Anna Ondrušeková, directress Tatra Gallery in Poprad, author of the project
Art and holocaust
It is not easy to connect and correlate these two concepts. To begin with, it is necessary to characterise them and then describe how we have managed to draw attention to the serious topic of the Holocaust in our project through various artistic genres (painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, installation, concept, music, literature, film, theatre).
This is based on the assumption that art is an individual manifestation of the creative soul – one of the forms of mastering the world by humankind. It is the subject matter of scrutiny in aesthetic, art history and philosophy of art. Art can also mean the use of certain spiritual qualities or manual skills in creating a particular artwork in order to make the world artificially more beautiful and better. It entails repeating “to make the world more beautiful and better”, this fulfilment and mission of art has accompanied man perhaps since the birth of human civilization. We can continue the characterisation : art is a form of man’s ultimate being. It consists in the purposeful transformation of the ugly or the aesthetically ineffective or less effective into beauty in a concentrated form. The concept of art is so broad, multifaceted and changeable that many experts believe it is impossible to define.
Asking the question “What is art?” is perhaps akin to posing other Socratic questions : what is goodness, what is happiness, what is virtue, what is justice…? To answer it clearly is equally difficult. Every age and epoch has had a different view of art and the work of art. Many of the works now on display in museums were useful objects of common use, often with aesthetically tasteful designs. Today, it is quite the contrary: in art museums or galleries we encounter things originally from the non-art world that were placed there deliberately as art. After a period when it was easy to identify a work of art, the post-modern era has arrived, where anything can be art. What matters is “When is art”, as Nelson Goodman would say, which goes on to say: “the work mediates knowledge and is the source of meaning, we cultivate art for the sake of knowledge, which is mediated by aesthetic symbols” According to institutional analysis (George Dickie) art must meet the following two conditions : firstly it must be an artefact (a creation of man and not a natural object untouched by human hand) and secondly a representative of the art world who speaks on behalf of the institution (the author, curator, historian, collector) will declare it to be a creation for artistic and aesthetic consideration.
For us, the important thing is knowing and quoting Morris Weitz: “Art is meant to be an open-ended concept so as not to inhibit artistic creativity… the contemporary artist expresses his experience in such a way that he speaks for the many. The artist expresses the general through the particular.” And so through specific artistic performances, whether in the form of visual artifacts, concerts, theatrical performances, films, literary works, we wanted to point at the vast wrong-doings, injustice, misfortune inflicted on humanity during the Holocaust. At the same time, we also wanted to draw attention to the goodness, humanity, and courage that we encountered and tried to convey through art.
Explaining and characterising the concept of the Holocaust is not the main focus of this article. It is dealt with in more detail in other scholarly studies in this collection from different perspectives. We present those facts that are necessary to mention. The word Holocaust comes from the Greek word holokauston. The original Greek and Latin word, from which the modern word holocaust is derived, literally meant to burn completely, fully burnt (burnt sacrifice was typical of the Jews, for example). This is also how it is rendered in the Greek or Latin text of the Bible. However, this is not the meaning of the modern term holocaust/holokaust. The author of the modern term Holocaust is Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), who used it in his novel La Nuit (1958). In a broader sense, the word Holocaust also refers to the Nazi system of persecution of prisons and camps as a whole, or the Nazi persecution of all ethnic, religious and political groups, opponents (communists and social democrats), Jehovah’s Witnesses, physically or mentally disabled, homosexuals, Jews, Roma, Poles and citizens of the Soviet Union. Around 6 million Jews were murdered as part of the genocide against the Jewish ethnic group. If we understand the Nazi persecution as a whole by the term Holocaust, we are talking about a number of Holocaust victims of between 11 and 15 million people.
Approximately 89 000 Jewish citizens lived in the territory of the then Slovak Republic (1938-1945). Three labour camps were established in Slovakia – Sereď, Vyhne and Nováky (Oremov Laz is also mentioned). From there, many were deported (the first transport from Slovakia on 25 March 1942 from Poprad) to concentration camps in Poland.
Concentration camps in Poland: Chełmno, Auschwitz, Auschwitz II – Birkenau, Auschwitz III in Monowice, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka.
One of the largest camps, Auschwitz, was liberated by the Soviet army on 27. 1. 1945. That day, 27 January, was declared International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations General Assembly (2005). The tragic liquidation of the Gypsy camp within the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration complex on 2. 8. 1944 was the impetus for the declaration of the Roma Holocaust Memorial Day by the European Parliament in 2015.
For a long time, there was silence about these horrors. Only a few individuals who survived imprisonment in the concentration camps have been able to process their experiences artistically and publish them, whether in literary or artistic form. Today, we find institutions all over the world dealing with this subject, archiving the works, objects and testimonies of survivors, and thus also drawing attention to the senselessness of this action. One of the first survivors who was able to describe it very evocatively was Primo Levi (1919-1987), a chemist originally from Italy who became a writer after the war. His book If this is a Man is one of the most powerful accounts of the concentration camps ever written. In this collection we include several quotations from this book. Here is one of them: “…we have reached the bottom. It is impossible to go lower: there is no lower position for man, and it is impossible to imagine a worse one. Nothing is ours any more: they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, and even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and even if they did listen, they would not understand us. They will even take away our name: and if we would keep it, we shall have to find it in ourselves to retain something of ourselves, of what we have been, besides our name.” In addition to this collection, quotations from the book were also performed at a concert performance and performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time as part of our project at the Tatra Gallery, the texts recited by Kamil Mikulčík.
Cooperation with a Norwegian partner
The project was made possible thanks to the support of the EEA Grant (the contributions made by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway) and our foreign partner in the project was the Jewish Museum in Oslo (Jødisk Museum i Oslo Norway). Thanks to our colleagues from the Museum, especially Mats Tangestuen, we learned about the similar fates of people marked by the Holocaust in Norway and about some very interesting artists who dealt with the topic in an emotive and timeless artistic way (see separate contributions in the proceedings). There were 2,173 Jews living in Norway before World War II, 765 of whom were killed. The others escaped to Sweden and Great Britain thanks to the help of the locals. Norway remembers 26 November 1942 as one of the saddest days in its history, when 532 Jews were loaded onto the SS Donau. On the shores of occupied Poland, cattle wagons awaited them, bound for Auschwitz. Of these, 342 were murdered in the gas chamber as soon as they arrived. The transport to the port from their place of residence was particularly elaborate. It was carried out using 101 taxis, which loaded unsuspecting Jewish citizens at the precise hour and minute. According to the original plan, more Jews were to be deported, but thanks to the Red Cross and the sabotage of the action by Norwegian railway workers, many were late getting to the port and did not make it on board. This event was commemorated through an emotional performance by the Norwegian artist Victor Lind, whom we also presented in the Tatra Gallery (see article on page…)
Personal knowledge
If you work on a topic for a longer period of time, your knowledge expands and new circumstances, experiences, acquaintances and friends appear. I was first introduced to the subject of the Holocaust 45 years ago during a visit to Terezín in the company of an acquaintance who had lived through it first hand, including various experiments on women. I was horrified and it is deeply etched in my memory. In Slovakia, this subject was hardly discussed during the communist era. Many years later, I attended the unveiling of a commemorative plaque at the railway station in Poprad and learned that Poprad was the site of the first transport of Jewish women and girls to Auschwitz, another sad realization. In 2002, we started to participate in the Remembrance in the Tatra Gallery (TG) with various exhibitions. This year, Editka Grosmanová, a survivor of the first transport, took part in the exhibition. I was struck by her story. I learned more deeply and emotionally about the aftermath of the Holocaust, but also about the ways and possibilities of how artists, and not only those of Jewish origin, deal with this topic. I organised an international art symposium with the participation of Slovak and Israeli artists in Vyšné Ružbachy and an exhibition in Israel. I visited the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 2008, designed by the world-famous architect Daniel Libeskind. Subsequently, I managed to organize a major exhibition of his work at TG in 2012. From the premises of the Museum in Berlin I created a series of interesting photographs, exhibited both at home and abroad. The space, its layout philosophy, the concept of the rooms, the contrast of light and darkness will amaze you and leave a lastingly strong emotional experience. Like the Polin Museum in Warsaw, or the preservation of the foundations of the Warsaw Ghetto wall.
On another visit to Warsaw, I was strongly struck by the exhibition Architecture of Survival by the young artist Natalia Romik in Zachenta Gallery. It explored archaeologically, geologically and archival sites where Jews hid during the war. She found unusual places, part of the opening or space of which she cast and then exhibited as a kind of monument, a memorial in shiny metallic paint. Each casting had a detailed description with photographic and factual documentation from the specific people hiding there. Such art is truthful, concrete and powerfully emotional.
For a long time I have been following artists who are able to sensitively, but appealingly, draw attention to the subject of the Holocaust or other extremist sentiments and threats. It is not easy to process this topic and then react in the form of a work of art. There are several personalities in Slovak art whose works we have exhibited or met in other places, for example in the Jewish synagogue in Trnava, Nitra, Šamorín. I approached several people who were working on this topic, and that is how the exhibition project Memory of a Place and a City came into being. For a more consistent cooperation, as a guarantor of the whole ART&HOLOCAUST project, I invited professor Ľubomír Stach, who had already had several photographic exhibitions and made a film Zachor about the Nováky labour camp. He met people who survived the Holocaust and transferred their stories onto canvases in the form of photography.
The work of several well-known and unknown authors of different periods was presented. The most important exhibition within the project, held in the Tatra Gallery, was the exhibition Human Weaknesses by the prominent Polish artist Marcin Berdyszak. Further information is given in the following chapters.
The great interest of young people and the general public in artistic and educational events is a great satisfaction for us, who prepared and participated in the project. They were meant to be a memento, or a recognition of a global evil that is still slumbering somewhere and occasionally emerges. Let us not allow evil to triumph over the goodness, kindness, tolerance and generosity that is typical of us. Through art we can still overcome this trauma, commemorate unflattering historical events, but also educate as wide an audience as possible, in an emotive way.
Michal PAĽKO, leader and co-founder of Mojše Band
SONGS FROM THE CAMP
Dramaturgic Intention as a Key to Interpretation
Throughout the existence of the Mojše Band, I have always approached the staging of the material presented, in as essential form as possible, preserving and honouring the essence of a relevant chapter of Jewish culture. Ethnomusicology, as part of a broader knowledge of social and cultural contexts, provides an opportunity to know or verify the anthropology of social relations. It is the resulting findings, along with specific, often musical artifacts, that serve me well in reconstructing or creating a new, my own perspective on the stylistically diverse Jewish contemporary musical culture in the European region. Songs from the Camp, as my band-mates and I have named the project, seeks to process the period of the greatest socio-racial persecutions of the 20th century and, above all, to highlight the specificity of song as a musical form that offers a certain space for content innovation, a space for social-psychological transformation, or serves us today to obtain a specific image of the life of a person in an extreme situation, a period of the formation of new social identities. However, music in general, referring to the Shoah (Holocaust) period, does not have a uniform character in terms of stimuli. From today’s perspective, we approach this specific chapter of music (not only Jewish music) from several perspectives. The text will deal in particular with that part of musical expression which relates to the personal experience of the prisoners, to their creation, or the legacy they enshrined in songs.
Musical expression during the Holocaust with regard to the concentration camps
In the introduction, I briefly outlined the issue of the diversity of surviving musical artifacts of the period in question. In the preparation of dramaturgies, the selection of songs and their reconstructions, I kept in mind the diversity of the artifacts presented. Each was created under different circumstances, fulfilled a different social function during and after the Shoah, and has a different meaning for us and for contemporaries in those times. The specific surviving compositions, therefore, not only give us a picture of their exceptional construction and content, but by knowing the specifics of their creation, we are able to grasp the details of the situations of the persecuted society in the concentration camps in a better and more plausible way. We can divide the surviving and studied musical expressions according to musical stylistics, origin and their functionality into several categories, thus gaining a more comprehensive knowledge of the situations in which these reactions – musical expressions – were created.
1.) Musical productions of imprisoned musicians
a.) pseudo-freedom, created as a direct reaction to lived reality, musical production served the purpose of propaganda
Perhaps the most representative are the productions from the Terezín concentration camp. This camp was a means of propaganda and demonstration used by the SS in its time, where even for the invited official visit of Red Cross workers in June 1944 it was intended to demonstrate the “exemplary treatment” of the imprisoned Jewish people. The delegation even attended the première of Hans Krasa’s children’s opera Brundibár, which was performed a total of 55 times in the concentration camp between 1941-44. Each performance and staging, however, was accompanied by the re-casting of child actors who were deported to other camps. Brundibár itself was not composed in a concentration camp, but Krása and other composers (Viktor Ullman, Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Raphael Shachter) composed a number of works, mostly for chamber ensembles in the stylistics of contemporary classical music of the time, which in many cases were also performed in the Terezín ghetto. Often in the individual scores we see the composers’ departure from the established language and an inclination towards more radical, expressive elements of expression, reaching for new compositional techniques, the creation and notation becoming more radical. In today’s musicology, we can encounter a term for the unified designation of these authors as “Terezín composers”.
b.) Musical ensembles in concentration camps (for example, 16 different orchestras, bands and marching bands in Auschwitz concentration camp)
During the existence of the Auschwitz concentration camp, several musical ensembles were created to provide productions for the SS members and their families and for the running of the camp, the fellow prisoners on the other hand. We can define the ideological intentions of the SS troops into several categories:
Their aim was mainly to deepen the psychological trauma of the prisoners. Whether it was the productions of a few “march-bands”, which had the task of accompanying the prisoners in their march to the gas chambers with music. Prisoners in various musical ensembles provided regular daily productions on the appel-platz during the morning, midday and afternoon roll call. Musical productions of the dance orchestra for the SS commandos and their families, were played especially during the Sunday 4-hour dance afternoons. Of these productions, we reached for a re-composed Franz Gröte’s inter-war popular song Die Schönsten Zeit dem Leben (The Most Beautiful Time of My Life), which was in the repertoire of the KT Auschwitz-Birkenau dance orchestra, in the Mojše Band’s dramaturgy of the Songs from the Camp program. In the archives of the Auschwitz Holocaust Museum, prof. Patricia Hall of the University of Michigan found manuscripts of the orchestral parts of this schlager (first and second violin and bassoon parts), which were made and signed by the prisoners with their assigned numbers. Later it was even possible to trace the identity of the prisoners as prisoner no. 5655 – Arthur Gargul, prisoner no. 5131 – Maximilian Pilat, who survived the war and after the war worked as 1st bassoonist of the Philharmonic Orchestra in Bydgoszcz. I reconstructed and re-arranged the original instrumentation for the symphonette (chamber orchestra) of the German dance orchestra of the 1920s according to surviving records for the needs of the Mojše Band’s cast, i.e. a trio with accordion, dulcimer and double bass.
2.) Individual musical expressions of prisoners in general
In surviving works composed or in some other way documented, e.g. in prisoners’ diary entries, we can observe:
- tendencies of “identity construction, through authentic creation”. This is the inner testimony of the prisoners, through musical creation, through musical expression, but which is not public towards the SS, often not even towards fellow prisoners, it is a personal individual testimony.
- insofar as prisoners presented their work to fellow prisoners, e.g. (as they state in their post-war testimonies) during secret evening productions in the barracks, the work often serves to educate the generations growing up in the concentration camp
- musical expression that unites several different social classes, groups into one social cluster (it is not shared among Jews, Poles, orthodox or left-wing intellectuals). Music in general goes back to the roots of socio-cultural communities and at the same time distinguishes certain denominational, cultural and other specificities that make this particular “music” unique. The musical expression of the prisoners in the concentration camps is unifying, uniting different minorities, denominations, races, social classes, while becoming the basis for communication several generations after the war.
- individual musical expression often serves as a means of creating a pseudo-reality, an escape from reality
As an example, I quote the diary entries of the imprisoned Krystyna Zywulska, a well-known Polish post-war writer, especially for her work for the younger generation. Zywulska was a Polish woman of Jewish descent who joined the underground resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. She was captured by the Gestapo in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz. In the concentration camp, she authored several poems, but they could not be written down at the time (Zywulska wrote them down in her diary after liberation, which she supplemented with numerous illustrations). The poems, however, she taught to her fellow inmates and became popular in her generation, even formative to a certain extent (Wymarz przez brame, Unsent Letter, Appeal, Dancing Girl). We know from a later diary that Zywulska interpreted these strophic poems to the tunes of well-known Polish folk songs, which probably made them easy to remember and fairly quickly and effectively disseminated among her fellow prisoners. The notebook likewise reveals a certain formal enclosure of the strophic formations into larger units, some of which are sung, some recited. Often it prescribes a stage performance for them, suggesting small stage performances that were to take place in the setting of the girls’ barracks.
Individualism versus collective creation in the shared consciousness of a community of fellow prisoners
In the milieu of Jewish society, the Hebrew term Shoah, which literally means catastrophe, is commonly used to refer to the period of racial persecution during the World War II. But Hebrew grammar offers us, with a certain amount of hyperbole, room to interpret the word Shoah – שואה – with the word shva – שוא (the sign of the parting of the ways, a sign that means nothing, represents emptiness, nothingness, has no sound in the Hebrew alphabet). Often, then, the period of the Shoah is interpreted in these terms as a void, a period of silence, nothingness, and destruction at the same time. I would like to use this deeper Talmudic, outright metaphysical, perhaps even kabbalistic discourse to delineate the space in which I perceive the emergence and the possibility of defining the state in which the society of the time found itself. As already outlined, and partly pointed out with examples, the imprisoned creators took different attitudes towards their situation. Individual testimony, creation, artistic expressions, are testimonies in silence, testimonies without sound, without the intensity of voice, yet they are the loud cry of the depths of each prisoner’s soul. We encounter different phenomena in a destabilized society of traumatized prisoners, with different personal backgrounds (Zionists, leftist intellectuals, Jews, Orthodox, opponents of the regime…). It appears that in the aforementioned emptiness, nothingness, there is only space left for essence, self-preservation (existence and legacy for the next generations). In this sense, there is no room for different linguistic mutations in the sung musical artifacts. Bilingual lyrics are frequent; words of foreign languages become sound effects. In the same way, there is no room for different political views, national identity, social status in this space. Only space is created for the will to live, and individual expression through, for example, musical expression generates artifacts through which the prisoners breathe “soul” into the assigned “numbers”. The space of nothingness is transformed into a moment of eternity and a kind of paradigm-shifting moment is created. Social anomie, the need to requalify relationships but also basic communicative principles. Art or “creative expressions” become the universal communicative element of the prisoners (of the persecuted society). From a psychological point of view, in a state of extreme tension of an individual or a group of people, singing is the last or subconscious declaration of an individual attitude. And these momentary and psychologically extreme expressions are also artifacts that often lose the meaning of authorship and from an individual expression have the possibility to become a characteristic musical artifact defining a certain group of society. This type of expression of prison society during the Shoah is best represented by song formations, often based on strophic texts, to which the melodies of existing (folk, though not only) songs were attributed ex-post or directly during their creation. Their carriers were mainly the camp singers, who not only sang the songs, taught them to other prisoners, and led the work frequencies, but also directly participated in their preservation (often documented after the war) and purposeful or unintentional transformation.
Comedian, Lagersäger and comedian Aleksander Kulisiewicz
Aleksander Kulisiewicz is a representative of a certain phenomenon of shared expressions of prisoners and at the same time a spreader of his own songs, statements and reactions. In the Sachsenhausen camp he was one of the camp singers (Lagersäger) and not only him. He became a kind of bearer of the shared consciousness of an entire generation of prisoners and later a collector, publicist and performer of songs by prisoners in his own cabaret “boy w pasiaku”, several concentration camps. He was born in 1918 in Krakow, graduated from law school, and from childhood he was interested in music, thanks to which he performed in many Krakow cabarets and theaters during his university studies. He became a well-known and respected cabaret artist, especially as a whistler (virtuoso whistler), he even performed on the Viennese cabaret scene. In 1939, he published the article “hitleryzm domorosly” in the Tesin magazine “glos stanu średniego”, for which he was arrested and later deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as prisoner no. 25149. He called himself the camp archive. He described the situation in the camp with the words: “… other prisoners came to me… Czechs, Poles, Germans… Alex, do you still have a place? At home, in the archive? I closed my eyes and said – dictate. Everyone could check – after 3 months, after a year and after four years – the precision of my entry. And only that allowed me to endure. The awareness that I am fighting, that I am needed by someone, that from day to day I live and grow in me “the poetics of eight directions, hatred, grievances and often the most intimate desires of all of us…” Since the prisoners could not take notes, or to record facts in any way, they went to him as a well-known memorizer and dictated their creations to him in the hope that through him they could “save” their expressions, reactions, creations. In addition to “memorizing” the songs of his fellow prisoners, he also composed his own songs, and thus “brought out” from the camps almost 60 songs and 100 verses describing the camp reality. After being hospitalized in a Krakow hospital after the death march, he dictated these to a nurse in fear of death. He noticed that she crossed herself several times during the writing, turned around. The texts were in several languages, he experienced difficult mental and physical conditions while dictating, doctors considered him possessed by the devil. The sister wrote down 716 pages of camp texts (songs).
Selected songs of Kulisiewiczowa’s collection performed by Mojše Band
From a musical point of view, the artefacts in the kulisiewiczowe koleckcii include texts, poetry, illegally made paintings on various objects and scraps of paper that the prisoners brought out of the concentration camps or reconstructed from memory after the war. Kulisiewicz’s collection is stored in the Holocaust Museum in Washington. It was created many years after the war, and its basis consists of the mentioned songs of his own creation and songs and texts of fellow prisoners, which Kulisiewicz dictated immediately after liberation. Alexander Kulisiewicz became an organizer of post-war life, when he tried to contact surviving fellow prisoners and document the artistic expressions of this society. His collection contains a total of more than 600 Polish camp songs, about 200 songs with texts in other languages (Slovak, Yiddish, Czech, Russian…), 60 instrumental compositions, 5200 meters of tape with sound recordings, 2300 poetic works and more than 100 graphics, sketches and watercolors painted by prisoners.
Kulisiewicz’s songs in the collection represent a rare phenomenon from an ethnomusicological point of view, since it is precisely in them that the already mentioned phenomenon of the emergence of a new social identity can be demonstrated relatively well. For the most part, they are formally solved in smaller and simpler song forms, often with a repeat or DaCapo rehearsal. The melody of the songs, which often use folk tunes from different national locations, is interesting. According to Kulisiewicz, quoting melodies was a means of communicating specific moments when, while working in the camp, the melodies of songs in other languages, which he was unable to understand, came to him. He “placed” his texts on these melodies, while often times the original chorus-like text kept this tune, while it already served as a new expressive element of a rather sonorous nature. These songs represent a kind of space of common consciousness, shared by a very bizarre society, but in terms of style and the original location of the melodic material, it blurs the boundaries and creates new content. At the same time, in the suite of selected songs from Kulisiewicz’s collection, which we presented as part of the Art and Holocaust project with Mojše Band, it is possible to clearly observe the national palette.
As an example, I present the song “Cozem czy zawinil, Bergen-Belsen moje”, which is a pretext version of the wedding song from Kysuce – “Love, God, love…”. Kulisiewicz remembers this song that he heard its melody during hospitalization in the camp hospital, when he developed typhus and was placed in quarantine. The melody of the text, which he did not fully understand, but in a feverish state transformed into a kind of chorus-like mantra with an accent on the text “Bergen-Belsen mine”.
Free translation of the song:
How have I wronged you, my Bergen-Belsen?
I can’t cry anymore, my Bergen-Belsen.
The sun is burning above the tent, my Bergen-Belsen,
I’m dying of fever, my Bergen-Belsen.
Dusty death awaits me, my Bergen-Belsen,
Hug me, and don’t undress, my Bergen-Belsen.
