Born out of horror, music of the concentration camps honoured

It may seem astonishing that despite the unspeakable cruelties imposed on those who were imprisoned and died in Hitler’s concentration camps, some of the inmates still found the will and the means to sing and play music.

But such was their determination to rise above the horror around them and create something of beauty, and even defiance, to comfort them during mankind’s darkest hour, that songs, choral pieces and even piano concertos were composed and performed in the camps.

Now, in memory of the millions killed by the Nazis, those works, crafted in horrific circumstances, are to be performed during a Holocaust Memorial Day service at Westminster Abbey next Sunday to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops.

Some of the work is being performed for the first time in the UK.

As part of the ceremony, the former poet laureate, Sir Andrew Motion, will also read a poem he wrote for the occasion in memory of those who lost their lives in the camps.

Sir Andrew told The Sunday Telegraph that his poem, Finis, was an attempt to recognise both the difficulty and necessity of creating art in the face of the Holocaust.

“I tried to convey the struggle of adequately expressing one’s feelings about what happened, to make sure we don’t forget and to honour the lives that were lost there,” he said.

“Adorno [a German sociologist] said that after Auschwitz poetry was impossible, but you have to try because if nothing gets said it increases the chances it will happen again.”

 Among the music at the service will be Ani Ma’amin, a religious song attributed to Reb Azriel David Fastag, a Chassidic Jew and renowned singer and composer from Warsaw.

He is thought to have composed the melody on the train taking him and thousands of other men, women and children to their deaths at the Treblinka camp. Contemporary accounts suggest that as he sang the words, others near him took up the song and it spread from wagon to wagon.

One young man managed to escape from the train, eventually making his way at the end of the war to the newly founded State of Israel, where his memory of Fastag’s tune and words were transcribed.

Fastag died at Treblinka in 1942, along with an estimated 700,000 to 900,000 Jews and 2,000 Roma people.

Also being performed is an excerpt from a string quartet composed by Viktor Ullmann in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in the Czech city of Terezín, in 1943.

 Conditions at Theresienstadt enabled Ullmann, a composer and conductor, to remain active musically. He played piano, organised concerts and carried on composing, writing at the time: “By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon.

 “Our endeavour with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to live.”

Ullmann was later transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he died in the gas chambers on October 18, 1944, aged 46 — three months before the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945.

One of the most moving pieces of music to emerge from the experience of the camps was a song written by Ullmann’s fellow Auschwitz detainee, Szymon Laks.

Laks survived by serving in, and later conducting, the orchestra of Auschwitz II and after the war wrote the song about his experiences.

The work was composed for voice and piano, and the Westminster Abbey performance will be its first in the UK.

A reworking of an old Yiddish folk-song written by Martin Rosenberg for a secret choir in the Sachsenhausen camp before his death at Auschwitz is also being performed. It was written from memory after the war by Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a fellow-prisoner in Sachsenhausen, who later became a respected scholar and performer of the music of the camps.

The service will also feature the stirring Zog nit Keynmol (Never Say) — often referred to as the hymn of the Jewish partisans. The melody comes from a Soviet song composed by Dmitri Pokrass, but the words were written by Hirsh Glik, a young Lithuanian Jew who wrote poems in Yiddish.

He wrote the song’s lyrics while captive in the Vilna ghetto in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius, where he took part in the 1942 ghetto uprising.

 Leading representatives of the Jewish faith and of other groups persecuted at Auschwitz, together with descendants of those who liberated the camp, will form part of next Sunday’s congregation.

The Rev Dr James Hawkey, of Westminster Abbey, said: “To create or perform a work of beauty in the context of such unbearable horror is … a refusal to allow the victory of death and destruction.”

The Sunday Telegraph

 24–01–2015