Sorry to follow-up myself, but I wanted to add somthing about the "other artists" on "Died in Hell", and wanted to check some facts first. Anyway, a quick Google produced this on Shoshana (whom I realised, from talking to June, was a Holocaust survivor), which I thought was worth sharing: Shoshana Kalisch was a survivor of the Lodz concentration camp, and tells of sharing it with Gypsies brought there from Austria: The Gypsies did not last long. Left without food for days, they were tortured sadistically by their special guards, who often forced them to do gymnastics until they collapsed or died ... The Nazi commander ordered squads of Jews to bury the Gypsies in the Jewish cemetery. Surviving Gypsies were deported to Auschwitz ... when we were deported to Auschwitz, my sister and I were assigned to a barracks of "C" compound at Birkenau, adjacent to the camp in which the Gypsies were detained ... One night in early August, we heard spine-chilling shrieks coming from the Gypsy camp, augmented by the sound of trucks coming and going and the ferocious barking of dogs. The elder in charge of our barracks told us that the Gypsies were being taken away. The sound of the trucks, the barking of the dogs, and the screaming and wailing of the Gypsies permeated our camp throughout the night. We held onto our shoes, our only possessions aside from the single garment on our bodies, ready to run - which would of course have been useless - expecting in silent terror to be the next ones taken away. Feeling only my sister's and my heartbeats, I made up my mind not to scream when they came for us. The Gypsies, I thought, had been screaming for me too (Kalisch, 1985:87-88). Shoshana Kalisch (op. cit.) also reproduces a song which was written about the Gypsies in her camp. "Strictly quarantined and isolated from the rest of the ghetto, the Gypsies were easily ignored or forgotten," she says. "Thus it is all the more touching to hear a song describing the Gypsies' plight by the Lodz, ghetto musician David Beigelman." Beigelman died of exhaustion in a slave labor camp just three months before liberation: (if you want the song then it's at: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/pariah-ch9.htm)
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