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The Conversation
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Jan Lanicek, Associate Professor in Modern European History and Jewish History, UNSW Sydney

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

Holocaust Claude Lanzmann SS Bucharest Memory Poland Europe University of Sydney
Janowska Orchestra University of Sydney

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).

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