“There’s No Life like at Auschwitz!”

Courtesy of AHRS

 

by M. Moore in Rome and M. Goslett

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1547303/Saved-from-scraps,-music-of-the-camps.html

 
Scribbled in notebooks, diaries and even on pieces of lavatory paper, they provide a remarkable history of the music played and sung by the victims of the Holocaust.

 
Scores for thousands of waltzes, tangos, operas and folk songs will soon be made available to the public, thanks to the dedication of Francesco Lotoro, a professional pianist who for 16 years has been scouring Europe's capitals to amass his collection. [Emma: I thought they were slaving 24-7?]

Italian composer Francesco Lotoro shows sheets of music written in concentration camps [Emma: Where are the sheets of music from Siberia?]

 
Mr Lotoro, 42, stumbled across his first piece of Holocaust music on a trip to Prague in 1991. "I was interested and decided to bring some back with me," he said. "In the end, I had to buy a new suitcase because I found 300 works.  Much of the music is sad and plaintive. The lyrics of one song by Josef Kropinski read: "In Buchenwald, the birch trees rustle sadly, as my heart sways languishing in woe." Despite the privations of life, there are several upbeat songs and plenty of wry Jewish humour. "There's no life like life at Auschwitz!" read the lyrics to another song.

 
Much of Mr Lotoro's collection comes from Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, a concentration camp used by the Third Reich as a propaganda exercise to hide its extermination plans. Consequently, music was allowed, and orchestras and bands were permitted to perform. There was even a jazz band called the Ghetto Swingers.

 
Nevertheless, 33,000 of the 140,000 Jews who were sent there died, and 90,000 were sent to other camps, where many also perished. One musician that Mr Lotoro discovered had been interned there was Rudolf Karel, a Czech composer arrested for taking part in the resistance in Prague.

Despite suffering from dysentry, he used lavatory paper to compose a five-act opera and a nonet - a composition for nine instruments. The last of his works was an upbeat Prisoners' March, dated four days before his death in March 1945.

Another set of music came from William Hilsley, a British pianist born in 1911, who survived imprisonment at Spittal and Kreuzburg in Germany and who died four years ago.

 
Anita Lasker Walfisch, 81, who was a prisoner at Auschwitz and Belsen, played the cello in bands throughout the war. Her talent enabled her to survive and, eventually, to emigrate to Britain, where she was a founder member of the English Chamber Orchestra. [Emma: I thought women were the first to be gassed during the "selection process"?]

 
"One was very lucky to be able to be part of it because it postponed one being killed," she said. "It seemed absurd that there was music in concentration camps. But it's what we did all day."

Mr Lotoro's collection, already comprising 4,000 manuscripts and 13,000 microfiches, as well as letters, drawings and photographs, will go on display in a new library at Rome's Third University in September.

"I felt it was my mitzvah, my duty as a Jew, to preserve this cultural heritage, this art of the people who were unseen," said Mr Lotoro, who converted to Judaism five years ago.

 
He sees his job as just beginning. "Of course, many documents were destroyed during the liberation, or by the Germans as they retreated. Though even now, while I scour through bookshops I find notebooks with a couple of pages of music in them.

 
"A friend told me the other day about a song that the Italian prisoners sang in Auschwitz which came from a folk song. In Israel, of course, there are many people who remember the songs they sang. But I have to move fast, the generation is dying out and the music will be lost for ever."

 
Mr Lotoro paid special tribute to -Aleksander Kuliewicz, a Pole who, after surviving imprisonment in Germany, dictated 700 songs that he had memorised to nurses at his bedside. Mr Lotoro is now working on recording these on to a cycle of 32 CDs. [Emma: Nurses?! I thought Jews were earmarked for death. Why a nurse?!]

 

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The Auschwitz photographer 

 

M. Shoffman

Source: http://www.totallyjewish.com/news/national/?content_id=5859

A Polish photographer, who was ordered to take pictures of concentration camp inmates during the Second World War, will visit London for the first time this week to see a film of his work.

 
Wilhelm Brasse was captured in the south of Poland whilst trying to escape the Nazis in order to join the Polish army. He was sent to Auschwitz in 1940 as a political prisoner and remained there until the end of the war.

 
As a photographer, the SS ordered him to document the inmates and, the day before the camp was evacuated, he risked his life to save most of the 100,000 pictures he took. Among the images are some portraits of children experimented on by the notorious Dr Josef Mengele.

 
Brasse will relive the experience on Monday at a screening of The Portraitist being shown as part of the fifth Polish Film Festival. The event, which will also feature a Q and A with the 92-year-old photographer, has been jointly arranged by Spiro Ark and the Polish Cultural Institute, and is being held at West London Synagogue.

 
Brasse, who now lives in Zywiec, Poland, told the Jewish News he was treated surprising well.

 
He said: “I was often asked about Dr Mengele’s attitude towards me. I always highlighted how surprisingly kind and polite he was talking to me, as a prisoner. He was always explaining to me what his purpose was and what kind of pictures he wanted of the children.

 
“He never referred to me as ‘you’ but as Mr Brasse, which was very unusual attitude towards the prisoners. Also, when SS officers asked me to take their private pictures I was treated quite well.

“I would often get something to eat or trade like cigarettes.”

 

But Brasse, who stopped taking pictures, after he was released from Auschwitz, admits he finds it hard to look back at the images from the camp: “I try to look at them as little as possible.

“I spend a lot of time in the Auschwitz Museum so I see pictures there. Occasionally bad dreams come back, which is not very pleasant, so I try to forget.”

 

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