Musical Archaeology
Listening Post 396. Holocaust narratives in literature, film and music originate largely from Central and Western Europe. During World War II the Nazis also penetrated 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) into the Soviet Union, in the process murdering more than 1.5 million Jews, but Stalinist suppression of personal testimonies and also restrictions on post-war emigration dictated that few first-hand accounts ever got out. Generations later, an extraordinary venture—combining musical archaeology and reconstruction—offers a rare opening on the totalitarian past. Toward the war’s end a team of ethnomusicologists had toured newly liberated Ukraine and Moldova looking for Yiddish songs composed by Jewish men, women and children during or immediately after the German occupation. Led by Moisei Beregovsky, they collected some 400 songs, but after the war the collectors were imprisoned for “anti-Soviet activity,” their research confiscated and seemingly destroyed. In the 1990s the collection surfaced in a Kyiv library and ultimately Anna Shternshis, a Moscow-born Canadian Yiddish scholar and historian, dug into what proved to be a trove of living history. Working with a team of artists who created arrangements and composed or paired music with unscored lyrics, she assembled the Yiddish Glory project. The first album, The Lost Songs of World War II, released in 2018, focused largely on Jewish Red Army soldiers and families on the Soviet home front; it attracted worldwide attention and earned a Grammy nomination. The new 15-track collection, The Silenced Songs of World War II, evokes tragedy tempered by hope and even humor. It visits the ghettoes and camps of Hitler’s death machine and comes at a time when much of the Ukrainian earth scorched by the Nazis is again at war. Reflecting life on the abyss, Transnistrian Lullaby (video 1) recalls uprooted families and loved ones lost. Obodivke Camp (video 2) and The Sad Camp (video 3) chronicle life in the Bershad ghetto with contrasting moods. Full-on despair simmers in Childhood Years (video 4), echoing the mother of a soldier who fell at Stalingrad. And A Girl from Kyiv (video 5), evokes a survivor’s bleak postwar horizon. Long after Hitler and Stalin, in a time of new tyrants, these old-new Yiddish songs illuminate persecution exposed by literacy, repression defeated by memory. (Six Degrees Records)

Yiddish Glory: The Silenced Songs of World War II
Psoy Korolenko: Vocals
Alice Zawadzki: Vocals, Violin
Simon Spiro: Vocals
Isaac Rosenberg: Vocals
Rebekah Wolkstein: Vocals, violin, guitar
Drew Jurecka: Violin, bandoneon, viola
Emily Kruspe: Violin
Yolanda Bruno: Violin
Catherine Gray: Viola
Beth Silver: Cello
Alice Purton: Cello
Michael Herring: Double Bass
Misha Mullov-Abbado: Double Bass
Joseph Phillips: Double Bass
Eric Abramovitz: Clarinet
Robert Horvath: Piano
Bruno Heinin: Piano

Executive Producer and Historian: Anna Shternshis
Produced by: Dan Rosenberg, Drew Jurecka, Anna Shternshis

Related post. Listening Post 148, Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II, May 3, 2018. https://worldlisteningpost.com/2018/05/03/yiddish-glory-the-lost-songs-of-world-war-ii/

Transnistrian Lullaby / Transnistria Viglid / טראַנסניסטריע וויגליד
Lyrics: Reli Blay, based on David Nomberg’s lullaby Dark Clouds Race and Rush
Music: Unknown
English translation: Hindy Abelson
Transliteration: Eli Jany
Vocals: Psoy Korolenko

From the album notes: Recorded from numerous survivors from Transnistria, the lullaby encapsulates all major experiences of refugees from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina—witnessing the deaths of close family members, forced expulsions from homes, violence of living under the German and Romanian occupation in Ukraine, and, of course, hope for a peaceful future. It is possible that Reli Blay, who was deported to Transnistria from Chernowitz in 1941, based the song on her own ordeals. [During World War II, “Transnistria” referred to the region between the Dniester and Southern Bug Rivers.]

The engines rush and run/and the train whistles
We, the expelled, sit inside/they’re sending us to the Bug

There, the wide Dniester beckons/sends a greeting to me
from my mother and my sister/who are already here.

[They] drove us out of our home/into a strange land
nothing remained for us/we were banished

And here we found/solitude, hunger, hardship
in beautiful Ukraine/death reigns

Typhus, solitude, hunger, cold/accomplished more
than weapons can/in a great battle

And for us there is/no grave, no tombstone
In a large mass grave/they lay us to rest

But a storm doesn’t last forever/the war will end
again the sun will shine for us/victory is ours.

And then we will come, liberated/to our old home
Leave the dead among the dead/life will be beautiful again

Obodivke Camp / In Obodivker Lager / אָבאָדיווקע לאַגער
Lyrics: Boris Zitserman, recorded from Sonya Reyber, Zunye Shtindler and Genye Soyfer, former prisoners of Bershad Ghetto
Music: Based on the tune of the Yiddish folk song Hey, Jankoe
English translation and transliteration: Eli Jany
Vocals: Simon Spiro

Written 1942 by a teenage poet Boris Zitserman (1926–2006), set to cheerful yet satirical tune of a pre-war folk song, the lyrics document daily routine in the Bershad ghetto, the largest ghetto of Transnistria. The song is based on memories of Avrom-Itsye, a deportee from Edine, in what is now northern Moldova. Owner of thin horse and wagon, he rode around ghetto, collecting bodies and dumping them behind ghetto’s iron gates. Avrom one of 20,000 deportees from Bessarabia & Northern Bukovina regions who ended up in the Bershad Ghetto by end of 1941. His entire family was killed on the way to Bershad.

If you travel to Balanivke, it’s not far to Obodivke/there’s a small camp there
Jews endure day and night/without drinking or eating
Hitler, the thief, says: That’s how it must be

Oh, woe, troubles, troubles/The Jews are being brought to slaughter
We wait for a more fortunate day
And the corpses lie and rot/and you begin to shudder
and why does a Jew suffer like this?

Avrom-Itsye sits in the wagon
It is a shame for him to admit it/he’s already making the sixth trip today.
The administration ordered him/to take care of all the corpses/and his hair’s standing on end with joy (???)

In the kolkhoz there in a corner/a girl dies there, oh, of hunger
and here they play a round of poker
And the Bershad cemetery/accepts into the world to come
as many people as there are

Oh, woe, troubles, troubles/The Jews are being brought to slaughter
We wait for a more fortunate day.

The Sad Camp / Fun a Troyerikn Lager / פֿון אַ טרויעריקן לאַגער
Lyrics: Itsik Semidubovski, a veteran of the Red Army wounded during World War II and former prisoner of Bershad ghetto
Music: Based on the folk song Bublichki, author unknown
English translation and transliteration: Eli Jany
Vocals: Alice Zawadzki

The song’s author Isaac Semidubovsky (1925–?), a former prisoner of the Bershad ghetto, wrote several texts describing destruction, despair and the emotional toll of life there—one of which he titled In a Sad Camp. He sang the song for Moisei Beregovsky on July 18, 1945, and it remains unclear whether it was written during his time in the ghetto or afterward while serving in the Red Army.

Oy tell me, dear Jews, oh where is the salvation?/I yearn, I wait for it, I’m being burned
They say that it’s a good remedy/it will redeem us from Hitler’s hands

It will open up our eyes, dear Jews/it will bring us joy once again
Oy, how does one live to see the golden hour/oy, how does one live to be there?

For the time being, we live, oy/beloved dear Jews
here in Transnistria in desperate need
In pitch darkness we wander around like sheep/death threatening from all corners

From the Bug to the Dnieper River/in cities and towns
murderers bathe in Jewish blood
On forsaken graves, on bloody graves/is inscribed: “The Jew – kaput”

Childhood Years / Kinder Yorn / קינדער יאָרן
Lyrics: Ida Rozhanskaya (based on Mordechai Gebirtig’s original lyrics)
Music: Mordechai Gebirtig
Vocals: Alice Zawadzki

A remake of popular the Yiddish theater song Childhood Years, originally written by Mordechai Gebirtig, a Polish songwriter from Krakow. Ida Rozhanskaya, a Polish refugee who spent part of the war in Almaty, Kazakhstan, created this song after her son, Moyshe Rozhansky, was killed during the Stalingrad Battle of 1942. Unlike Gebirtig’s piece, idealizing the childhood of a boy in a small Jewish town, Rozhansky’s version asserts that no matter what happens in the future, life without her son is devoid of purpose. Between June 1941 and the end of 1942, 386,492 evacuees and refugees, many of them Jews, found temporary homes in Kazakhstan. Mordechai Gebirtig was killed in Krakow ghetto in 1942.

Years of childhood, your childhood/forever you will stay in my memory
Whenever I think of those years/My heart crawls and I feel sad
O how far from me you are lost.

During those years – fresh beautiful flowers/You used to bring for me when you found them
Those are sad years/Difficult, terrifying ones
Took the beautiful time away

Here I see a little Moyshele/I kiss his red beautiful cheeks
His blue eyes are full of charm/They sink into my heart
I thought the world was mine.

Oh my child, I used to love you/I never used to take you to kheyder
Never hit you with a stick or hand/You never knew it
Not a single scar is left on you from me

In my mind still stands/the little house where I gave birth to you with so much pain
There I still see your cradle/it still stands at its place
Oh how fast you flew away from me/Years of childhood, I lost you
I lost my peace with them too/I have no courage, no purpose
Because you are so far away/I curse the day I was born.

A Girl from Kyiv / A Meydele fun Kyiv / א מיידלע פון ​​קיעוו
Lyrics: Unknown / Music: Folk
English translation and transliteration: Eli Jany
Vocals: Alice Zawadzki

Recorded from unknown survivor, this version draws on an older Yiddish song first documented in the Ginsburg–Marek collection of Yiddish folklore, published in 1901, with editors dating it to at least 1898. The earlier folk text contains no reference to war but centers on girl who lost her family and pleads for help. In contrast, this postwar rendition — recorded in Kyiv sometime after 1945 and before 1947 — recasts the narrative by citing German violence as source of singer’s suffering, presenting begging not as a timeless motif but as a direct consequence of wartime devastation.

On the streets of Kiev, where it’s dark and damp/a little girl stands and cries
She stands and cries/looking at the many people
and begging for a small donation.

“You little girl, you pretty girl/why is your expression so sad?
With your nature, with your lovely figure/you’re fit to be a countess”

“The murderers from Germany came into our home/and smashed everything to pieces
Smashed everything to pieces/and stabbed my father
my mother died of grief

My brother, in anger, went into the street/and stabbed one of the murderers
They caught him and beat him/and put him in shackles

How great is the shame in holding out one’s hand/to beg for a small donation
God, have mercy, stretch out your arms/and take me away from this world”