Shotns—שָאטנס—Shadows
Songs from Testimonies, Volume 3

1. Introduction by Stephen Naron, Director, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

In 1979 the Holocaust Survivors Film Project – the predecessor of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies – began taping the testimonies of survivors and witnesses in New Haven, Connecticut. The project was founded by Dr. Dori Laub, a psychiatrist and analyst and himself a child survivor from Czernowitz, Romania (now Ukraine), and Laurel Vlock,
a television journalist at Channel 8. They had the support of the New Haven survivor community, particularly of William Rosenberg, who would later become the president of the project, as well as many other members of the Jewish community.
In 1981 the video collection came to Yale, thanks to the work of Professor Geoffrey Hartman, who gave it a permanent home within the Manuscripts and Archives department at Sterling Memorial Library. Under Hartman’s watch as faculty advisor, it grew to become an internationally renowned collection that, over the years, has influenced the way the history of the Holocaust is written, studied, and taught.
There are more than 4,400 testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archive – 12,000 hours of material in over a dozen languages, recorded over the last 40 years in over a dozen different countries. That’s 4,400 life stories. I call them life stories because our interview methodology asks survivors to recount their entire history – from their earliest childhood memories to the present. We consider it essential to know what life was like before the Holocaust in order to understand the scope of the loss it wrought, as well as the complexity of each individual’s attempt to recover – to the extent possible – and build a life after the war.

The songs on this third volume of ‘Songs from Testimonies,’ were sung in a number of testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archive and reflect the richness of these audiovisual documents. They are songs from the interwar period, songs from the ghettos, songs from the camps. Originally, many were often sung collectively, but in survivors’ testimonies they are recounted or performed by individuals. They thus remind us that the survivor singing them represents all those who did not survive to sing again, and so remind us of the absence of the songs’ original audience.

The Fortunoff Archive’s faculty advisor, Professor Timothy Snyder, observes that testimonies, like works of art, have a special ability to cross the membrane between death and life, between past and present. The songs embedded in these testimonies are especially evocative in this respect, but to fully appreciate their power they must be heard, not read. That’s what inspired us to produce this series of recordings.

The recording you are about to hear is a reading of testimony as a source – perhaps an unconventional reading, but a reading nonetheless. Some of the songs are about dying and death, written and sung in the camps. This effort to recall them – part anthropological, part ethnomusicological, part historical – also recreates them. It is my hope that this recreation will form a link between those who are no longer with us and the living, all of us listening to these songs today.

2. Foreword
by Shirli Gilbert, University College London, January 2023

In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews across Europe heeded a strongly-felt imperative to document ‘the most tragic page in the history of our nation’. Numerous initiatives were launched to collect witness testimonies alongside photographs, documents, and other remnants of the communities that had been destroyed. In this critical post- war undertaking songs played a crucial role, both as historical sources that would enable researchers to reconstruct what had happened and as artefacts that could help preserve the voices, and thereby the memory, of the victims. As one impassioned collector, the Vilna poet and partisan Shmerke Katsherginski, put it, the 'bloody’ musical folklore that he and others were labouring to salvage would 'help future history-writers and researchers as well as readers to fathom the soul of our people.'

Cited in Natalia Aleksiun, “Polish Historiography of the Holocaust: Between Silence and Public Debate,” German History 22/3 (2004): 412.
Shmerke Katsherginski and H. Leivick, eds., Lider fun di getos un lagern (New York, 1948), xviii.

In the intervening decades, the songs collected by Katsherginski and others have mostly been gathering dust in archives, unknown by historians, musicians, filmmakers, teachers, and the general public. This, despite having survived in their hundreds. The songs are rich and complex documents, reflecting the tumultuous historical moment at which they were forged as well as the diversity of their creators. Thrown together under Nazi internment, the Nazis’ victims represented nationalities, languages, religious beliefs, and political affiliations from across the European continent. In a world where newspapers, radios, and other forms of communication had in effect ceased functioning, songs were one powerful way for them to interpret what was happening, to record, to share emotions and responses.
The perspective the songs offer is not a retrospective but rather a contemporary one: that of victims making sense of lived reality without knowledge of what was around the corner. The songs also reflect the diverse range of responses one would expect across such a vast population. A handful are anthems of resistance. Some are nostalgic, connecting people with memories of home and community. Some are lullabies; others use sardonic humour to make light of the situation; yet others criticize the Jewish leadership in the ghettos or Kapos in the camps. They bring to light countless different voices: some optimistic, some defiant, some fearful, some critical—all struggling in different ways to make sense of a frightening and unpredictable reality.

This third volume of the Fortunoff Video Archive’s ‘Songs from Testimonies’ project contributes to the restoration and dissemination of this precious and plentiful archive. The album contains thirteen songs in Yiddish, Ladino, Hebrew, Polish, Czech, and Greek, recalled by survivors in their oral testimonies for the Archive and masterfully brought to life here in new musical arrangements by Zisl Slepovitch, performed by a group of talented and dedicated musicians. The songs embrace a dizzying array of musical styles, from Hassidic niggunim and Yiddish folk songs to liturgical music, Czech marches, and the ever-popular tango—further testament to the cultural diversity of the Nazis’ Jewish victims.

The songs testify, too, to a wide range of responses. In 'Di bone' we witness the despair of beggars in the Warsaw ghetto; in 'Geto, getunyu', the sardonic humour of Lodz troubadour Jankele Herszkowicz (‘Whoever wears a ‘badge’, / Gets the nicest and the best of everything, / Even a position of the highest order. / But if you’re an intellectual, / Without a cent, / You drag yourself around like a corpse / Without bread and without an address’). The Jewish police-collaborators who exploit their fellow inmates in Salonika are the target of the extraordinary 'Yinete prosklitiryo ke Stavrou Voutira' [There Was a Bugle Call on Stavrou Voutira Street]. Morale-raising comes in the form of 'Zog shoyn lekho doydi' [Now say 'Lekho Doydi'], a song by a Bobov Hassid based on the well-known paraliturgical Sabbath poem, on one end of the cultural spectrum, and the jaunty ‘Pochod neutrálu’ [The March of the Neutral] by the popular (non-Jewish) Czechoslovak jazz composer Jaroslav Ježek, on the other.
These are not simply texts. By virtue of their very form, songs offer a space of rich potential for understanding and remembering the Holocaust. Unlike the piles of glasses and shoes displayed at some museums, which represent the victims only by their absence, the songs are relics of the past that, symbolically, can still sing. They cannot replace what was lost, of course, but they can speak in the present, restoring some voice and agency to those who did not live to recount their stories. They are also a reminder of the range and vitality of Jewish life in a world that was largely destroyed. There is so much here for researchers to mine and for listeners to savour.

3. Liner Notes by Dr. D. Zisl Slepovitch, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

Songs from Testimonies is a musical project of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (FVAHT) that aims to bring to life the musical parts of the stories of the survivors. About 60 of more than 4,400 archived testimonies contain songs: that the survivors grew up with; that helped them mentally survive the inhumane reality of the Holocaust; with which they rebuilt their lives after World War II; songs they had composed themselves or old tunes sung to newly invented lyrics; songs performed in a dozen languages throughout the European continent, and so on. The musical collection of FVAHT contains songs of almost any imaginable kind and period-relevant genre. This extreme diversity might be explained by the research method employed by the Archive, which asked and encouraged survivors to tell their entire life stories. Some Holocaust survivors happened to be remarkable folksingers with incredibly impressive memories. Among these were Jack M., a native of the Polish town of Szydłowiec, and Moshe B., from Rymanów in Galicia, now Poland. Some survivors, like Pepo S, sang only a few lines of a song about the collaborationist Jewish police of his native Thessaloniki, Greece, set to the tune of Lili Marleen—a few lines that now constitute a unique historical document. Regardless of their musical talent, all survivors who chose to perform music and poetry as part of their testimonies wove an important layer into both their personal stories and their contributions to a larger picture of the history of culture, language, music, and sometimes politics of the Holocaust.

Just as the material itself has many sides, so my work on this collection requires a variety of skills, from research into the archival materials to production of this record series. It would be impossible to accomplish these goals were it not for the collegial support and fruitful collaboration of: singer Sasha Lurje, violinist Craig Judelman, accordionist, keyboardist and guitarist Joshua Camp, and bassist Dmitry Ishenko. Each of these outstanding musicians has helped this project to speak in all imaginable depth and colors.

Producing an album like this is comparable to writing a history book. The process requires extensive contextualization and proper attribution of every recorded piece. Light was shed on many songs on this album only with the help of multilingual Internet resources and through conversations with colleagues (see the thanks recorded at the end of this essay). Many indirect sources, incidentally turned up during conversations, proved keys to understanding the lyrics in seemingly irresolvable situations of weak diction, mixed up lyrics, and so on. The Songs from Testimonies music project is challenging and exacting because it strives to preserve the memory of, and decode and amplify, the voices of those who are, for the most part, no longer with us. It is hugely rewarding because it is important that we hear these voices loud and clear in the present.