Yiddish Songs

Buried Monuments: Yiddish Songs and

Holocaust Memory

by Shirli Gilbert

In 1988, Aaron Lansky published an article titled ‘Collecting Yiddish

Folksongs: a Do-It-Yourself Guide for the Amateur Yiddish Song-

Zamler’. Best known as the founder of the National Yiddish Book

Center – or, more dramatically, as the ‘man who rescued a million

Yiddish books’, as the subtitle of his recent book puts it – Lansky was

extending his passion for the preservation of Yiddish literature to the

realm of Yiddish songs, which also needed urgently to be ‘transcribed,

recorded and saved for posterity’. Lansky’s intention in the article was to

provide prospective zamlers (collectors) with the requisite techniques for

collecting songs from anyone old enough to ‘remember the songs they

learned at their bobe’s (grandmother’s) knee, either in the ‘‘Old Country’’

or here in America’; the songs they collected were solicited directly for the

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Lansky lamented that

although early twentieth-century Jewish ethnographic expeditions had

yielded thousands of these songs, and despite the dedicated work of a hand-

ful of scholars in the decades since, the work of ‘recording the living music

of a world which is no more’ remained far from complete. ‘It is imperative’,

he insisted, ‘that these surviving songs be recorded – right now – before they

are forgotten and lost forever.’1

In articulating the importance of collecting Yiddish songs in the late

1980s, Lansky was echoing a rhetoric of preservation and loss that had

informed the field of folklore studies in general, and Jewish folkloristics in

particular, for at least a century. In the Jewish case this rhetoric resurfaced

with added urgency in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, when

numerous independent initiatives were launched to ‘gather and secure all

materials and historical documents that would enable [us] to reconstruct the

most tragic page in the history of our nation’.2 In this critical post-war

undertaking, as in earlier ethnographic work, songs were recognized as

playing an integral role, both as historical sources that would enable

future researchers to reconstruct what had happened, and as artefacts that

could perhaps preserve the voices, and thereby the memory, of the victims.

Although not overtly addressed by song collectors working in this period,

the question of memory was always implicit in their observations. They

made frequent reference to the value that ‘historians’, ‘researchers’ and

‘future generations’ would glean from the songs, seemingly making little

distinction between notions of history and memory, or at least between

formal historiography and popular (Jewish) remembering.

History Workshop Journal Issue 66 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbn026

� The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.

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Fig. 1. One of the two milk cans in which portions of the Ringelblum ‘Oyneg shabes’

archives were hidden and buried in the Warsaw ghetto.

108 History Workshop Journal

This article seeks to make explicit the link between music and Holocaustmemory, exploring their relationship from the conceptions of the early songcollectors to more recent trends, and gesturing tentatively to future possibil-ities. It explores how music functions as a mediator of memory, and con-siders the distinctive ways in which it might inform the process ofmemorialization. Music has from the outset functioned as a key agent orbearer of Holocaust memory, from the earliest commemorations amongstsurvivors until today;3 it is arguably one of the most important mediathrough which ideas and attitudes about the past are constructed andshared. In recent decades, however, its usage has fallen largely under thelimiting interpretive rubric of ‘spiritual resistance’, which associates it over-whelmingly with affirmative frameworks such as defiance, faith and hero-ism. As a result, and in the context of increasingly diversified ideas abouthow and why we remember the Holocaust, the article argues that music’sdistinctive potential as a memorial object has been underdeveloped: poten-tial both for enriching and deepening the scope of popular memorializationand for challenging some of the unconstructive narratives that have domi-nated the memorialization process. The motivations of the early zamlers,and their articulation of music’s value, offer a helpful starting point forrethinking how this relationship might be conceived.

The larger question of the relationship between music and memory hasbeen relatively underexplored in historical, musicological and ethnomusicol-ogical writing. As Kay Kaufman Shelemay argued in her groundbreakingstudy Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews,although so much music ‘is shot through with remembrance and is explicitlyperceived as commemorative when performed’, the relationship has beenlargely neglected and little theorized. This is particularly striking given theincreasing prominence of memory as a theoretical concern in the broaderhumanities.4 While some studies have begun to map out this complex andrich terrain, they have focused largely on music that is overtly or purposelycommemorative: in Shelemay’s case, for example, songs that are ‘intention-ally constructed sites for long-term storage of conscious memories from thepast’.5 By contrast, my primary interest in this article is in songs that werefor the most part not created with commemoration in mind – though if theyhave seen the light of the present day, it will generally have been in acommemorative context. Although there is a growing body of compositionswritten post-1945 in commemoration of the Holocaust, my focus here is onYiddish songs that were created during the Holocaust, and the ways inwhich they have functioned, and might function, as vehicles for Holocaustmemory.

A few words are in order about my use of the term ‘memory’, whichdespite ongoing deliberation amongst scholars remains a notoriously com-plex concept to delineate and define. I have written elsewhere about the useof music as a historical source, and I do not intend to rehearse those argu-ments here.6 In this context I am interested primarily in popular memory,

Yiddish Songs and Holocaust Memory 109

not only in the limited sense of remembrance ceremonies, but also in thebroader sense of how knowledge about the Holocaust is mediated and dis-seminated in the public sphere. My discussion takes as its point of referencethe ways in which music is used to shape understandings of the Holocaust insettings like commemorations, pedagogy, websites, concerts, songbooks,organizations devoted to the study and dissemination of Holocaust musicand other public forums, although I do not present detailed analyses.

Underlying Lansky’s work, and that of countless collectors before him, isthe self-evident importance and urgency of collecting cultural treasuresbefore they are irrevocably lost. What is sometimes less clearly evident,amidst the urgent fervour of this collection work, is the purpose that theresulting products, once gathered and safely secured, will serve. While this isnot always a process over which ethnographers have control,7 I argue thatthe early song collectors’ notions are an instructive basis from which torethink the critical question of why we ought to remember the Holocaustin the first place, and the role that song might play in that process.

ELEVENTH-HOUR ETHNOGRAPHYBefore his death in the Riga ghetto in 1941, the Jewish historian SimonDubnov is reported to have made a fervent appeal to his fellow Jews:‘People, do not forget. Speak of this, people; record it all.’8 The imperativeto record and bear witness was widely heeded by Jews across Europe fromthe early years of the Second World War, particularly by ethnographers andhistorians – like Dubnov, Emanuel Ringelblum and others – who insistedthat the documentation and transmission of Jewish history was critical toensuring a Jewish future.9

The importance attached to documentation during the Holocaust periodwas not a new phenomenon, but part of a longer trajectory, dating back tothe late nineteenth century, of salvage or ‘eleventh-hour’ ethnography: col-lection work that is premised on the threat of the imminent disappearance ofa tradition or culture, and the urgent need to document the remnants of thatculture before it is too late.10 In the Jewish case, the looming threat in the1890s was acculturation and assimilation; as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimbletthas argued, the prevailing approach in the emerging field of Jewish folklor-istics at that time was the importance of salvaging ‘the last vestiges oftraditional culture before it yields in the face of cosmopolitanism and assim-ilation, whether in Europe or North America’.11 Jewish ethnographersderived many of their approaches from the larger field of late nineteenth-century German folklore studies, and their writings reveal clear lines ofconnection and influence.12 They justified their activities with similar warn-ings about collecting before it was too late, and the urgent need to preserveprecious material that was on the verge of being lost.

A wide range of organized Jewish efforts in Europe to document theNazi onslaught continued these earlier trends, and in some cases, the con-nections with pre-war collection efforts were direct. In the Warsaw Ghetto,


for example, Emanuel Ringelblum co-ordinated a secret archive (see fig. 1)codenamed ‘Oyneg shabes’ (Joy of the Sabbath), in which he enlisted a widerange of people to report on culture and education in the ghetto, distributequestionnaires, interview ghetto residents, record statistical data relating toghetto life, collect folklore and chronicle daily events. As Ringelblum notedin his diary, one of his most committed co-workers was Shmuel Lehman,who had been a prolific collector of Yiddish folklore before the war:

Lehman, as was his way, was very active. He collected folklore of the warday and night – jokes, sayings and so forth. Lehman always used tocompare his enormous collection from the other World War to his collec-tion on this war.13

Similar documentary efforts were initiated elsewhere, with the help ofexperienced collectors: an underground archive in the Bialystok ghetto mod-elled on ‘Oyneg shabes’, another in Theresienstadt, an official chronicle inLodz, in addition to a wide range of individual diaries.14 The vast majorityof these were clandestine endeavours, signalling the value attached to thisactivity by ghetto inmates across Nazi-occupied Europe and the enduringimportance attached to such documentation efforts.

In the post-war period, which constitutes this article’s primary focus,Jewish collection work continued to draw on practices and approaches thathad been established in the preceding decades. What was perhaps distinctiveabout the discourse that emerged amongst collectors directly after the geno-cide was their explicit articulation of memory as a concern: that is, theiremphasis not only on preserving a culture in danger of destruction (or alreadydestroyed), but also on honouring andmemorializing the people that had diedalong with it. Although the extent of the tragedy undeniably added layers ofintensity and urgency to the long-standing need to document, however, thepractice was in essence characterized by continuity rather than rupture. Theemphasis on continuity is crucial both to understanding the early collectors’ideas about why they were preserving, and consequently to considering theways in which the genocide has been, and might be, remembered.

Early gatherings of survivors echoed the importance of recording whathad happened, and numerous independent initiatives were launched to col-lect material. The Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland wasformally established in December 1944, and in the months that followedseveral similar institutions were established across western and centralEurope.15 According to Philip Friedman, who directed the Commission inPoland, the aim of these institutions was

historical documentation per se, documentation to embrace all historicalfeatures during the Nazi regime, including the internal life of the Jewishcommunity at that time, its social, cultural, religious, artistic and literaryactivities etc.16


The objective of these institutions is perhaps more precisely describedas twofold. On one level, the emphasis was on ‘historical documentationper se’, but underlying the fervent collection of material was clearly anurgently felt (and overwhelmingly personally felt) imperative to preservethe memory of a destroyed people. A distinction was not made betweendocumenting on the one hand and preserving memory on the other, sincethese activities were seen as practically synonymous. As Laura Jokusch hasargued, commission activists conceived of documentation itself as a meansof commemorating the dead: a call to survivors in the US zone of occupa-tion, for example, urged that ‘every document, picture, song, legend is theonly gravestone which we can place on the unknown graves of our parents,siblings, and children!’17

It is worth emphasizing that these post-war documentation efforts weretaking place at a moment of dire physical and emotional circumstances forEurope’s Jews. The vast majority were officially ‘displaced persons’ (DPs),refusing to be repatriated to their countries of origin, but – at least until theestablishment of Israel and the easing of US immigration restrictions in 1948– having few alternatives for emigration. Many found themselves once againliving in appalling conditions in camps on German soil, and facing thespectre of renewed antisemitism in Poland.18 The fervent documentationefforts appear all the more remarkable in this context, and signal the con-tinued significance attached to these activities given the survivors’ pressingpersonal needs.

SALVAGING MUSIC IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE HOLOCAUSTSongs had long been considered an essential component of the Jewish eth-nographic enterprise, with collectors often stressing their importance ashistorical and ethnographic artefacts. In their 1901 Yidishe folkslider in rus-land (Yiddish folksongs in Russia), for example, one of the earliest and mostcomprehensive published collections, Saul Ginzburg and Peysekh Marekexpressed confidence that the songs would ‘lead us into the intimate worldof folklife and present valuable material for the historian and the ethnogra-pher’. In his 1923 collection Baym kval: materialn tsum yidishn folklor –yidishe folkslider (At the source: Materials for Yiddish folklore – Yiddishfolk songs), the leading folklorist Shloyme Bastomski opined that the songsprovided ‘a mirror of . . . Jewish life’ and could direct one to the ‘mosthidden corners of the folk’s soul’.19

Song-collection initiatives during the Holocaust and in its immediateaftermath were premised on similar motivations. Although those involvedin documentation efforts placed their primary emphasis on personal testi-monies, many also consistently expressed their interest in songs, stories,jokes and other cultural remnants of the communities they sought to memo-rialize. Music featured prominently in three particular initiatives carried outin the post-war years: the collection work of Shmerke Katsherginski primar-ily in Lithuania and Poland; that of the Central Historical Commission in


Munich; and the interview project carried out by the psychologist DavidBoder in Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland.20 In all three cases, musicwas conceived as an integral part of the larger mission to document andpreserve, rather than as an initiative on its own terms.

Why do these collection projects merit attention? In the first place, theprocess through which Holocaust-era songs were recovered and preservedhas scarcely been documented.21 Beyond simply filling this gap in our his-torical knowledge, however, my aim in drawing attention to these initiativesis to raise several interrelated points. The fact that music was an integralpart of larger documentary initiatives has not been widely recognized, but itshows that songs were considered valuable artefacts with much to contributeto the writing of history and the preservation of memory. Indeed, this moti-vation was explicitly expressed and elaborated by early collectors. Further,although collectors’ ideas regarding music’s value clearly originated in ear-lier ethnographic thought, they are worthy of emphasis not least becausethere is a striking disjuncture between how they imagined the songs wouldbe used, and how those songs have in reality featured in subsequent decadesof Holocaust memorialization. Although this disjuncture is not inherentlyproblematic, as I argue below, it sheds light on some of the dynamics ofrecent Holocaust memory and provides a basis for a reconsideration of howmusic might alternatively inform the memorialization process.

The collectors themselves also deserve attention. One of the earliest col-lectors of Yiddish songs from the ghettos and camps was ShmerkeKatsherginski, a well-loved writer and communist activist before the warand a leading member of the United Partisans’ Organization established inthe Vilna ghetto.22 Katsherginski’s involvement in collection efforts began inthe ghetto, where he was one of forty inmates assigned to assist in the workof Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Nazi agency charged with seizingthe archives and libraries of its political adversaries ‘for safekeeping’ and‘research purposes’.23 Einsatzstab Rosenberg set up its Vilna headquartersoutside the ghetto, and the inmates attempted to save as many materials aspossible, an operation that involved smuggling them back into the ghettoand burying them in designated places.24 ‘People looked at us as if we werecrazy’, wrote Katsherginski. Other inmates ‘would smuggle food from towninto the ghetto under their clothes, in their boots, and we would smugglebooks, papers, or sometimes a Torah, mezuzahs’.25 After the liberation ofVilna by the Soviets in summer 1944, Katsherginski established with somefellow partisans a provisional museum in his apartment, where they dis-played unearthed artefacts and documents relating to Jewish life in Vilnabefore and during the Nazi occupation (see figs 2 and 3).26

In addition to these initiatives, it is as a collector of music and poems thatKatsherginski has perhaps become best known. Katsherginski was himself asongwriter who had penned some of the most popular songs in the ghetto.27

After the war, he travelled widely in Poland collecting poems and songsfrom survivors, and in spring 1946 moved to Lodz, where he helped to


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Fig. 2. Shmerke Katsherginski in Vilna after the liberation

of the city by the Red Army, July 1944.

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Fig. 3. Former members of the United Partisans’ Organization outside the Jewish museum on

Straszuna Street in Vilna, where they were engaged in organizing the ghetto archives, September

1944. Pictured from left to right are: Naomi Markeles, Shmerke Katsherginski, Abba Kovner,

and Yitzhak Kowalski.


prepare Undzer Gezang (Our Song), one of the earliest published collectionsof ghetto songs in post-war Poland.28 After the Kielce pogrom in July 194629

he joined a growing Jewish exodus to Paris, where within a few years hepublished several books (works of autobiography and history), as well astwo important music collections: Dos gezang fun vilner geto (The song of theVilna ghetto, 1947), his first independent song compilation; and his monu-mental Lider fun di getos un lagern (Songs from the ghettos and camps,1948), which remains the largest and most important collection of Yiddishsongs from the Holocaust period. Since Katsherginski lacked formal musicaltraining, he relied on musical collaborators to transcribe melodies for him.Generally, they would notate melodies that he remembered, or meet withsurvivors directly.30 His Lider consists of over 230 poem and song texts,some with musical notation.

In November 1947, from his new base in Paris, Katsherginski departedfor a three-week tour of Displaced Persons’ camps in the American zone ofoccupied Germany, to give lectures and share with fellow survivors some ofthe songs he had collected.31 While in Germany he briefly interrupted hisengagement schedule to record some songs for another important collectioninitiative, organized by the Tsentrale historishe komisye (Central HistoricalCommission), which had been created under the auspices of the CentralCommittee of Liberated Jews in Munich in December 1945. TheCommission became an important archival and information-gatheringcentre under the leadership of Moses Josef Feigenbaum and IsraelKaplan, and from August 1946 it began publishing its own newspaper,Fun letstn khurbn: tsaytshrift far geshikhte fun yidishn lebn beysn natsirezhim (From the Latest Destruction: Journal for the History of JewishLife during the Nazi regime).32

At the top of Feigenbaum and Kaplan’s agenda for the Commission’swork were eyewitness testimonies, which they urgently wanted to gatherfrom survivors before they left the DP camps and emigrated fromGermany. Ranking a close second to these in importance was whatKaplan characterized as folklore: ‘songs, anecdotes, jokes, sayings, phrases,quotes, nicknames, passwords, curses, greetings’ and similar oral artefactsthat had come into being under the occupation.33 Fun letstn khurbn was avaluable medium both for soliciting the submission of such materials and forpublishing them. Advertisements in the newspaper encouraged people toshare stories, photographs and other documentary materials with theCommission, and Kaplan wrote a regular column titled ‘Dos folks-moylin natsi-klem’ (Jewish folk-expressions under the Nazi yoke), where he pub-lished in increasingly expanded articles some of the material he hadreceived.34

Some of the newspaper’s most prominent announcements urged survivorsto share songs. The second issue, for example, published in September 1946,asked its readers: ‘Can you sing a song from the ghetto, camps, partisans,etc.[?] Come to the Historical Commission where the song will immediately


be immortalized on a gramophone record.’35 The newspaper’s tone becameincreasingly insistent, and a few weeks later it declared: ‘It is the obligationof every surviving Jew to immortalize the songs that were sung in his ghettoor camp. Get in touch with us!’36

The campaign was successful, and the Commission managed to recorddozens of Yiddish songs, sung by their authors or, as was more often thecase, by survivors who remembered the songs. Some appeared numeroustimes by different respondents, offering insight into patterns of circulationand the songs’ myriad variants. The Commission’s collection included pop-ular songs that appeared in other collections, including Katsherginski’s, aswell as songs that were not documented elsewhere.37

Unlike Katsherginski, Feigenbaum and Kaplan, whose urge to preservesprang from their personal experiences of the Nazi occupation, David Boderapproached the task of documentation from the outside – though hedefended the imperative with no less fervour. Boder was a Latvian Jewishemigre to the United States who settled in 1926 in Chicago, where he even-tually became a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute ofTechnology. Soon after the end of the war, Boder decided to undertake atrip to western Europe to interview witnesses and study the psychologicaleffects of trauma, enticed by General Eisenhower’s suggestion thatAmerican journalists ‘come and see for themselves’ what had happened.38

Although it took him over a year to secure clearance and funding, by whichpoint he assumed he was almost certainly too late, Boder finally departed inmid 1946, and between late July and early October he travelled to DP andrefugee centres in France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany.

Boder insisted it was crucial to interview witnesses while their memorieswere still fresh, and to allow them to ‘tell their own stories’.39 In a proposalto prospective funders, written just as the war was ending, he urged:

For psychological as well as historical reasons, it appears of utmostimportance that the impressions still alive in the memory of displacedpersons of their sufferings in concentration camps and during their sub-sequent wanderings, be recorded directly not only in their own languagebut in their own voices.40

The innovative technology that enabled Boder to fulfil this imperative wasthe magnetic-wire recorder, a portable (albeit cumbersome) machine thatallowed him not just to transcribe witnesses’ testimonies, but aurally torecord them. Boder repeatedly emphasized the unique auditory aspect ofhis interviews, noting that ‘while untold thousands of feet of film had beencollected to preserve the visual events of war, practically nothing had beenpreserved for that other perceptual avenue, the hearing’. His intention wasto gather as many personal reports as possible for future psychologicalstudy, and he deliberately set out to record not so much the exceptionalstories as those of the ‘rank and file’.41


Song played a key role in Boder’s project. In the first place, he used songsas a means of drawing survivors into his work, and in particular to demon-strate the functioning of his wire recorder. This is how he described hisapproach:

The refugee agencies put me in contact with DP shelter houses. I wouldmeet a colony of DP’s in a particular shelter house for lunch or dinner.After the meal I would ask them to sing and, with their knowledge, Irecorded the songs. When I played these back, the wonder of hearingtheir own voices recorded was boundless. Then I would explain my pro-ject and ask for volunteers.42

Music was thus a means through which Boder established the legitimacy ofhis endeavour and recruited prospective interviewees. But his use of musicalso extended well beyond this, to a deep ethnographic interest that com-plemented his wider project. Boder was clearly working in the mode ofsalvage ethnography: as the literary critic Alan Rosen has shown, he con-sistently emphasized the urgent need to preserve, and was acutely‘[c]onscious of collecting artifacts that might be in danger of extinction’.43

He frequently asked his interviewees whether they remembered songs fromthe ghettos or camps, soliciting them as artefacts of wartime internment.When the young survivors were too shy to sing, which was frequentlythe case, Boder encouraged them firmly, insisting on the importance ofpreservation. He collected approximately sixty songs; his recordingsconsist of both group recordings and solo songs scattered throughout theindividual interviews. Although many were popular songs that alsoappeared in other collections, a substantial number have not appearedelsewhere.

Why did these early collectors, in a time of crisis, devote preciousresources to gathering songs? Although their initiatives were largely inde-pendent – Katsherginski working in Lithuania and Poland, the CentralHistorical Commission in Allied-occupied Germany, and Boder primarilyin France, Italy and Switzerland – all three revealed strikingly similar con-ceptions of music’s value and importance. Following directly on theapproaches of folklorists before them, they stressed above all the urgentneed to document and preserve, understanding songs as integral to thelarger project of recording what had happened.

They also offered some explicit observations about how they thoughtthe songs would contribute to memorializing the events. Songs were per-ceived as offering insight into a specific dimension of history: namely, nothow the victims were acted upon as passive objects, but the ways in whichthey, as historical subjects with agency, lived under the Nazi occupationand actively responded to what was happening. In the first issue of Funletstn khurbn, Feigenbaum explained the motivation underlying theCentral Historical Commission’s establishment. Some people were


cynical about the need for such an institution, he wrote: surelyenough documents were being amassed by governments and other author-ities in anticipation of the Nuremberg Trials? Feigenbaum’s defence wasresolute:

All of those documents are just a fragment of our tragedy. They showonly how the murderers behaved towards us, how they treated us andwhat they did with us. Do our lives in those nightmarish days consist onlyof such fragments? On what basis will the historian be able to create animage of what happened in the ghettos? How will one be able to depictour suffering- and pain-filled lives? From where will one be able to knowabout our heroic deeds and how will one determine our attitudes towardsour oppressors? [. . .] We, the she’erit hapletah, the surviving witnesses,must create for the historian the foundation, represent to him the sources,from which he will be able to create a clear image of what happened to usand between us. Therefore each testimony of a saved Jew, every songfrom the Nazi era, every proverb, every anecdote and joke, every photo-graph is for us of tremendous value . . .44

Making reference to the paucity of surviving historical documentation,Katsherginski similarly emphasized that the songs could offer insight intothe inner lives of Jewish communities under internment. He stressed the needto ‘preserv[e] the voices of the departed, their simple, clear words that tell usabout their lives until their deaths’.45 His observations reveal a desire to givethe victims’ voices agency. How did Jews respond to the Nazi onslaught?How did they live before they died? Katsherginski acknowledged that thepicture the songs offered was not a uniformly rosy one: they documentednot only Nazi crimes but also internecine community struggles, corruptJewish officials and other less savoury aspects of everyday life. But theseelements, too, were crucial for enabling historians to document what hadhappened:

Few documents were preserved that would allow even a partial picture ofthe practical, official existence and the way of life of Jews in the occupiedterritories. Therefore, I think that the songs that Jews from ghettos, deathcamps and partisans sang from their sad hearts, will be a great contribu-tion to the history of Jewish martyrdom and struggle. . . . The daily Jewishlife in the ghetto with all its accompanying phenomena, like arrests,death, work, Gestapo, Jewish power-mongers, internal way of life,etc. – are reflected in precisely this bloody folklore. It will help futurehistory-writers and researchers as well as readers to fathom the soul ofour people.46

Boder’s underlying impulse seems to have been a similarly deeply-feltsense of the importance of preserving. At the conclusion of an interview


with the eighteen-year-old Polish Jew Israel Unikowski, he urged theyoung man:

Write as much as you are able and it will be collected in the future byJewish academies and organizations that will want all that was written.. . . Write everything that you remember, all the songs, all the sayings, allthe stories, of everything. As soon as you remind yourself of anythingthat you had not written down, write it down.47

While he clearly emphasized the importance of preservation, however,Boder was less explicit about how precisely he conceived of music’s ultimatehistorical value. Evidently he considered songs to be significant artefactsfrom the past, since he regularly solicited them and insistently pressed hisinterviewees to record them. On the question of what specifically songsmight record – and Boder’s frequent emphasis on the lyrics rather thanthe music itself is intriguing in this regard48 – we might guess that, as withthe interviews, the key was once again restoring the victims’ inner lives andagency: allowing them to tell their own stories, in their own voices.

It also seems likely that Boder’s project was informed to some extent bycontemporary ideas about music and preservation relating particularly tothe phenomenon of sound recording. Jonathan Sterne has shown that fromthe advent of the technology in the late nineteenth century, ‘there was some-thing special about the relation between sound recording and death’: record-ing seemed to offer the powerful potential of preserving the voices of thedead into the future, effectively embalming the voice and enabling the trans-mission of ‘messages to future generations’. This perceived potentialextended naturally into ethnographic work: ‘While Edison wrote of usingthe phonograph to preserve the voices of dying persons, the Americananthropologists who first used sound recording in their work often explicitlyjustified it in terms of the phonograph’s potential to preserve the voices ofdying cultures.’49 These ideas were part and parcel of the discourse of sal-vage ethnography, marked by the threat of impending loss and the impor-tance of preservation, and Boder (as well as Katsherginski and theCommission) revealed their enduring influence at the historical moment inwhich he was working.

MUSIC AS A MEDIATOR OF MEMORYIn light of the collectors’ views on how music could contribute to the processof remembering the genocide, it is instructive to consider how songs havefigured in the intervening decades of Holocaust memorialization. As sug-gested earlier, the collectors’ conceptions regarding the relationship betweenmusic, history and memory diverge sharply with the interpretive trends ofthe past few decades. Of course, this is not necessarily a problematic devel-opment. Historians are not bound to the interpretations of contemporaryobservers; quite the reverse: it is our job to probe and understand the forces


influencing these interpretations rather than to accept them at face value. Inthis case, however, the stark shift is symptomatic of broader trends regard-ing the orientation of Holocaust memory and commemoration.

The past three decades have seen a veritable explosion of memorials,museums, publications and educational initiatives related to theHolocaust, particularly in the United States, Europe and Israel.50A largebody of critical scholarship explores the directions that this memorializationhas taken, particularly its redemptive tendencies,51 its political uses andimplications,52 and the question of whether we have ultimately reached ‘asurfeit of memory’.53 My primary analytical concern here is to explorespecifically the kinds of commemorative messages that music has beenused to convey, and the section that follows considers briefly the ways inwhich the products of post-Holocaust collection work, in particular songs,have been used (or not used) in the context of Holocaust memorialization.

In recent decades music has increasingly been seen as a seemingly naturalopportunity for redemptive, hope-tinged discourse about the Holocaust,emphasizing in particular the resistance and heroism of Nazism’s victims.As I have discussed extensively elsewhere, ‘spiritual resistance’ is a pervasivetheme in many popular representations of the Holocaust, linked withredemptive notions such as the will to live and the triumph of the spirit,and it is often associated with (though by no means limited to) music. Thediscourse of spiritual resistance tends to be sentimentalized and emotive,replete with celebrations of ‘the resilience of the human spirit’ and affirma-tions that despite endless persecution and suffering, Jews managed to find‘strength and inspiration to impart their spirit, their despair, their heroism inJewish song’.54

This rhetoric undeniably derives in part from the language of the surviv-ing victims themselves. This includes the collectors, who approached theirwork with a deep sense of emotional conviction and urgency, and oftenspoke explicitly of a ‘sacred duty’ to document and bear witness.Nonetheless, while the collectors’ early conceptions of music’s contributionto memory were deeply felt, they were also remarkably sober and unsenti-mental. Although many present-day representations echo the earlier dis-course, including the rhetoric of preservation, the surface similarity belieswhat are widely divergent underlying impulses. In the introduction to hisThe Joy of Jewish Memories Songbook, for example, the popular Jewishsinger Sol Zim explains the motivation underlying his collection ofYiddish songs, made accessible for American Jews:

THERE IS A NEED ‘‘TO PRESERVE’’! THERE IS A NEED TO‘‘REMEMBER OUR ROOTS’’! THERE IS A NEED ‘‘NEVER TOFORGET’’ the Jewish memories of our BOBES and ZEDES [grand-mothers and grandfathers]! Only if WE TEACH OUR YOUTHABOUT THE ‘‘YIDDISH CULTURE’’ OF THE PAST, can wesecure a rich heritage for the ‘‘JEW OF THE FUTURE!’’55


Ethnomusicologist Abigail Wood has argued that with the steep declineof Yiddish as a spoken language since the Holocaust, the message of pre-servation following destruction evident in Zim’s text ‘has become the prin-cipal narrative surrounding Yiddish song in general’.56 The motivation thatdrove the early collectors’ work, however, is quite distinct from that under-lying Zim’s emotive appeal. While the scope of Zim’s book extends wellbeyond Holocaust songs, his plea invokes the language of Holocaustremembrance (‘never forget’) and echoes the sentimentalized discoursethat surrounds Holocaust-era song. In this and other examples, the motiva-tion behind preservation is lifted out of context. There is little recognition ofthe complex dynamics that influenced how survivors approached the ques-tion of memorialization. In addition, there is little recognition that corre-sponding shifts must accompany the responses of those removed from theevents in time and space.

If the discourse of Holocaust memory has emphasized resistance anddefiant faith, the choice of songs to accompany popular representationsreinforces these interpretive trends. There is of course no authoritative oruniform ritual of Holocaust commemoration, but ceremonies that includemusic tend overwhelmingly towards an established core handful of songs,in addition to the liturgy of mourning. One of these is ‘Ani ma’amin’(I believe), titled in Katsherginski’s collection ‘Varshever geto lid funfrumer yidn’ (Song of religious Jews in the Warsaw ghetto), a song whoseHebrew words are drawn from Maimonedes’ Thirteen Articles of Faith andaffirm belief in the arrival of ultimate redemption. Another popular offeringis Mordekhai Gebirtig’s ‘Es Brent’ (It is burning), which was written follow-ing a 1938 Polish pogrom and condemns the passivity of non-Jewish onlook-ers. Hirsh Glik’s ‘Zog nit keynmol az du geyst dem letstn veg’ (Never saythat you are walking the final road), almost certainly the most frequentlyappearing song, was inspired by the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising andadopted as an anthem by the Vilna partisans.57 These songs were some ofthe most popular amongst Jewish ghetto and camp inmates, and their dom-inance in the commemorative context stems in part from this popularity. Atthe same time, however, they emphasize certain aspects of the inmate experi-ence, and serve to shape popular memory of historical events accordingly.

Songs play an important but largely under-observed role in mediating ourunderstanding of history: as metonymic symbols of the events being remem-bered, they are used to represent particular versions of the past. An obviousparallel question to consider, then, is what kinds of alternative understand-ings they might be used to convey. The early interventions of Katsherginski,Boder and the Commission representatives offer a helpful starting point,because they explicitly articulated music’s potential contribution to the proj-ect of memorialization. Of course, as noted earlier, both the conceptions andthe work of the early collectors were unmistakably the products of a partic-ular historical and cultural context. The songs they collected were necessa-rily only fragmentary traces of the events within which they originated,


and the collection processes through which they were obtained were markedby individuals’ particular emphases, informants’ perceptions about the kindsof songs being sought, the vagaries of available recording technologies andthe politics of publication, to name but a few of the possible elements withan impact on the final products of this ethnographic work. Once thesequalifications have been duly acknowledged, however, it is still possible toprobe their interpretations for valuable hints about what the songs might beable to offer as memorial objects. The early collectors insisted that songscould offer insight into the inner lives of diverse prisoner communities andallow for a nuanced understanding of their responses rather than a one-dimensional portrayal of passive victims or heroic martyrs. In satisfying theneed for hopeful messages, by contrast, the kind of remembrance promotedthrough the discourse of spiritual resistance ultimately fails to engage withthe complexity of the societies from which this music emerged. Although itpurports to honour and exalt the victims’ memory, it tends often to de-contextualize and mythicize it, replacing complex historical accounts ofhuman responses with consoling explanations.58

BURIED MONUMENTSOne way in which songs might deepen Holocaust commemoration is thus torefocus emphasis on the experience of victimhood, and to offer nuanced,multi-dimensional portrayals of human responses to harsh realities. Thiswould also go some way towards counteracting another set of persistentnarratives that surround the Holocaust, particularly in the public sphere:those that insist on the Holocaust’s uniqueness, the impossibility of repre-sentation, and the impossibility or undesirability of understanding. A returnto the complex, multifaceted, contradictory and stubbornly diverse perspec-tives reflected in these songs might help to reorient Holocaust awarenessaway from the realm of the mythicized and ahistorical, and towards con-textualized multiplicity. In an era of increasing ‘Holocaust fatigue’,59 wherethe imperative to remember is less and less urgently felt, a shift seems neces-sary towards a wider-ranging, further-reaching remembrance, one whichintentionally draws out ‘lessons and legacies’ that remain relevant to thecontemporary world. This is not an endorsement of what Peter Novickcalls ‘the sort of pithy lessons that fit on a bumper sticker’. Rather, as hesuggests, ‘If there are lessons to be extracted from encountering the past,that encounter has to be with the past in all its messiness; they’re not likelyto come from an encounter with a past that’s been shaped and shaded sothat inspiring lessons will emerge.’60 If increasing desensitization to theHolocaust results in part from a memory that is proprietary and defensivelysacrosanct, then it is also possible that remembering of a different kindmight help to resensitize – in however gradual and subtle a way – thosewho continue to witness genocidal events with depressing regularity.

There is another dimension to music’s potential use in the commemora-tive sphere: its nature as a concrete memorial object. In ways distinct from


physical structures like stone memorials, statues and graves, music is per-formative, enacting memorialization primarily through time rather than inspace (although it can be used effectively to create and define temporalmemorial spaces). In addition, unlike artefacts such as camp uniforms orvictims’ personal possessions, songs created under Nazi internment –although they function similarly as metonymic representations of theHolocaust, having originated in the events themselves – of necessity cannothave survived as singular, intact ‘original’ artefacts. Initially, they survivedprimarily in people’s memories as oral artefacts, and later were documentedin transcriptions and reconstructed recordings. The latter span a wide range,from those recorded by survivors in the immediate post-war period throughto the often stylized commercial recordings produced today. When consider-ing song in a memorial context, then, the object is slippery: how do we define‘the song itself’, when it exists in various transcriptions and recordings, acrossan extended time-span? The possibilities for modifying the oral ‘original’ –for example, by choosing a particular version or combination of versions,adding melodic embellishment or orchestration, and staging it in a formalperformance context – further complicate the question of song’s potentialrole as a bearer of memory. In short, in order to function as agents ofmemory, songs unavoidably have to be recreated.

This inherent performativity, however, is perhaps also the basis formusic’s greatest potential as a memorial object. The songs are distinctivein being simultaneously remnants of the events themselves and retrospectivememorials, fulfilling the roles of both ‘original’ artefacts from the time andpost-war commemorative imaginings. What is more, they encode theongoing, dynamic ways in which succeeding generations choose to remem-ber and forget: there have been numerous creative reconstructions of thesongs since the late 1940s.61

Beyond the sharp divergence between the collectors’ early interpretationsand more recent ones, what is striking is that the material they so desperatelyand zealously worked to preserve has largely been neglected. Katsherginski’sLider fun di getos un lagern has long been out of print, and neither Boder’snor the Central Historical Commission’s music collections – which wereamong the earliest recorded versions of Holocaust-era songs – have everbeen published.62 Although the latter are accessible in archives, their songrecordings remain almost entirely unused and unknown by historians, doc-umentary filmmakers, teachers, commemoration organizers and the like. Inother words, despite having survived in unusually large numbers, anddespite the importance of music in general to the commemorative enterprise,the vast majority of the Yiddish songs from the period of Nazi internmentmight be thought of as buried monuments, since they have never been usedas memorial objects in the first place.63 Given the distinctive possibilities oftheir form, these songs might usefully be revived in the commemorativecontext, through a conscious process that acknowledges the ways in whichthey shape and colour memory.


In The Texture of Memory, his study of ‘Holocaust memorials and mean-ing’, James Young has argued:

That a murdered people remains known in Holocaust museums anywhereby their scattered belongings, and not by their spiritual works, that theirlives should be recalled primarily through the images of their death, may bethe ultimate travesty. These lives and the relationships between them arelost to the memory of ruins alone – and will be lost to subsequent genera-tions who seek memory only in the rubble of the past. Indeed, by adoptingsuch artifacts for their own memorial presentations, even the newmuseums in America and Europe risk perpetuating the very figures bywhich the killers themselves would have memorialized their Jewish victims.

By ‘the rubble of the past’ Young refers in part to the piles of hair, glassesand clothes (‘eyeless lenses, headless caps, footless shoes’) that are displayedin some Holocaust museums, and which represent the victims only ‘by theirabsence, by the moment of their destruction’.64 Beyond the rubble, as thisarticle has argued, music offers a rich alternative memorial space. As objectsfrom the time that are simultaneously implicated in an ongoing process ofrecreation, songs embody the process of negotiating between the remnantsof the past and the needs of the present. We may no longer believe that songswill enable us to ‘fathom the soul of [a] people’, but they can perhaps help usto memorialize the victims more honestly by acknowledging their diversehuman-ness. The early collectors suggested that songs could offer insightinto the victims’ lives and responses, rather than merely ‘how the murderersbehaved towards us, how they treated us and what they did with us’. Theirideas offer a promising route beyond what is an increasingly (and ironically)dehumanized discourse of uniqueness and spiritual resistance, towardsrefocusing memorialization on the consequences suffered by the humanvictims of genocide. Moreover, publicizing and talking about their earlyrecordings – with due acknowledgement that they, too, were inevitablyreconstructions – might be a useful starting point for reintroducing a diver-sity of voices and perspectives into the memorial framework.

Shirli Gilbert is Karten Lecturer in Jewish and non-Jewish relations at theUniversity of Southampton, where she teaches courses in Modern JewishHistory, the Holocaust, and Music and Resistance. She obtained herMasters in Musicology and D.Phil. in Modern History from theUniversity of Oxford. Her research is currently focused in two principalareas: Displaced Persons in the aftermath of the Holocaust; and popularsong in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Her book Music inthe Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (OxfordUniversity Press, 2005) was a finalist for the 2005 National Jewish BookAward.


NOTES AND REFERENCES

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Jewish Music Forum (Center for JewishHistory, New York), and seminars at the University of Cambridge and the University ofMichigan. I am grateful to participants in those events as well as to Geoff Eley, LauraJokusch, and Alan Rosen for their helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to theCenter for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museumand the Michigan Society of Fellows for their generous support.

I also thank United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for permission to reproduce thethree photographs published here. The views or opinions expressed in this article and thecontext in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, norimply approval or endorsement by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

1 Aaron Lansky, ‘Collecting Yiddish Folksongs: a Do-It-Yourself Guide for the AmateurYiddish Song-Zamler’, Pakn Treger 9–10, 1988, pp. 20–23, 81–82; Aaron Lansky, OutwittingHistory: the Amazing Adventures of a Man who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, Chapel Hill,NC, 2004.

2 Cited in Natalia Aleksiun, ‘Polish Historiography of the Holocaust: Between Silence andPublic Debate’, German History 22: 3, 2004, p. 412.

3 Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope: the Survivors of the Holocaust inOccupied Germany, Cambridge, 2002, p. 197.

4 Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among SyrianJews, Chicago, 1998, p. 6.

5 Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down, p. 6.6 See Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and

Camps, Oxford, 2005; and Shirli Gilbert, ‘Music as Historical Source: Social History andMusical Texts’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 36: 1, 2005.

7 See, for example, George Steinmetz, ‘The Uncontrollable Afterlives of Ethnography:Lessons from ‘‘Salvage Colonialism’’ in the German Overseas Empire’, Ethnography 5: 3, 2004,pp. 251–88.

8 Cited in Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov: DiasporaNationalism and Jewish History, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991, p. 247.

9 The inseparability of historical (documenting) and ethnographic work is reflected inthe names of early institutions like the Historical Ethnographic Commission founded in1892, and its successor the S. Ansky Vilne Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society; see ItzikNakhmen Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation: the Jewish Folklorists of Poland, Detroit,2003, p. 195.

10 For more on salvage ethnography, see for example Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,‘Imagining Europe: the Popular Arts of American Jewish Ethnography’, in DivergentCenters: Shaping Jewish Cultures in Israel and America, ed. Deborah Dash Moore andS. Ilan Troen, New Haven, 2001; Roger D. Abrahams, ‘Phantoms of Romantic Nationalismin Folkloristics’, Journal of American Folklore 106: 419, 1993, esp. 11–12. On specifically Jewishresponses to catastrophe, see for example From a Ruined Garden: the Memorial Books of PolishJewry, ed. and transl. Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin (NY 1983), 2nd ednBloomington, 1998; and David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe inModern Jewish Culture, Cambridge, MA, 1984.

11 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘The Folk Culture of Jewish Immigrant Communities:Research Paradigms and Directions’, in The Jews of North America, ed. Moses Rischin,Detroit, 1987, esp. 81.

12 See, for example, Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation, pp. xxii, 39, 140–1.13 Cited in Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation, p. 12.14 Shmuel Krakowski, ‘Memorial Projects and Memorial Institutions Initiated by She’erit

Hapletah’, in She’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle. Proceedingsof the Sixth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, October 1985, ed.Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf, Jerusalem, 1990; The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki, New Haven, 1984. For some examples of diaries, see amongmany others Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, ed. Abraham I. Katsh,London, 1965; The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. AlanAdelson, London, 1996; The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, ed. Raul Hilberg, StanislawStaron and Josef Kermisz, Chicago, 1999.


15 Philip Friedman, ‘Problems of Research on the Jewish Catastrophe’, Yad WashemStudies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance 3, 1959, esp. 27; Krakowski,‘Memorial Projects’, pp. 389–94; Laura Jokusch, ‘Judische Geschichtsforschung im LandeAmaleks: Judische historische Kommissionen in Deutschland 1945–1949’, in ZwischenErinnerung und Neubeginn: Zur deutsch-judischen Geschichte nach 1945, ed. SusanneSchonborn, Munich, 2006; Laura Jokusch, ‘A ‘‘Folk Monument for our Destruction andHeroism’’: Jewish Historical Commissions in the Displaced Persons Camps of Germany,Austria, and Italy’, in ‘‘We Are Here’’: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons inPostwar Germany, ed. Avinoam Patt and Michael Berkowitz, Detroit, forthcoming;Aleksiun, ‘Polish Historiography, pp. 412–9.

16 Friedman, ‘Problems of Research’, p. 27.17 Jokusch, ‘Folk Monument’. Another important contemporaneous initiative, which

revealed even more explicitly the inseparability of historical documentation and preservingmemory, was the yizker-bikher (memorial books of eastern European Jews), in which survivingcommunities sought to document as fully as possible the history of their towns, including theirpre-war existence as well as their destruction during the Holocaust. In addition to constitutingperhaps ‘the single most important act of commemorating the dead on the part of Jewishsurvivors’, the yizker-bikher were explicitly conceived in the hope that future scholars wouldturn to these books as historical resources when it came to recording Jewish life in easternEurope and its destruction: Kugelmass and Boyarin, From a Ruined Garden, p. 1.

18 See, among others, Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives inPostwar Germany, transl. Barbara Harshav, Princeton, NJ, 1997; Atina Grossmann, Jews,Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, Princeton and Oxford, 2007;Angelika Konigseder and Juliane Wetzel, Lebensmut im Wartesaal: Die judischen DPs[Displaced Persons] im Nachkriegsdeutschland, Frankfurt/M, 1994; Mankowitz, Life BetweenMemory and Hope; Mark Wyman, DP: Europe’s Displaced Persons, Ithaca and London, 1998.

19 Cited in Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation, pp. xxi (Ginzburg and Marek) and 92,101 (Bastomski).

20 Another significant music collection project that was being pursued around this time wasthat of the pioneering Ukrainian ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski. Although the bulk ofBeregovski’s work was done earlier, in the 1930s and early 1940s, he also conducted post-warexpeditions to sites of former ghettos and camps. Draft materials from his collection are held atthe Vernadsky National Library of the Ukraine, though it is unclear to what extent the post-war materials have been preserved. Beregovski’s work is ripe for further research and scholar-ship, but lies beyond the scope of this article. See Mark Slobin, ‘A Fresh Look at Beregovski’sFolk Music Research’, Ethnomusicology 30: 2, 1986, pp. 253–60; Lyudmila Sholokhova, ‘TheResearch and Expeditionary Work of the Folklore Division of the Cabinet for Jewish Cultureat the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1944–1949’, in ‘‘Samuel’’ Goldenberg und ‘‘Schmuyle’’:Judisches und Antisemitisches in der russischen Musikkultur, ed. Ernst Kuhn, Jascha Nemtsovand Andreas Wehrmeyer, Berlin, 2003.

21 Of the three projects discussed here, that of Katsherginski has been the best documen-ted, although even here the source material is relatively sparse. Relatively little has been writtenabout the Central Historical Commission, and even less about its music collection; similarlywith Boder. See references cited below.

22 For a comprehensive account of Katsherginski’s life, see Bret Werb, ‘ShmerkeKaczerginski, Partisan-Troubador’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 20 (Making HolocaustMemory), 2008.

23 Willem de Vries, Sonderstab Musik: Music Confiscations by the Einsatzstab ReichsleiterRosenberg Under the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe, Amsterdam, 1996, p. 30. See ShmerkeKatsherginski, Partizaner geyen! Fartseykhenungen fun vilner geto, Buenos Aires, 1947, p. 67;Rachel Pupko-Krinsky, ‘Laurel Trees of Wiwulskiego’, in The Root and the Bough: the Epic ofan Enduring People, ed. Leo W. Schwartz, New York and Toronto, 1949.

24 Pupko-Krinsky, ‘Laurel Trees’, p. 160.25 Katsherginski, Partizaner geyen!, p. 69.26 Krakowski, ‘Memorial Projects’, pp. 394–5.27 See Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust, pp. 73–9.28 Nakhmen Blumental, ‘Iz shoyn, heyst es, oykh shmerke nito?’, in Shmerke

Katsherginski ondenk-bukh, Buenos Aires, 1955, p. 32; ‘Introduction’, Shmerke Katsherginskiondenk-bukh, p. 11.


29 The Kielce pogrom was the climax of a wave of antisemitism in Poland that began in late1944. In July 1946, over forty Jews were killed and fifty wounded in this small Polish townfollowing charges of the ritual murder of a Polish child. Mankowitz, Life Between Memory andHope, p. 18. For an extended account of the Kielce pogrom see also Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, New York, 2006.

30 Werb, ‘Shmerke Kaczerginski’.31 ‘Sh. Katsherginski bay der sheyres hapleyte’, Undzer Vort, Bamberg, 1947 (not

paginated).32 Moses Josef Feigenbaum, ‘Pe’ulota shel ha’va’ada ha’historit ha’merkazit be’minkhen’,

Dapim le-kheker ha-sho’ah ve-ha-mered 1, Jan.-April 1951, pp. 107–10; Moses JosefFeigenbaum, ‘Life in a Bunker’, in The Root and the Bough, ed. Schwarz, p. 142; Jokusch,‘Judische Geschichtsforschung’; Jokusch, ‘Folk Monument’.

33 Fun letstn khurbn 1, 1946, p. 1; Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope,p. 215.

34 Kaplan later published this material in the form of a book: Israel Kaplan, Dos folks-moyl in natsi-klem: reydenishn in geto un katset, Tel-Aviv, 1982.

35 Fun letstn khurbn 2, 1946, p. 50.36 Fun letstn khurbn 3, 1946, p. 40.37 For more on the Commission’s work, see Feigenbaum, ‘Pe’ulota shel ha’va’ada’,

pp. 107–10; Jokusch, ‘Folk Monument’.38 David P. Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, Urbana, 1949, p. xi.39 Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, p. xi.40 Carl Marziali, ‘Voices of the Holocaust’, Catalyst (Illinois Institute of Technology

alumni newsletter), summer 1999, pp. 1–3.41 Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, p. xii.42 Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, p. xii.43 Alan Rosen, ‘Evidence of Trauma: David Boder and Writing the History of Holocaust

Testimony’, in Historical Research on the Holocaust: Its History in Context, ed. David Bankierand Dan Michman (Jerusalem, forthcoming).

44 Fun letstn khurbn 1 1946, p. 2.45 Emphasis in original. ‘Preface’, Lider fun di Getos un Lagern, ed. Shmerke Katsherginski

and H. Leivick, New York, 1948, pp, xix, xxiv.46 Lider, ed. Katsherginski and Leivick, pp. xv, xviii.47 Boder interview with Israel Unikowski, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Archive (hereafter USHMM): RG-50.472�0012.48 See interviews with Bella Zgnilek, USHMM: RG-50.472�0017; Henja Frydman,

USHMM: RG-50.472�0024; and Bertha Goldwasser, USHMM: RG-50.472�0019.49 Emphasis in original. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past, Durham, 2003, pp. 291,

309, 311.50 For a brief overview, see Michael Berenbaum, ‘Consciousness of the Holocaust:

Promises and Perils’, Dimensions 15: 1, 2001, pp. 25–7.51 See in particular Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: the Ruins of

Memory, London, 1991; Lawrence L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust, London, 1998; EvaHoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust,New York, 2004.

52 See, among others, Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood,Cambridge, 2005; Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, New York, 1999; NormanG. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering,New York, 2000.

53 Charles Maier, ‘A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy, and Denial’,History and Memory 5, 1992, pp. 136–51.

54 http://www.terezinmusic.org/terezin/?GCS_Session¼0d3244c077c29b2ff751b685b29190d7; Jerry Silverman, The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust, Syracuse, NY,2002, p. xv; ‘Foreword’ inWe Are Here: Songs of the Holocaust, ed. Eleanor Mlotek and MalkeGottlieb, New York, 1983, n.p.

55 Emphasis in original. The Joy of Jewish Memories Songbook: Nostalgic Melodies inContemporary Settings, ed. Sol Zim, Hollis Hills, NY, 1984, p. 7.

56 Abigail Wood, ‘Commemoration and Creativity: Remembering the Holocaust inToday’s Yiddish Song’, European Judaism 35: 2, 2002, pp. 43–56, esp. 44.


http://www.terezinmusic.org/terezin/?GCS_Session

57 Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust, pp. 48–9, 70–3, 97. For discussion of songs used atcommemoration ceremonies, see Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: CulturalMediations of the Holocaust, Amherst, 2003, pp. 160–8; Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust,pp. 196–7; We Are Here, ed. Mlotek and Gottlieb, pp. 12, 94; Wood, ‘Commemoration andCreativity’, pp. 47–8.

58 For a fuller discussion of spiritual resistance, see Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust,‘Introduction’.

59 See, for example, Berenbaum, ‘Consciousness of the Holocaust’, pp. 27–8.60 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 261.61 See, for example, Wood, ‘Commemoration and Creativity’.62 There are growing attempts to make this material more accessible. Yad Vashem is

working with the Israeli National Sound Archives to make some of the Central HistoricalCommission’s recordings publicly accessible on the web. The Illinois Institute of Technologyhas launched an online project that aims ultimately to make available Boder’s recordings andinterview transcripts (http://voices.iit.edu/). Katsherginski’s book can now be reprinted thanksto the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, under the auspices of the National YiddishBook Center.

63 I am indebted to Heather Wiebe for the concept of ‘buried monuments’.64 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, London,

1993, p. 133.


http://voices.iit.edu/

Documents

Yiddish Songs