What Place Does Concentration Camp Art Have in Holocaust History?

Yet at times, her book can fall into the trap of seeing music as inherently uplifting. Many of her chapter titles, for example—“I felt sun on my face,” “She gave us hope and courage,” “The orchestra means life”—are tonally at odds with what the research in the book says. In this she also has company—The Washington Post, for instance, wrote that prisoners found “comfort, dignity and sometimes a lifeline” in music, while The New York Times described music as a “buoy” in the camps.

In reality, inmates turned to music—when they weren’t forced to do so—for myriad reasons. Uplift was just one. Some found in music entertainment, a solution to intellectual boredom, a means of escape. At every major Nazi camp, deportees of all backgrounds, many with no formal training, created and performed music. There were choirs, ensembles, troupes, duos, and individual singers performing in their blocks—and sometimes even “touring” from block to block—largely beyond the knowledge of the guards. Buchenwald had a jazz big band, Falkensee was home to a “gypsy orchestra.” Soviet POWs gathered to perform at Flossenbürg. Sachsenhausen alone had a harmonica troupe, a secret Jewish choir, and a string quartet that performed contraband scores by Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, and Dvořák at the camp mortuary.

Prisoners often created parodies of existing tunes, in which they processed what was taking place around them, commented on it, documented it; they slung broadsides, ridiculed Hitler, and expressed their fear of Germany’s domination of Europe. After the British evacuation at Dunkirk, for instance, Kulisiewicz composed anxious lyrics about the Wehrmacht’s seemingly unstoppable advance. After their defeat at Stalingrad, he wrote jubilant lyrics of celebration.