Deggendorf Songbook
The illustrated ‘Deggendorf Songbook’ is both a fascinating artefact and a visual record of cultural life and social rehabilitation in the DP Camps.
David Botwinik is a composer of Yiddish music and a music teacher. At the age of almost 13, he began his studies at the Yidisher muzik-institut conservatory in Vilna. Later, he studied at the Conservatorio di Musica Santa Cecilia, Rome, Italy.
The prolific Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) wrote 22 symphonies, 17 string quartets, 7 operas, 6 concertos, 3 ballets, 30 sonatas and more than 200 songs as well as 60 film scores and incidental music for theatre and circus.
Mikhail Fabianovich Gnessin was a Russian Jewish composer and teacher. Gnessin's works "The Maccabeans" and "The Youth of Abraham" earned him the nickname the "Jewish Glinka".
The illustrated ‘Deggendorf Songbook’ is both a fascinating artefact and a visual record of cultural life and social rehabilitation in the DP Camps.
The Displaced Persons’ camps of occupied post-war Europe were home to a diverse range of music used as a means to chronicle what they had experienced.
British forces established a DP camp in Belsen, which existed until 1950. Concerts, theatre, dance, folk music and other genres of entertainment flourished.
On a heym, on a dakh (Without a home, without a roof) is a song that the 19 year old survivor, Ludwig Hamburger, learned while interned in Buchenwald.
The end of WWII presented ORT and other relief organisations with many challenges. As many as 80,000 Jews passed through ORT training projects after the war.