In November 2005, the United Nations adopted Resolution 60/7: Holocaust remembrance.
The date selected, Jan. 27, was the day that one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps — Auschwitz — was liberated by the Red Army. The resolution was never meant as another calendar observance. It called for U.N. member states to develop “educational programs that will inculcate future generations with the lessons of the Holocaust in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide”; “reject any denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full or part”; and “condemn without reserve all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, wherever they occur.”
As an international non-sectarian day of remembrance, Holocaust programs occur around the world in government and private spaces. On Jan. 27, a program of nearly lost musical compositions was heard and appreciated by a new generation of concertgoers at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. The evening, “Enduring Music: Compositions from the Holocaust,” was created by Italian pianist, composer and musicologist Francesco Lotoro. He has spent three decades digging in archives, interviewing survivors who remembered songs and stories and then preserving and performing nearly lost music sung in ghettos and concentration camps.
The concert was presented by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a nonprofit, nonpartisan NGO working internationally against extremist ideologies through research, educating and tracking organizations, and creating programs that target finances, recruitment and other support of extremist groups. CEP was joined by the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization, which is located immediately outside of Auschwitz-Birkenau in House 88, the former home of notorious camp commandant Rudolf Hess. CEP now owns the house, which serves as a center for combating antisemitism and extremism. Together, these organizations, supported by private contributions, rented the theater at the Kennedy Center.
Mark Wallace, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under President George W. Bush and the CEO of CEP, introduced the evening by discussing the Auschwitz orchestra, made up of prisoners who were forced to play during selections accompanying others to the gas chambers. The evening opened with a lullaby, “Kołysanka,” composed by Adam Kopyciński in 1941, when he was a member of the Auschwitz orchestra. The translated words sear: “A lullaby for my little son in the crematoria.”
Primarily sung in Yiddish and other languages spoken in the camps by soprano Anna Maria Stella Pansini, baritone Angelo De Leonardis and male singer Paolo Candido, while Lotoro conducted and accompanied on piano, the 17 works in the program included pieces that were documented from musical notation on scraps of paper and hidden from Nazi staff. Others were gathered from survivors who never forgot the songs they and their fellow inmates sang. Still others were pieced together from fragments with half-remembered notes or lyrics.
Interestingly, these works were not liturgical or traditional pieces. Many resembled the popular songs of the 1940s heard on radio, film or at clubs and community gatherings. “Friling,” from the Vilnius Ghetto, came from Avrom Brudno in 1942 and featured lyrics from a Yiddish poet accompanied by a tango rhythm and flair. American Colonel Edmund Jones Lilly Jr. was held in a POW camp in Manchuria where he and others were forced on a death march through the Gobi Desert. His composition, “Moon above the Gobi,” has been called “a defiant retort to that place that was designed to dehumanize.”
Hitler and his Nazi killing machine murdered 6 million Jews, as other groups of people were also targeted, among them non-Jewish Poles, Soviet POWs, Romani, people with disabilities, German dissenters and homosexuals. An anonymous song from the Romani of Burgenland, “But Facunge, but maro pekal,” is an aching paean to a better time. Its author was an unknown prisoner of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.
Intermingled with the musical performances were projected photos of the authors and selected videos from Lotoro’s interviews and research. One recording shared the remarkable account of a Polish prisoner who had memorized 716 songs sung to him by political prisoners.
Among the invited speakers, Iranian Mersedeh Shahinkar paid her personal tribute to the Holocaust. “Every victim had a name, a history, a future … remembrance must lead to action.” She added, “I am only one of hundreds of thousands of victims of this extremist regime in Iran … where music and dance are banned. These acts are resistance.”
“Today is about remembrance,” Wallace said to the predominantly, but not entirely, Jewish audience. “But 81 years later, sadly, this is clear: Remembrance was not enough … Sometimes we must interfere. I ask you [the audience] not only to remember, but to honor those we remember with interference. We must all interfere with dignity, resilience, defiance and hope. We have been taught to keep remembrance close, but we must also interfere when antisemitism is in our midst.”
Lisa Traiger is an award-winning arts journalist who covers the performing and visual arts in the Washington, D.C., region and beyond.
