrated for a small chamber orchestra: three woodwinds, a string quartet, a trumpet, a saxophone, an alto, a banjo, a keyboard player, and some percussion instruments. The libretto is the symbolic story of Emperor Overall who cannot rule chaos on earth any longer because Death has decided to go on strike. His strike is caused by his unwillingness to cope anymore with war and famine. Death has decided to take the side of the unfortunate humans, and will accept the natural order of things as soon as the Emperor agrees to accept his own death. This opera was never performed until after the war.
Important People
Rudi Freudenfel was the director of the children's opera Brundibar, the Organ Grinder.
Mordecai Gebirtig was born in 1877 in Kraków. He worked all his life as a carpenter in Kraków, and became one of the most popular folk balladeers in Poland. He was deported to the Kraków Ghetto under the German occupation and was killed there in 1942. His poem, "Our Town Is Burning," written in 1938, became one of the most popular songs in the ghettos and concentration camps.
The life of Mordecai Gebirtig, Yiddish folk poet, who was killed in the Kraków ghetto.
Pavel Haas was born in Brno in 1899. Haas belonged to a group of Czech avant-garde composers. After the German occupation, he spent three years in Theresienstadt. He died in Auschwitz October 17, 1944.
Biography and selected works of Pavel Haas at the Czech Music Information Centre.
Hans Krasa was a prisoner of the Terezín ghetto. He wrote the children's opera Brundibar, The Organ Grinder before the war in 1938. It was used in the Nazi propaganda film "The Führer gives the Jews a City," filmed in Terezín in 1944. It was performed in Israel in 1988.
Shmerke Kaczerginski was a poet and ghetto partisan fighter of the Vilna ghetto. He collected and preserved many of the ghetto songs, which have survived today.
Gideon Klein was a composer who was a prisoner of the Terezín ghetto.
Short biography and selected works of Gideon Klein.
Olivier Messian wrote Quartet for the End of Time, a 49-minute instrumental for the piano, clarinet, violin, and violoncello. These instruments are an unusual combination, chosen because they were the only ones available in the Silesian internment camp where Olivier was a prisoner of war. The French composer wrote, "Never had I been listened to with such attention and understanding."
Leyb Rozental wrote a number of plays and several songs in the ghettos. He was drowned by the Germans in the Baltic Sea near Könisburg in January 1945.
Martin Rosenberg was a professional conductor before the war; he was arrested in 1939 and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he was tortured. While at the camp he organized a secret chorus of Jewish prisoners. They would perform for other prisoners in some of the less guarded barracks for political prisoners. Rosenberg and the chorus were deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where they all died in the gas chambers. Before he died, Rosenberg wrote a parody of an old Yiddish folk song called Tsen Brider (Ten Brothers). In the parody, all ten brothers are murdered in the gas chambers, one by one.
Ervin Schulhoff came from a Prague German-Jewish family. After serving in World War I, Schulhoff spent four years in Germany where he was influenced by the Dada movement. His jazz music was an attempt to distance himself from bourgeois tastes. Schulhoff was arrested and died of tuberculosis after about a one-year imprisonment in the Wulzburg camp.
Short biography and selected works of Ervin Schulhoff.
Victor Ullman was deported to the Terezín ghetto on September 8, 1942. While there, he composed twenty-two works, as well as a libretto for an opera about Joan of Arc. His most famous piece was the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder Der Tod dankt ab (The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death Abdicated). Just before its premiere, most of the musicians of the ghetto were deported to Auschwitz. He was deported to Auschwitz and murdered in October of 1944. Several years after the war, the opera was finally performed.
Viktor Ullmann biography and selected works.
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A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
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College of Education, University of South Florida © 2000.