Help: Music From Concentration Camps

Subject: Music From Concentration Camps
From: pastorpest
Date: 22 Sep 00 - 09:26 PM

I am on an interfaith committee that annually puts together a service of commemoration for Yom Hashoah. I am looking for music, songs about the holocaust, but especially music and songs that originated in the concentration camps. I have text (not music) from the Digitrad for Unter Dayn Vayse Shter'n. I already have music and words for "The Peat-Bog soldiers". I would appreciate being pointed to lyrics and music, especially in notation. English lyrics are most useful to us as those who attend the commemoration will be English speaking.

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: Susan A-R
Date: 22 Sep 00 - 09:33 PM

There are a series of songs (four part for women's voices, I think, ) called I Never Saw Another Butterfly. The poems were written by children in Terezian (sp?) Not sure who set the music, but they are lovely. There are also some yiddish songs Die Nacht, Zwei Teibelach (sp? the two doves), Dremlein Veigel (Sp? Birds are deraming, about a child orphaned and sung to sleep by strangers), Ysrolich, (about a tough ghetto child) which were sung in the Jewish community at the time. I can ask Michael, who actually put together a music program siilar to this one, for details, and possibly copies of music, if you want 'em. Also, if you have access to some VERY good musicians, Messian's Quartet for the End of Time was written and performed in the Silesia camp. An amazing and weird pice of music.

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: Mbo
Date: 22 Sep 00 - 09:45 PM

There's also Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. I contains the stories of both Jewish & Catholic from Poland imprisoned in concentration camps.

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 23 Sep 00 - 05:55 AM

Here is a post I made to a thread earlier this year which might be relevant:

"We faced something terrible.Heaps of unburied bodies and unbearable stench. When I saw the suriviving Romanies, with small children among them, I was shaken. Then I went over to the ovens and found on one of the steel stretchers the half-charred body of a girl, and I understood what had been going on there." (Frederick Wood, later first president of the Gypsy Council in England, telling of his arrival at Belsen as a British serviceman.)

That comes from a book called "The Destiny of Europe's Gyspies", by Donald Kendrick and Grattan Puxon. For Gypsies the war was as bad as it was for Jews - but after it was over, the persecution didn't stop, and it still hasn't. And there has never been a Gypsy Spielberg to make a film to move the world, or strong and powerful people to call for this Holocaust to be kept before our eyes.

Here is another quote from the book, a song/poem:

U bar dikhila xoymi, oprundus,
sviymi vastinsa biri armasaya.
Liska ozistar sesi garadu
mangila pali ti inkil ziyasa.

The upright stone stares angrily
with clenched fist and a great curse.
From within a hidden voice
tries to send out a song.

The roads where we still travel
wait to hear it.
The Gypsies await the call
together with their horses.

But they are quiet, all are asleep.
Our brothers lie among the flowers
and noone knows who they are
or on which road the victims fell.

Hush Gyspsies! Let them sleep
beneath the flowers.
Halt, Gypsies! May
all our children have their strength.

(by Dimitri Golemanov.)

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: Mike Regenstreif
Date: 23 Sep 00 - 11:13 AM

Adrienne Cooper and Zalmen Mlotek have a new CD -- "Ghetto Tango(Traditional Crossroads)" -- of songs sung in the ghettos and concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Some other songs sung in the camps and ghettos that you might want to look at include:

Mayn Shvester Khaye- available on "The Well (Xenophile)" by Chava Alberstein & the Klezmatics;

Der Hoyfzinger Fun Varshever Geto- available on "The Thirteenth Anniversary Album Live (Rounder)" by the Klezmer Conservatory Band;

Schtille di Nacht- available on "We Shall Overcome: The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert 1963 (Columbia/Legacy)" by Pete Seeger;

Di Nakht- available on "Aleyn (Green Linnet)" by June Tabor.

Some excellent songs written about the Holocaust or reactions to it include:

Train for Auschwitz- by Tom Paxton, available on "The Best of Broadside 1962-1988 (Smithsonian Folkways);

Children of Poland- available on "Unfinished Portraits" by Si Kahn;

Dachau- available on "The Passing (Prime CD)" by Jack Hardy.

Tattoo- available on "Breaking Silence (Morgan Creek" by Janis Ian;

Ways to Survive- available on "Isle of Spirit (Sanctuary)" by Bernice Lewis;

Auschwitz- available on "The Man on the Ledge (Shanachie)" by Rod MacDonald.

Mike Regenstreif

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: The Shambles
Date: 23 Sep 00 - 12:42 PM

They Were Only Children

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: The Shambles
Date: 23 Sep 00 - 12:46 PM

Another Journey By Train

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: Joe Offer
Date: 23 Sep 00 - 04:17 PM

Hi - Wolfgang posted Tsen Brider a while back - a very powerful song. Also take a look at Songs about Genocides and Massacres. I don't know if it's a song or just a poem, but Se questo e' Un Uomo by Primo Levi is moving.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: AllisonA(Animaterra)
Date: 23 Sep 00 - 04:35 PM

S'dremlen Feygel is in Ruth Rubin's "Treasury of Jewish Folk Song", now out of print I think. It's a beautiful lullabye for a child from the Vilna ghetto.

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 23 Sep 00 - 05:32 PM

Here is a link to a page about the song cycle about the Mauthausen camp, by Mikis Theororakis Very well worth looking for.

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: Little Neophyte
Date: 23 Sep 00 - 06:58 PM

Thanks Kevin, that is a very good site.

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: bbelle
Date: 23 Sep 00 - 07:31 PM

What an amazingly resourceful thread. Mike, glad you listed the Janis Ian ... I'd forgotten about that one. Now, I'm going to be obsessed with learning it.

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: pastorpest
Date: 23 Sep 00 - 07:32 PM

I say thanks to all of you! I have been away for the day and just now have read the excellent posts made to this thread.

Subject: RE: Help: Music From Concentration Camps
From: Susan A-R
Date: 23 Sep 00 - 09:22 PM

When we did a Yom Ha Shoa program some ten years ago, we used songs collected by Shosana Kalish,a holocost surviver, with accompaniaments by Mordecai Sheinkman. It included Tsvey Teybelekh, In Kriuvke, Rifkele, treblinke, Dremlen Feygel, ysrolik, and Die Nakt. There's also a wonderful Kaddish (symphony number 3 by leonard bernstein for voice, piano and percussion. Somewhere, in our house, music for all of this lives, because my husband does a prohram of Jewish Culture in his role as concert pianisty. If you want info on the program, or want the musicksend me a snail mail address over my personal page and I'l do what I can. I know that I personally have Dremley Feygel and Tsvey Taybelekh in my music notebook mess.

Susan A-R