Music and song bring to life tales of the Holocaust

The music gives listeners insight into what daily life was like at the World War II concentration camps

May 6, 2000
Web posted at: 10:01 p.m. EDT (0201 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- This week people worldwide paused to honor the victims of the Holocaust, some of whom used music and song to express their lives, their emotions and the horror of Nazi concentration camps.

Don McCullough, music director of the Master Chorale of Washington, spent a year searching through the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to find material that would form the basis of a composition he called the Holocaust Cantata.

"I was looking for material that would give the listener, as I was writing this, some insight into daily life -- just routine things and the horrific things that happened -- but just some sense of what it was like being in a camp," McCullough said.

During his research, McCullough discovered a Polish composer named Jozef Kropinski who was a prisoner at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Kropinski was jailed for publishing an underground newspaper and wrote 117 songs while in captivity.

VIDEO CNN's Kathleen Koch takes a look at the work, what went into making it and the stories behind it. QuickTime Play Real 28K 80K Windows Media 28K 80K     AUDIO Samples of music that brings to life tales of the Holocaust 97K/10 sec. AIFF or WAV sound 103K/10 sec. AIFF or WAV sound     MESSAGE BOARD Holocaust historian

Another Buchenwald prisoner was fellow Pole Kazimierz Wojtowicz, who wrote 35 song texts and 52 poems at the camp. Their collaboration, McCullough said, formed the foundation of the cantata after they went through the material collected by another Polish survivor, Aleksander Kulisiewicz.

Kulisiewicz devoted much of his life after his liberation traveling through Europe to collect music and poetry written by prisoners in the camps. He hoped to publish an anthology but his dream was never realized.

The museum purchased the collection in 1992.

Holocaust experiences pepper the musical score

"Fire is burning, and they burn us in mid-life there," are grim lyrics left behind by an anonymous composer. Another lyric captures the moment of separation as a man sees his love board a train to a concentration camp.

"Eyes last meet gazing ... hands gesture, waving."

Interspersed in the cantata are readings of actual Holocaust experiences, such as those of Irena Kafka, who was wanted by the Nazis but hid until officials threatened to shoot her family.

"My mother came to where I was hiding," Kafka wrote, "and showed me the letter, begging me not to go, but I knew what I must do."

Kafka's daughter, Laura, performed in the cantata's premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington in March, 1998 -- and still has the Nazi order.

"It has the original seal from the city of Stashof -- telling my mother what she had to do, when she was only 18."

Bret Werb, the museum's musicologist, said little music was written by Jews in camps.

"The Poles and the Jews were treated differently in the camps. And in many instances the camps for the Jews were extermination camps," Werb said. "They didn't have the opportunity to make music."

For those who did, it sustained them as little else could. "It became a way of resisting ... spiritual resistance is what it is," McCullough said.

The composer calls his cantata, for chorus, cello and piano, a vehicle to awaken audiences to the fact that, without vigilance, what happened once could happen again.

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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