What Place Does Concentration Camp Art Have in Holocaust History?
However, his book can fall into the trap of seeing music as an intrinsic building. Many of her chapter titles, for example – “I felt a sun on my face”, “she gave us hope and courage”, “the orchestra means life” – are in contradiction with what research says in the book. She also has company –THE Washington Post, For example, wrote that prisoners had found “comfort, dignity and sometimes a life buoy” in music, while The New York Times describes music as a “buoy” in the camps.
In reality, prisoners turned to music – when they were not forced to do so – for a myriad of reasons. The uprising was just one. Some found in musical entertainment, a solution to intellectual boredom, a means of escape. In all the major Nazi camps, deportees from all backgrounds, many without formal, created and interpreted music. There were choirs, sets, troops, duets and individual singers who occurred in their blocks – and sometimes even “turning” from one block to another – far beyond the knowledge of the guards. Buchenwald had a Big Band Jazz, Falkensee housed a “gypsy orchestra”. Soviet prisoners of war gathered to perform in Flossenbürg. Sachsenhausen alone had a harmonica troop, a secret Jewish choir and a string quartet which carried out smuggling scores by Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and Dvořák at the camp mortuary.
Prisoners have often created parodies of existing pieces, in which they treated what was going on around them, commented on, documented it; They lowered the broad, ridiculed Hitler and expressed their fear of Germany’s domination over Europe. After the British evacuation in Dunkirk, for example, Kulisiewicz composed anxious words about the apparently unstoppable advance of the Wehrmacht. After their defeat in Stalingrad, he wrote jubilant words of celebration.
