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Memory

Music amongst Displaced Persons

The Displaced Persons’ camps were home to a diverse range of musical activities. Surviving victims of the Nazi genocide used music as a means to chronicle what they had experienced, to raise morale, and to imagine possible futures after the catastrophe.

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Music for Memorial Events

Music has played a part in Holocaust commemoration from even before the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27 January 1945. Jewish Historical Commissions in Germany and Poland gathered songs written during the Holocaust, preserving them in written or recorded format.

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Babi Yar memorial

BABI YAR In 1962, the Russian poet Evgeny Evtushenko visited the site of Babi Yar, a deep ravine northwest of Kiev, where in September 1941 an estimated 70,000 Jews were executed by Nazi soldiers. Evtushenko returned to his hotel room and immediately penned a memorial poem in which the first line – 'There are no monuments over Babi Yar, the steep precipice, like a rough-hewn tomb'.

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Different Trains - Steve Reich

Steve Reich selected sound clips through digital sampling and then arranged them into a semi-coherent narrative, which divides into three movements: 'America, before the war', 'Europe, during the war' and 'After the war'. In all cases, the spoken testimonies are accompanied by a string quartet.

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Bergen-Belsen DP Camp

The Kazet-Theater (Concentration Camp Theatre) was headed by the actor and director Sammy Feder, and consisted of up to 50 actors, some of whom had already gathered experience and worked with Feder in the ghetto Bendin and the concentration camp Bunzlau.

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In the tumultuous years following the Holocaust, music emerged as a powerful force for displaced survivors and a means for the world to come to terms with the unfathomable. This section explores the ways in which music shaped the immediate post-war experience, from displaced persons camps to later memorialisation.

We examine how music provided comfort and a means of maintaining religious and secular cultural identities for displaced survivors. We'll look at the emergence of commemorative compositions that attempted to come to terms with the scale of the genocide. Music is a powerful and important part of memorialisation events honouring the victims of the Holocaust and the many ways music documents the Holocaust.

All peopleComposer

David Botwinik

Composer

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.

Mieczysław Weinberg

Composer

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 Gnessin

Composer

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".

Steve Reich

Composer

In Different Trains (1988), Steve Reich presents a semi-autobiographical account of the Holocaust, electronically interweaving his memories as a Jewish child in the 1940s with those of Holocaust survivor children who later recorded their testimonies.

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All articlesMemory
Memory

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.

Politics & Propaganda
Memory

Jojo Rabbit

Explores the coupling of visual and musical symbolism, focusing on how the film Jojo Rabbit uses popular music and visual and vocal icons of the Holocaust.

Memory

Music amongst Displaced Persons

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.

Memory

Music in Nazi Camps - Exhibition Review

A review of the Paris exhibition, Le Musique dans les camps nazis, curated by Elise Petit.

Memory

Music in the Bergen-Belsen DP-camp

British forces established a DP camp in Belsen, which existed until 1950. Concerts, theatre, dance, folk music and other genres of entertainment flourished.

Memory

On a heym, on a dakh ♫

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.

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All music Music after the Holocaust
Name
Artist
Category
Time
Lyrics

1940.
On my birthday
The Germans walked-walked into Holland
Germans invaded Hungary
I was in 2nd grade
I had a teacher
A very tall man, his head was completely plastered smooth
He said, "Black Crows-
Black Crows invaded our country many years ago"
And he pointed right at me
No more school
You must go away
And she said, "Quick, go!"
And he said, "Don't breathe"
Into the cattle wagons
And for four days and four nights
And then we went through…

The idea for the piece comes from my childhood. [Due to my parent’s divorce], I travelled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942. […] While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride on very different trains. With this in mind, I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation.

'Heveti shalom aleykhem' (I bring you greetings of peace), also often titled in the plural, is one of the best-known and -loved Hebrew folk songs. In this rare recording it is sung by surviving Polish children in postwar France, in a recording taken by the Latvian-American psychologist David Boder in September 1946.

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