Songs of the Holocaust
Five songs of the Holocaust live in this catalog in Russian poetic adaptations. Each carries a true story: a name, a place, a melody that outlived its authors. All five will be born again in English, so that their meaning can travel as far as their music.
Spring in the Ghetto, in Russian (Весна в гетто)
Performed by Elechka · Music: Avrom Brudno · Original Yiddish lyrics: Shmerke Kaczerginski · Russian text: Olga Anikina, poetic adaptation, 2017
Shmerke Kaczerginski wrote this song, known in Yiddish as Friling ("spring"), in April 1943, after the death of his wife Barbara in the Vilna Ghetto. The melody was composed by Avrom Brudno, imprisoned in the same ghetto. Spring in this song becomes a painful contrast between the renewal of nature and personal loss.
The song was first performed on the stage of the Vilna Ghetto theater in the spring of 1943 and quickly spread through the ghettos and camps. After the war Kaczerginski included it in his famous collection Songs of the Ghettos and Camps (1948). Avrom Brudno perished in the Klooga camp, but the song lives on: it has been sung by Chava Alberstein and many others, and today it is heard at memorial concerts and in the educational programs of Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Archival source: holocaustmusic.ort.org →
Spring in the Ghetto, in Russian (Весна в гетто)
Children on the Train, in Russian (Едут дети)
Performed by Elechka · Original lyrics: Miriam Harel · Melody: a Polish children's song · Russian text: Olga Anikina, poetic adaptation, 2017
Miriam Harel created this song after the mass deportation from the Lodz Ghetto in September 1942. She was seventeen years old and led a children's group of the Gordonia movement. The familiar Polish children's melody sharpens the tragic contrast with the story of children being taken away into the unknown.
Archival source: holocaustmusic.ort.org →
Children on the Train, in Russian (Едут дети)
Summer Day, in Russian (Летний день)
Performed by Elechka · Russian text: Olga Anikina, original work, 2017 · Melodic source: the melody known from the song Papirosn
Olga Anikina's song is inspired by the memory of S'iz geven a zumertog, a song created by Rikle Glezer, an eighteen-year-old prisoner of the Vilna Ghetto, to the melody of the popular song Papirosn. The original tells of the forced removal into the ghetto and the killings at Ponar.
The Russian text is not a literal translation. It is an independent work in dialogue with the historical song.
Archival source: holocaustmusic.ort.org →
Summer Day, in Russian (Летний день)
Yisrolik, in Russian (Исролик)
Performed by Elechka · Music: Misha Veksler, written in the Vilna ghetto · Original Yiddish lyrics: Leyb Rosenthal · Russian text: Olga Anikina, poetic adaptation, 2017
A boy on a ghetto street corner. A tray of cigarettes almost given away. A coat with a hole, and a whistle that refuses to break. Yisrolik is the voice of a child who lost everything except his dignity.
Yisrolik was created in 1942 in the theater of the Vilna ghetto, one of the most famous songs written during the Holocaust. The poet Leyb Rosenthal wrote it for his younger sister, the singer Chayela Rosenthal, who performed it first. The music is by Misha Veksler, composer and conductor of the ghetto orchestra.
Neither author survived the war. But the song did. After the war Chayela sang it around the world and recorded it in Paris in 1948. Today it is heard at memorial concerts, in Jewish museums and school programs: a living reminder of the children who were never allowed to grow up, and whose voices did not disappear.
Archival source: holocaustmusic.ort.org →
Yisrolik, in Russian (Исролик)
Freedom Tango, in Russian (Танго Освенцима)
Performed by Elechka · Source: Niewolnicze tango, a pre-war Polish tango · Yiddish version: P.M. and Shmerke Kaczerginski · Russian text: Olga Anikina, poetic adaptation
This song reached us through a tangled history of languages and memory. The World ORT archive notes that the author of the Polish text of Niewolnicze tango is unknown. The Yiddish version was created by P.M. and Shmerke Kaczerginski, set to the melody of the pre-war Polish tango.
The Russian version returns the song to today's listener as a testimony of memory and of the longing for freedom.
Archival source: holocaustmusic.ort.org →
Freedom Tango, in Russian (Танго Освенцима)
The catalog
These five songs stand inside a larger songbook: joyful songs, lullabies, holiday songs. The music is the entrance; the story is the home.