These hidden songs survived the Holocaust – and helped singers to endure their own survival

In the renowned Holocaust documentary, Shoah (1985), former SS guard Franz Suchomel sings a song prisoners had to perform in the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. After finishing the last line, he chillingly asks the director, Claude Lanzmann : “Satisfied? That’s unique. No Jew knows that today!”

More than 30 years before, in 1945, Yehuda Eismann, a Holocaust survivor, published a little collection of songs, conveyed to him by Jewish refugees passing through Bucharest in Romania. He called it Mima’amakim: folkslider fun lagers un getos in poyln 1939-1944 (Out of the Depths: Folks Songs from the Camps and Ghettos of Poland, 1939-1944).

“The poets and the others who sang the songs are for the most part no longer living,” he wrote in the introduction. But the songs survived. Passed from mouth to mouth, they lived among survivors. Eismann and his team collected and recorded them to create a “memorial stone for Polish Jewry”, a community largely destroyed by the Holocaust.

Review: Out of the depths: the first collection of Holocaust songs – by Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher (Manchester University Press)

Eighty years later, two Sydney-based scholars, Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher , republished the songs , with information about their authors. The collection shows that the Nazi plan to erase the memory of those slated for destruction – their suffering, but also their resilience – failed.

A lucky coincidence led to the recovery of these hidden voices of the Holocaust. In 2013, Olga R., a Sydney based Polish–Jewish survivor, passed away. Her family found a little booklet containing songs written in Yiddish in her cupboard. They shared it with Toltz, which led to more than a decade of arduous labour, tracing the origin of the songs and the fate of their authors. This incredible piece of history includes the musical score and translations of the songs.

When Holocaust survivor Olga R. died, her family shared a little booklet of Yiddish songs with Joseph Toltz, who worked on them with Anna Boucher.

University of Sydney

Music and Holocaust history

Songs are part of Holocaust history . In concentration and death camps, such as Treblinka, Auschwitz and Janowska, the SS forced Jewish inmates to perform songs as a way of mocking and torturing them. The camp orchestras had to play as Jews marched to the backbreaking slave labour , or to their death.

In other contexts, Jewish prisoners in the ghettos, camps or forests performed songs to keep their spirits high and forge a strong collective identity. Others responded to the events they witnessed and composed new songs. Some documented their experience; others paid respect to the memory of their loved ones, murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices.

Many of the songs died with their authors before the end of the war. But others spread around the world during the massive postwar migration of Holocaust survivors, staying hidden among personal belongings – until their discovery decades later.

Many songs died with their authors before the end of the war – but others spread around the world.

University of Sydney

Eismann, who recorded these songs, was born in 1913 in Lviv (Lemberg), a town now located in Ukraine, though between the world wars it was part of independent Poland. In 1941, the town was occupied by the German army and the Nazis together with Ukrainian nationalists orchestrated a brutal pogrom , killing hundreds of Jewish civilians. Eismann passed through several ghettos and camps, until he assumed a false identity and escaped to Budapest in Hungary. Eventually, in late 1944, he moved to liberated Bucharest. His parents and brother perished.

In Bucharest, Eismann and a small team – including architect Flora Romm, his future wife, and Olga R., who later came to Australia – recorded close to 1,000 protocols with Jewish survivors who passed through the city. They tried to capture their memories of wartime events immediately after the liberation.

Similar initiatives developed across liberated Europe. Survivor activists collected evidence to record the wartime persecution, commemorate those who perished and help bring to justice those who caused their predicament. But the survivors carried more than just their trauma and memory of the persecution.

As Eismann wrote, “as refugees arrive the songs arrive with them”. Testifying and recording the songs helped survivors cope with the trauma of survival. It also returned agency to those who suffered for so long. The book is another proof that the oft-repeated dictum about survivors’ silence early after the war, and their unwillingness to talk about their experiences is inaccurate .

Toltz and Boucher situate Eismann’s efforts in the long tradition of Jewish zemler (collectors): ethnographers who recorded traditional Jewish culture at the time of mass migration and dislocation. The destruction wrought by the Holocaust, however, turned them into “crisis ethnographers”, who captured the lost world and the civil…