Sing, Memory

March 27, 2023
Journalist Eyre debuts with a poignant account of one man’s campaign to preserve the music created by concentration camp prisoners during WWII. Shortly after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, law student and amateur musician Aleksander Kulisiewicz was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen as a political prisoner. That same year, composer Moses Rosenberg, known by his stage name, Rosebery d’Arguto, arrived at Sachsenhausen. He eventually became Aleks’s “musical mentor,” and after Rosebery was sent to Auschwitz and killed, Aleks preserved his masterpiece, “Jüdischer Todessang” (Jewish Deathsong), a musical representation of the Holocaust. Other prisoners who entrusted Aleks with their creations include Aron, a Jewish detainee who asked Aleks to memorize a lullaby he composed for his toddler, who was murdered by a Nazi officer, and Russian Red Army volunteer Alyosha, whose song for his love Sonia contained a vow to “forever howl at my executioners.” Eyre’s spare prose is most evocative when describing Aleks’s heroic and largely unheralded postwar efforts to amass an archive of camp songs, which culminated in a 1972 public performance, just 10 years before his death. Sparely written yet deeply moving, this is a powerful study of the healing power of art.