Buried Monuments: Yiddish Songs and

Holocaust Memory
by Shirli Gilbert
In 1988, Aaron Lansky published an article titled Collecting Yiddish
Folksongs: a Do-It-Yourself Guide for the Amateur Yiddish SongZamler. Best known as the founder of the National Yiddish Book
Center or, more dramatically, as the man who rescued a million
Yiddish books, as the subtitle of his recent book puts it Lansky was
extending his passion for the preservation of Yiddish literature to the
realm of Yiddish songs, which also needed urgently to be transcribed,
recorded and saved for posterity. Lanskys intention in the article was to
provide prospective zamlers (collectors) with the requisite techniques for
collecting songs from anyone old enough to remember the songs they
learned at their bobes (grandmothers) knee, either in the Old Country
or here in America; the songs they collected were solicited directly for the
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Lansky lamented that
although early twentieth-century Jewish ethnographic expeditions had
yielded thousands of these songs, and despite the dedicated work of a handful of scholars in the decades since, the work of recording the living music
of a world which is no more remained far from complete. It is imperative,
he insisted, that these surviving songs be recorded right now before they
are forgotten and lost forever.1
In articulating the importance of collecting Yiddish songs in the late
1980s, Lansky was echoing a rhetoric of preservation and loss that had
informed the field of folklore studies in general, and Jewish folkloristics in
particular, for at least a century. In the Jewish case this rhetoric resurfaced
with added urgency in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, when
numerous independent initiatives were launched to gather and secure all
materials and historical documents that would enable [us] to reconstruct the
most tragic page in the history of our nation.2 In this critical post-war
undertaking, as in earlier ethnographic work, songs were recognized as
playing an integral role, both as historical sources that would enable
future researchers to reconstruct what had happened, and as artefacts that
could perhaps preserve the voices, and thereby the memory, of the victims.
Although not overtly addressed by song collectors working in this period,
the question of memory was always implicit in their observations. They
made frequent reference to the value that historians, researchers and
future generations would glean from the songs, seemingly making little
distinction between notions of history and memory, or at least between
formal historiography and popular (Jewish) remembering.
History Workshop Journal Issue 66
doi:10.1093/hwj/dbn026
The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Zydowski Instytut Historyczny Instytut Naukowo-Badawczy.

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Fig. 1. One of the two milk cans in which portions of the Ringelblum Oyneg shabes
archives were hidden and buried in the Warsaw ghetto.

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This article seeks to make explicit the link between music and Holocaust
memory, exploring their relationship from the conceptions of the early song
collectors to more recent trends, and gesturing tentatively to future possibilities. It explores how music functions as a mediator of memory, and considers the distinctive ways in which it might inform the process of
memorialization. Music has from the outset functioned as a key agent or
bearer of Holocaust memory, from the earliest commemorations amongst
survivors until today;3 it is arguably one of the most important media
through which ideas and attitudes about the past are constructed and
shared. In recent decades, however, its usage has fallen largely under the
limiting interpretive rubric of spiritual resistance, which associates it overwhelmingly with affirmative frameworks such as defiance, faith and heroism. As a result, and in the context of increasingly diversified ideas about
how and why we remember the Holocaust, the article argues that musics
distinctive potential as a memorial object has been underdeveloped: potential both for enriching and deepening the scope of popular memorialization
and for challenging some of the unconstructive narratives that have dominated the memorialization process. The motivations of the early zamlers,
and their articulation of musics value, offer a helpful starting point for
rethinking how this relationship might be conceived.
The larger question of the relationship between music and memory has
been relatively underexplored in historical, musicological and ethnomusicological writing. As Kay Kaufman Shelemay argued in her groundbreaking
study Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews,
although so much music is shot through with remembrance and is explicitly
perceived as commemorative when performed, the relationship has been
largely neglected and little theorized. This is particularly striking given the
increasing prominence of memory as a theoretical concern in the broader
humanities.4 While some studies have begun to map out this complex and
rich terrain, they have focused largely on music that is overtly or purposely
commemorative: in Shelemays case, for example, songs that are intentionally constructed sites for long-term storage of conscious memories from the
past.5 By contrast, my primary interest in this article is in songs that were
for the most part not created with commemoration in mind though if they
have seen the light of the present day, it will generally have been in a
commemorative context. Although there is a growing body of compositions
written post-1945 in commemoration of the Holocaust, my focus here is on
Yiddish songs that were created during the Holocaust, and the ways in
which they have functioned, and might function, as vehicles for Holocaust
memory.
A few words are in order about my use of the term memory, which
despite ongoing deliberation amongst scholars remains a notoriously complex concept to delineate and define. I have written elsewhere about the use
of music as a historical source, and I do not intend to rehearse those arguments here.6 In this context I am interested primarily in popular memory,

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not only in the limited sense of remembrance ceremonies, but also in the
broader sense of how knowledge about the Holocaust is mediated and disseminated in the public sphere. My discussion takes as its point of reference
the ways in which music is used to shape understandings of the Holocaust in
settings like commemorations, pedagogy, websites, concerts, songbooks,
organizations devoted to the study and dissemination of Holocaust music
and other public forums, although I do not present detailed analyses.
Underlying Lanskys work, and that of countless collectors before him, is
the self-evident importance and urgency of collecting cultural treasures
before they are irrevocably lost. What is sometimes less clearly evident,
amidst the urgent fervour of this collection work, is the purpose that the
resulting products, once gathered and safely secured, will serve. While this is
not always a process over which ethnographers have control,7 I argue that
the early song collectors notions are an instructive basis from which to
rethink the critical question of why we ought to remember the Holocaust
in the first place, and the role that song might play in that process.
ELEVENTH-HOUR ETHNOGRAPHY
Before his death in the Riga ghetto in 1941, the Jewish historian Simon
Dubnov is reported to have made a fervent appeal to his fellow Jews:
People, do not forget. Speak of this, people; record it all.8 The imperative
to record and bear witness was widely heeded by Jews across Europe from
the early years of the Second World War, particularly by ethnographers and
historians like Dubnov, Emanuel Ringelblum and others who insisted
that the documentation and transmission of Jewish history was critical to
ensuring a Jewish future.9
The importance attached to documentation during the Holocaust period
was not a new phenomenon, but part of a longer trajectory, dating back to
the late nineteenth century, of salvage or eleventh-hour ethnography: collection work that is premised on the threat of the imminent disappearance of
a tradition or culture, and the urgent need to document the remnants of that
culture before it is too late.10 In the Jewish case, the looming threat in the
1890s was acculturation and assimilation; as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
has argued, the prevailing approach in the emerging field of Jewish folkloristics at that time was the importance of salvaging the last vestiges of
traditional culture before it yields in the face of cosmopolitanism and assimilation, whether in Europe or North America.11 Jewish ethnographers
derived many of their approaches from the larger field of late nineteenthcentury German folklore studies, and their writings reveal clear lines of
connection and influence.12 They justified their activities with similar warnings about collecting before it was too late, and the urgent need to preserve
precious material that was on the verge of being lost.
A wide range of organized Jewish efforts in Europe to document the
Nazi onslaught continued these earlier trends, and in some cases, the connections with pre-war collection efforts were direct. In the Warsaw Ghetto,

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for example, Emanuel Ringelblum co-ordinated a secret archive (see fig. 1)

codenamed Oyneg shabes (Joy of the Sabbath), in which he enlisted a wide
range of people to report on culture and education in the ghetto, distribute
questionnaires, interview ghetto residents, record statistical data relating to
ghetto life, collect folklore and chronicle daily events. As Ringelblum noted
in his diary, one of his most committed co-workers was Shmuel Lehman,
who had been a prolific collector of Yiddish folklore before the war:
Lehman, as was his way, was very active. He collected folklore of the war
day and night jokes, sayings and so forth. Lehman always used to
compare his enormous collection from the other World War to his collection on this war.13
Similar documentary efforts were initiated elsewhere, with the help of
experienced collectors: an underground archive in the Bialystok ghetto modelled on Oyneg shabes, another in Theresienstadt, an official chronicle in
Lodz, in addition to a wide range of individual diaries.14 The vast majority
of these were clandestine endeavours, signalling the value attached to this
activity by ghetto inmates across Nazi-occupied Europe and the enduring
importance attached to such documentation efforts.
In the post-war period, which constitutes this articles primary focus,
Jewish collection work continued to draw on practices and approaches that
had been established in the preceding decades. What was perhaps distinctive
about the discourse that emerged amongst collectors directly after the genocide was their explicit articulation of memory as a concern: that is, their
emphasis not only on preserving a culture in danger of destruction (or already
destroyed), but also on honouring and memorializing the people that had died
along with it. Although the extent of the tragedy undeniably added layers of
intensity and urgency to the long-standing need to document, however, the
practice was in essence characterized by continuity rather than rupture. The
emphasis on continuity is crucial both to understanding the early collectors
ideas about why they were preserving, and consequently to considering the
ways in which the genocide has been, and might be, remembered.
Early gatherings of survivors echoed the importance of recording what
had happened, and numerous independent initiatives were launched to collect material. The Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland was
formally established in December 1944, and in the months that followed
several similar institutions were established across western and central
Europe.15 According to Philip Friedman, who directed the Commission in
Poland, the aim of these institutions was
historical documentation per se, documentation to embrace all historical
features during the Nazi regime, including the internal life of the Jewish
community at that time, its social, cultural, religious, artistic and literary
activities etc.16

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The objective of these institutions is perhaps more precisely described

as twofold. On one level, the emphasis was on historical documentation
per se, but underlying the fervent collection of material was clearly an
urgently felt (and overwhelmingly personally felt) imperative to preserve
the memory of a destroyed people. A distinction was not made between
documenting on the one hand and preserving memory on the other, since
these activities were seen as practically synonymous. As Laura Jokusch has
argued, commission activists conceived of documentation itself as a means
of commemorating the dead: a call to survivors in the US zone of occupation, for example, urged that every document, picture, song, legend is the
only gravestone which we can place on the unknown graves of our parents,
siblings, and children!17
It is worth emphasizing that these post-war documentation efforts were
taking place at a moment of dire physical and emotional circumstances for
Europes Jews. The vast majority were officially displaced persons (DPs),
refusing to be repatriated to their countries of origin, but at least until the
establishment of Israel and the easing of US immigration restrictions in 1948
having few alternatives for emigration. Many found themselves once again
living in appalling conditions in camps on German soil, and facing the
spectre of renewed antisemitism in Poland.18 The fervent documentation
efforts appear all the more remarkable in this context, and signal the continued significance attached to these activities given the survivors pressing
personal needs.
SALVAGING MUSIC IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE HOLOCAUST
Songs had long been considered an essential component of the Jewish ethnographic enterprise, with collectors often stressing their importance as
historical and ethnographic artefacts. In their 1901 Yidishe folkslider in rusland (Yiddish folksongs in Russia), for example, one of the earliest and most
comprehensive published collections, Saul Ginzburg and Peysekh Marek
expressed confidence that the songs would lead us into the intimate world
of folklife and present valuable material for the historian and the ethnographer. In his 1923 collection Baym kval: materialn tsum yidishn folklor
yidishe folkslider (At the source: Materials for Yiddish folklore Yiddish
folk songs), the leading folklorist Shloyme Bastomski opined that the songs
provided a mirror of . . . Jewish life and could direct one to the most
hidden corners of the folks soul.19
Song-collection initiatives during the Holocaust and in its immediate
aftermath were premised on similar motivations. Although those involved
in documentation efforts placed their primary emphasis on personal testimonies, many also consistently expressed their interest in songs, stories,
jokes and other cultural remnants of the communities they sought to memorialize. Music featured prominently in three particular initiatives carried out
in the post-war years: the collection work of Shmerke Katsherginski primarily in Lithuania and Poland; that of the Central Historical Commission in

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Munich; and the interview project carried out by the psychologist David
Boder in Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland.20 In all three cases, music
was conceived as an integral part of the larger mission to document and
preserve, rather than as an initiative on its own terms.
Why do these collection projects merit attention? In the first place, the
process through which Holocaust-era songs were recovered and preserved
has scarcely been documented.21 Beyond simply filling this gap in our historical knowledge, however, my aim in drawing attention to these initiatives
is to raise several interrelated points. The fact that music was an integral
part of larger documentary initiatives has not been widely recognized, but it
shows that songs were considered valuable artefacts with much to contribute
to the writing of history and the preservation of memory. Indeed, this motivation was explicitly expressed and elaborated by early collectors. Further,
although collectors ideas regarding musics value clearly originated in earlier ethnographic thought, they are worthy of emphasis not least because
there is a striking disjuncture between how they imagined the songs would
be used, and how those songs have in reality featured in subsequent decades
of Holocaust memorialization. Although this disjuncture is not inherently
problematic, as I argue below, it sheds light on some of the dynamics of
recent Holocaust memory and provides a basis for a reconsideration of how
music might alternatively inform the memorialization process.
The collectors themselves also deserve attention. One of the earliest collectors of Yiddish songs from the ghettos and camps was Shmerke
Katsherginski, a well-loved writer and communist activist before the war
and a leading member of the United Partisans Organization established in
the Vilna ghetto.22 Katsherginskis involvement in collection efforts began in
the ghetto, where he was one of forty inmates assigned to assist in the work
of Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Nazi agency charged with seizing
the archives and libraries of its political adversaries for safekeeping and
research purposes.23 Einsatzstab Rosenberg set up its Vilna headquarters
outside the ghetto, and the inmates attempted to save as many materials as
possible, an operation that involved smuggling them back into the ghetto
and burying them in designated places.24 People looked at us as if we were
crazy, wrote Katsherginski. Other inmates would smuggle food from town
into the ghetto under their clothes, in their boots, and we would smuggle
books, papers, or sometimes a Torah, mezuzahs.25 After the liberation of
Vilna by the Soviets in summer 1944, Katsherginski established with some
fellow partisans a provisional museum in his apartment, where they displayed unearthed artefacts and documents relating to Jewish life in Vilna
before and during the Nazi occupation (see figs 2 and 3).26
In addition to these initiatives, it is as a collector of music and poems that
Katsherginski has perhaps become best known. Katsherginski was himself a
songwriter who had penned some of the most popular songs in the ghetto.27
After the war, he travelled widely in Poland collecting poems and songs
from survivors, and in spring 1946 moved to Lodz, where he helped to

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of YIVO Institute.

114

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot.

Fig. 2. Shmerke Katsherginski in Vilna after the liberation

of the city by the Red Army, July 1944.

Fig. 3. Former members of the United Partisans Organization outside the Jewish museum on
Straszuna Street in Vilna, where they were engaged in organizing the ghetto archives, September
1944. Pictured from left to right are: Naomi Markeles, Shmerke Katsherginski, Abba Kovner,
and Yitzhak Kowalski.

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115

prepare Undzer Gezang (Our Song), one of the earliest published collections
of ghetto songs in post-war Poland.28 After the Kielce pogrom in July 194629
he joined a growing Jewish exodus to Paris, where within a few years he
published several books (works of autobiography and history), as well as
two important music collections: Dos gezang fun vilner geto (The song of the
Vilna ghetto, 1947), his first independent song compilation; and his monumental Lider fun di getos un lagern (Songs from the ghettos and camps,
1948), which remains the largest and most important collection of Yiddish
songs from the Holocaust period. Since Katsherginski lacked formal musical
training, he relied on musical collaborators to transcribe melodies for him.
Generally, they would notate melodies that he remembered, or meet with
survivors directly.30 His Lider consists of over 230 poem and song texts,
some with musical notation.
In November 1947, from his new base in Paris, Katsherginski departed
for a three-week tour of Displaced Persons camps in the American zone of
occupied Germany, to give lectures and share with fellow survivors some of
the songs he had collected.31 While in Germany he briefly interrupted his
engagement schedule to record some songs for another important collection
initiative, organized by the Tsentrale historishe komisye (Central Historical
Commission), which had been created under the auspices of the Central
Committee of Liberated Jews in Munich in December 1945. The
Commission became an important archival and information-gathering
centre under the leadership of Moses Josef Feigenbaum and Israel
Kaplan, and from August 1946 it began publishing its own newspaper,
Fun letstn khurbn: tsaytshrift far geshikhte fun yidishn lebn beysn natsi
rezhim (From the Latest Destruction: Journal for the History of Jewish
Life during the Nazi regime).32
At the top of Feigenbaum and Kaplans agenda for the Commissions
work were eyewitness testimonies, which they urgently wanted to gather
from survivors before they left the DP camps and emigrated from
Germany. Ranking a close second to these in importance was what
Kaplan characterized as folklore: songs, anecdotes, jokes, sayings, phrases,
quotes, nicknames, passwords, curses, greetings and similar oral artefacts
that had come into being under the occupation.33 Fun letstn khurbn was a
valuable medium both for soliciting the submission of such materials and for
publishing them. Advertisements in the newspaper encouraged people to
share stories, photographs and other documentary materials with the
Commission, and Kaplan wrote a regular column titled Dos folks-moyl
in natsi-klem (Jewish folk-expressions under the Nazi yoke), where he published in increasingly expanded articles some of the material he had
received.34
Some of the newspapers most prominent announcements urged survivors
to share songs. The second issue, for example, published in September 1946,
asked its readers: Can you sing a song from the ghetto, camps, partisans,
etc.[?] Come to the Historical Commission where the song will immediately

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be immortalized on a gramophone record.35 The newspapers tone became

increasingly insistent, and a few weeks later it declared: It is the obligation
of every surviving Jew to immortalize the songs that were sung in his ghetto
or camp. Get in touch with us!36
The campaign was successful, and the Commission managed to record
dozens of Yiddish songs, sung by their authors or, as was more often the
case, by survivors who remembered the songs. Some appeared numerous
times by different respondents, offering insight into patterns of circulation
and the songs myriad variants. The Commissions collection included popular songs that appeared in other collections, including Katsherginskis, as
well as songs that were not documented elsewhere.37
Unlike Katsherginski, Feigenbaum and Kaplan, whose urge to preserve
sprang from their personal experiences of the Nazi occupation, David Boder
approached the task of documentation from the outside though he
defended the imperative with no less fervour. Boder was a Latvian Jewish
emigre to the United States who settled in 1926 in Chicago, where he eventually became a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of
Technology. Soon after the end of the war, Boder decided to undertake a
trip to western Europe to interview witnesses and study the psychological
effects of trauma, enticed by General Eisenhowers suggestion that
American journalists come and see for themselves what had happened.38
Although it took him over a year to secure clearance and funding, by which
point he assumed he was almost certainly too late, Boder finally departed in
mid 1946, and between late July and early October he travelled to DP and
refugee centres in France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany.
Boder insisted it was crucial to interview witnesses while their memories
were still fresh, and to allow them to tell their own stories.39 In a proposal
to prospective funders, written just as the war was ending, he urged:
For psychological as well as historical reasons, it appears of utmost
importance that the impressions still alive in the memory of displaced
persons of their sufferings in concentration camps and during their subsequent wanderings, be recorded directly not only in their own language
but in their own voices.40
The innovative technology that enabled Boder to fulfil this imperative was
the magnetic-wire recorder, a portable (albeit cumbersome) machine that
allowed him not just to transcribe witnesses testimonies, but aurally to
record them. Boder repeatedly emphasized the unique auditory aspect of
his interviews, noting that while untold thousands of feet of film had been
collected to preserve the visual events of war, practically nothing had been
preserved for that other perceptual avenue, the hearing. His intention was
to gather as many personal reports as possible for future psychological
study, and he deliberately set out to record not so much the exceptional
stories as those of the rank and file.41

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Song played a key role in Boders project. In the first place, he used songs
as a means of drawing survivors into his work, and in particular to demonstrate the functioning of his wire recorder. This is how he described his
approach:
The refugee agencies put me in contact with DP shelter houses. I would
meet a colony of DPs in a particular shelter house for lunch or dinner.
After the meal I would ask them to sing and, with their knowledge, I
recorded the songs. When I played these back, the wonder of hearing
their own voices recorded was boundless. Then I would explain my project and ask for volunteers.42
Music was thus a means through which Boder established the legitimacy of
his endeavour and recruited prospective interviewees. But his use of music
also extended well beyond this, to a deep ethnographic interest that complemented his wider project. Boder was clearly working in the mode of
salvage ethnography: as the literary critic Alan Rosen has shown, he consistently emphasized the urgent need to preserve, and was acutely
[c]onscious of collecting artifacts that might be in danger of extinction.43
He frequently asked his interviewees whether they remembered songs from
the ghettos or camps, soliciting them as artefacts of wartime internment.
When the young survivors were too shy to sing, which was frequently
the case, Boder encouraged them firmly, insisting on the importance of
preservation. He collected approximately sixty songs; his recordings
consist of both group recordings and solo songs scattered throughout the
individual interviews. Although many were popular songs that also
appeared in other collections, a substantial number have not appeared
elsewhere.
Why did these early collectors, in a time of crisis, devote precious
resources to gathering songs? Although their initiatives were largely independent Katsherginski working in Lithuania and Poland, the Central
Historical Commission in Allied-occupied Germany, and Boder primarily
in France, Italy and Switzerland all three revealed strikingly similar conceptions of musics value and importance. Following directly on the
approaches of folklorists before them, they stressed above all the urgent
need to document and preserve, understanding songs as integral to the
larger project of recording what had happened.
They also offered some explicit observations about how they thought
the songs would contribute to memorializing the events. Songs were perceived as offering insight into a specific dimension of history: namely, not
how the victims were acted upon as passive objects, but the ways in which
they, as historical subjects with agency, lived under the Nazi occupation
and actively responded to what was happening. In the first issue of Fun
letstn khurbn, Feigenbaum explained the motivation underlying the
Central Historical Commissions establishment. Some people were

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cynical about the need for such an institution, he wrote: surely

enough documents were being amassed by governments and other authorities in anticipation of the Nuremberg Trials? Feigenbaums defence was
resolute:
All of those documents are just a fragment of our tragedy. They show
only how the murderers behaved towards us, how they treated us and
what they did with us. Do our lives in those nightmarish days consist only
of such fragments? On what basis will the historian be able to create an
image of what happened in the ghettos? How will one be able to depict
our suffering- and pain-filled lives? From where will one be able to know
about our heroic deeds and how will one determine our attitudes towards
our oppressors? [. . .] We, the sheerit hapletah, the surviving witnesses,
must create for the historian the foundation, represent to him the sources,
from which he will be able to create a clear image of what happened to us
and between us. Therefore each testimony of a saved Jew, every song
from the Nazi era, every proverb, every anecdote and joke, every photograph is for us of tremendous value . . .44
Making reference to the paucity of surviving historical documentation,
Katsherginski similarly emphasized that the songs could offer insight into
the inner lives of Jewish communities under internment. He stressed the need
to preserv[e] the voices of the departed, their simple, clear words that tell us
about their lives until their deaths.45 His observations reveal a desire to give
the victims voices agency. How did Jews respond to the Nazi onslaught?
How did they live before they died? Katsherginski acknowledged that the
picture the songs offered was not a uniformly rosy one: they documented
not only Nazi crimes but also internecine community struggles, corrupt
Jewish officials and other less savoury aspects of everyday life. But these
elements, too, were crucial for enabling historians to document what had
happened:
Few documents were preserved that would allow even a partial picture of
the practical, official existence and the way of life of Jews in the occupied
territories. Therefore, I think that the songs that Jews from ghettos, death
camps and partisans sang from their sad hearts, will be a great contribution to the history of Jewish martyrdom and struggle. . . . The daily Jewish
life in the ghetto with all its accompanying phenomena, like arrests,
death, work, Gestapo, Jewish power-mongers, internal way of life,
etc. are reflected in precisely this bloody folklore. It will help future
history-writers and researchers as well as readers to fathom the soul of
our people.46
Boders underlying impulse seems to have been a similarly deeply-felt
sense of the importance of preserving. At the conclusion of an interview

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with the eighteen-year-old Polish Jew Israel Unikowski, he urged the

young man:
Write as much as you are able and it will be collected in the future by
Jewish academies and organizations that will want all that was written.
. . . Write everything that you remember, all the songs, all the sayings, all
the stories, of everything. As soon as you remind yourself of anything
that you had not written down, write it down.47
While he clearly emphasized the importance of preservation, however,
Boder was less explicit about how precisely he conceived of musics ultimate
historical value. Evidently he considered songs to be significant artefacts
from the past, since he regularly solicited them and insistently pressed his
interviewees to record them. On the question of what specifically songs
might record and Boders frequent emphasis on the lyrics rather than
the music itself is intriguing in this regard48 we might guess that, as with
the interviews, the key was once again restoring the victims inner lives and
agency: allowing them to tell their own stories, in their own voices.
It also seems likely that Boders project was informed to some extent by
contemporary ideas about music and preservation relating particularly to
the phenomenon of sound recording. Jonathan Sterne has shown that from
the advent of the technology in the late nineteenth century, there was something special about the relation between sound recording and death: recording seemed to offer the powerful potential of preserving the voices of the
dead into the future, effectively embalming the voice and enabling the transmission of messages to future generations. This perceived potential
extended naturally into ethnographic work: While Edison wrote of using
the phonograph to preserve the voices of dying persons, the American
anthropologists who first used sound recording in their work often explicitly
justified it in terms of the phonographs potential to preserve the voices of
dying cultures.49 These ideas were part and parcel of the discourse of salvage ethnography, marked by the threat of impending loss and the importance of preservation, and Boder (as well as Katsherginski and the
Commission) revealed their enduring influence at the historical moment in
which he was working.
MUSIC AS A MEDIATOR OF MEMORY
In light of the collectors views on how music could contribute to the process
of remembering the genocide, it is instructive to consider how songs have
figured in the intervening decades of Holocaust memorialization. As suggested earlier, the collectors conceptions regarding the relationship between
music, history and memory diverge sharply with the interpretive trends of
the past few decades. Of course, this is not necessarily a problematic development. Historians are not bound to the interpretations of contemporary
observers; quite the reverse: it is our job to probe and understand the forces

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influencing these interpretations rather than to accept them at face value. In

this case, however, the stark shift is symptomatic of broader trends regarding the orientation of Holocaust memory and commemoration.
The past three decades have seen a veritable explosion of memorials,
museums, publications and educational initiatives related to the
Holocaust, particularly in the United States, Europe and Israel.50 A large
body of critical scholarship explores the directions that this memorialization
has taken, particularly its redemptive tendencies,51 its political uses and
implications,52 and the question of whether we have ultimately reached a
surfeit of memory.53 My primary analytical concern here is to explore
specifically the kinds of commemorative messages that music has been
used to convey, and the section that follows considers briefly the ways in
which the products of post-Holocaust collection work, in particular songs,
have been used (or not used) in the context of Holocaust memorialization.
In recent decades music has increasingly been seen as a seemingly natural
opportunity for redemptive, hope-tinged discourse about the Holocaust,
emphasizing in particular the resistance and heroism of Nazisms victims.
As I have discussed extensively elsewhere, spiritual resistance is a pervasive
theme in many popular representations of the Holocaust, linked with
redemptive notions such as the will to live and the triumph of the spirit,
and it is often associated with (though by no means limited to) music. The
discourse of spiritual resistance tends to be sentimentalized and emotive,
replete with celebrations of the resilience of the human spirit and affirmations that despite endless persecution and suffering, Jews managed to find
strength and inspiration to impart their spirit, their despair, their heroism in
Jewish song.54
This rhetoric undeniably derives in part from the language of the surviving victims themselves. This includes the collectors, who approached their
work with a deep sense of emotional conviction and urgency, and often
spoke explicitly of a sacred duty to document and bear witness.
Nonetheless, while the collectors early conceptions of musics contribution
to memory were deeply felt, they were also remarkably sober and unsentimental. Although many present-day representations echo the earlier discourse, including the rhetoric of preservation, the surface similarity belies
what are widely divergent underlying impulses. In the introduction to his
The Joy of Jewish Memories Songbook, for example, the popular Jewish
singer Sol Zim explains the motivation underlying his collection of
Yiddish songs, made accessible for American Jews:
THERE IS A NEED TO PRESERVE! THERE IS A NEED TO
REMEMBER OUR ROOTS! THERE IS A NEED NEVER TO
FORGET the Jewish memories of our BOBES and ZEDES [grandmothers and grandfathers]! Only if WE TEACH OUR YOUTH
ABOUT THE YIDDISH CULTURE OF THE PAST, can we
secure a rich heritage for the JEW OF THE FUTURE!55

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Ethnomusicologist Abigail Wood has argued that with the steep decline
of Yiddish as a spoken language since the Holocaust, the message of preservation following destruction evident in Zims text has become the principal narrative surrounding Yiddish song in general.56 The motivation that
drove the early collectors work, however, is quite distinct from that underlying Zims emotive appeal. While the scope of Zims book extends well
beyond Holocaust songs, his plea invokes the language of Holocaust
remembrance (never forget) and echoes the sentimentalized discourse
that surrounds Holocaust-era song. In this and other examples, the motivation behind preservation is lifted out of context. There is little recognition of
the complex dynamics that influenced how survivors approached the question of memorialization. In addition, there is little recognition that corresponding shifts must accompany the responses of those removed from the
events in time and space.
If the discourse of Holocaust memory has emphasized resistance and
defiant faith, the choice of songs to accompany popular representations
reinforces these interpretive trends. There is of course no authoritative or
uniform ritual of Holocaust commemoration, but ceremonies that include
music tend overwhelmingly towards an established core handful of songs,
in addition to the liturgy of mourning. One of these is Ani maamin
(I believe), titled in Katsherginskis collection Varshever geto lid fun
frumer yidn (Song of religious Jews in the Warsaw ghetto), a song whose
Hebrew words are drawn from Maimonedes Thirteen Articles of Faith and
affirm belief in the arrival of ultimate redemption. Another popular offering
is Mordekhai Gebirtigs Es Brent (It is burning), which was written following a 1938 Polish pogrom and condemns the passivity of non-Jewish onlookers. Hirsh Gliks Zog nit keynmol az du geyst dem letstn veg (Never say
that you are walking the final road), almost certainly the most frequently
appearing song, was inspired by the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and
adopted as an anthem by the Vilna partisans.57 These songs were some of
the most popular amongst Jewish ghetto and camp inmates, and their dominance in the commemorative context stems in part from this popularity. At
the same time, however, they emphasize certain aspects of the inmate experience, and serve to shape popular memory of historical events accordingly.
Songs play an important but largely under-observed role in mediating our
understanding of history: as metonymic symbols of the events being remembered, they are used to represent particular versions of the past. An obvious
parallel question to consider, then, is what kinds of alternative understandings they might be used to convey. The early interventions of Katsherginski,
Boder and the Commission representatives offer a helpful starting point,
because they explicitly articulated musics potential contribution to the project of memorialization. Of course, as noted earlier, both the conceptions and
the work of the early collectors were unmistakably the products of a particular historical and cultural context. The songs they collected were necessarily only fragmentary traces of the events within which they originated,

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and the collection processes through which they were obtained were marked
by individuals particular emphases, informants perceptions about the kinds
of songs being sought, the vagaries of available recording technologies and
the politics of publication, to name but a few of the possible elements with
an impact on the final products of this ethnographic work. Once these
qualifications have been duly acknowledged, however, it is still possible to
probe their interpretations for valuable hints about what the songs might be
able to offer as memorial objects. The early collectors insisted that songs
could offer insight into the inner lives of diverse prisoner communities and
allow for a nuanced understanding of their responses rather than a onedimensional portrayal of passive victims or heroic martyrs. In satisfying the
need for hopeful messages, by contrast, the kind of remembrance promoted
through the discourse of spiritual resistance ultimately fails to engage with
the complexity of the societies from which this music emerged. Although it
purports to honour and exalt the victims memory, it tends often to decontextualize and mythicize it, replacing complex historical accounts of
human responses with consoling explanations.58
BURIED MONUMENTS
One way in which songs might deepen Holocaust commemoration is thus to
refocus emphasis on the experience of victimhood, and to offer nuanced,
multi-dimensional portrayals of human responses to harsh realities. This
would also go some way towards counteracting another set of persistent
narratives that surround the Holocaust, particularly in the public sphere:
those that insist on the Holocausts uniqueness, the impossibility of representation, and the impossibility or undesirability of understanding. A return
to the complex, multifaceted, contradictory and stubbornly diverse perspectives reflected in these songs might help to reorient Holocaust awareness
away from the realm of the mythicized and ahistorical, and towards contextualized multiplicity. In an era of increasing Holocaust fatigue,59 where
the imperative to remember is less and less urgently felt, a shift seems necessary towards a wider-ranging, further-reaching remembrance, one which
intentionally draws out lessons and legacies that remain relevant to the
contemporary world. This is not an endorsement of what Peter Novick
calls the sort of pithy lessons that fit on a bumper sticker. Rather, as he
suggests, If there are lessons to be extracted from encountering the past,
that encounter has to be with the past in all its messiness; theyre not likely
to come from an encounter with a past thats been shaped and shaded so
that inspiring lessons will emerge.60 If increasing desensitization to the
Holocaust results in part from a memory that is proprietary and defensively
sacrosanct, then it is also possible that remembering of a different kind
might help to resensitize in however gradual and subtle a way those
who continue to witness genocidal events with depressing regularity.
There is another dimension to musics potential use in the commemorative sphere: its nature as a concrete memorial object. In ways distinct from

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123

physical structures like stone memorials, statues and graves, music is performative, enacting memorialization primarily through time rather than in
space (although it can be used effectively to create and define temporal
memorial spaces). In addition, unlike artefacts such as camp uniforms or
victims personal possessions, songs created under Nazi internment
although they function similarly as metonymic representations of the
Holocaust, having originated in the events themselves of necessity cannot
have survived as singular, intact original artefacts. Initially, they survived
primarily in peoples memories as oral artefacts, and later were documented
in transcriptions and reconstructed recordings. The latter span a wide range,
from those recorded by survivors in the immediate post-war period through
to the often stylized commercial recordings produced today. When considering song in a memorial context, then, the object is slippery: how do we define
the song itself, when it exists in various transcriptions and recordings, across
an extended time-span? The possibilities for modifying the oral original
for example, by choosing a particular version or combination of versions,
adding melodic embellishment or orchestration, and staging it in a formal
performance context further complicate the question of songs potential
role as a bearer of memory. In short, in order to function as agents of
memory, songs unavoidably have to be recreated.
This inherent performativity, however, is perhaps also the basis for
musics greatest potential as a memorial object. The songs are distinctive
in being simultaneously remnants of the events themselves and retrospective
memorials, fulfilling the roles of both original artefacts from the time and
post-war commemorative imaginings. What is more, they encode the
ongoing, dynamic ways in which succeeding generations choose to remember and forget: there have been numerous creative reconstructions of the
songs since the late 1940s.61
Beyond the sharp divergence between the collectors early interpretations
and more recent ones, what is striking is that the material they so desperately
and zealously worked to preserve has largely been neglected. Katsherginskis
Lider fun di getos un lagern has long been out of print, and neither Boders
nor the Central Historical Commissions music collections which were
among the earliest recorded versions of Holocaust-era songs have ever
been published.62 Although the latter are accessible in archives, their song
recordings remain almost entirely unused and unknown by historians, documentary filmmakers, teachers, commemoration organizers and the like. In
other words, despite having survived in unusually large numbers, and
despite the importance of music in general to the commemorative enterprise,
the vast majority of the Yiddish songs from the period of Nazi internment
might be thought of as buried monuments, since they have never been used
as memorial objects in the first place.63 Given the distinctive possibilities of
their form, these songs might usefully be revived in the commemorative
context, through a conscious process that acknowledges the ways in which
they shape and colour memory.

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In The Texture of Memory, his study of Holocaust memorials and meaning, James Young has argued:
That a murdered people remains known in Holocaust museums anywhere
by their scattered belongings, and not by their spiritual works, that their
lives should be recalled primarily through the images of their death, may be
the ultimate travesty. These lives and the relationships between them are
lost to the memory of ruins alone and will be lost to subsequent generations who seek memory only in the rubble of the past. Indeed, by adopting
such artifacts for their own memorial presentations, even the new
museums in America and Europe risk perpetuating the very figures by
which the killers themselves would have memorialized their Jewish victims.
By the rubble of the past Young refers in part to the piles of hair, glasses
and clothes (eyeless lenses, headless caps, footless shoes) that are displayed
in some Holocaust museums, and which represent the victims only by their
absence, by the moment of their destruction.64 Beyond the rubble, as this
article has argued, music offers a rich alternative memorial space. As objects
from the time that are simultaneously implicated in an ongoing process of
recreation, songs embody the process of negotiating between the remnants
of the past and the needs of the present. We may no longer believe that songs
will enable us to fathom the soul of [a] people, but they can perhaps help us
to memorialize the victims more honestly by acknowledging their diverse
human-ness. The early collectors suggested that songs could offer insight
into the victims lives and responses, rather than merely how the murderers
behaved towards us, how they treated us and what they did with us. Their
ideas offer a promising route beyond what is an increasingly (and ironically)
dehumanized discourse of uniqueness and spiritual resistance, towards
refocusing memorialization on the consequences suffered by the human
victims of genocide. Moreover, publicizing and talking about their early
recordings with due acknowledgement that they, too, were inevitably
reconstructions might be a useful starting point for reintroducing a diversity of voices and perspectives into the memorial framework.
Shirli Gilbert is Karten Lecturer in Jewish and non-Jewish relations at the
University of Southampton, where she teaches courses in Modern Jewish
History, the Holocaust, and Music and Resistance. She obtained her
Masters in Musicology and D.Phil. in Modern History from the
University of Oxford. Her research is currently focused in two principal
areas: Displaced Persons in the aftermath of the Holocaust; and popular
song in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Her book Music in
the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford
University Press, 2005) was a finalist for the 2005 National Jewish Book
Award.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Jewish Music Forum (Center for Jewish
History, New York), and seminars at the University of Cambridge and the University of
Michigan. I am grateful to participants in those events as well as to Geoff Eley, Laura
Jokusch, and Alan Rosen for their helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to the
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
and the Michigan Society of Fellows for their generous support.
I also thank United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for permission to reproduce the
three photographs published here. The views or opinions expressed in this article and the
context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor
imply approval or endorsement by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
1 Aaron Lansky, Collecting Yiddish Folksongs: a Do-It-Yourself Guide for the Amateur
Yiddish Song-Zamler, Pakn Treger 910, 1988, pp. 2023, 8182; Aaron Lansky, Outwitting
History: the Amazing Adventures of a Man who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, Chapel Hill,
NC, 2004.
2 Cited in Natalia Aleksiun, Polish Historiography of the Holocaust: Between Silence and
Public Debate, German History 22: 3, 2004, p. 412.
3 Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope: the Survivors of the Holocaust in
Occupied Germany, Cambridge, 2002, p. 197.
4 Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian
Jews, Chicago, 1998, p. 6.
5 Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down, p. 6.
6 See Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and
Camps, Oxford, 2005; and Shirli Gilbert, Music as Historical Source: Social History and
Musical Texts, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 36: 1, 2005.
7 See, for example, George Steinmetz, The Uncontrollable Afterlives of Ethnography:
Lessons from Salvage Colonialism in the German Overseas Empire, Ethnography 5: 3, 2004,
pp. 25188.
8 Cited in Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov: Diaspora
Nationalism and Jewish History, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991, p. 247.
9 The inseparability of historical (documenting) and ethnographic work is reflected in
the names of early institutions like the Historical Ethnographic Commission founded in
1892, and its successor the S. Ansky Vilne Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society; see Itzik
Nakhmen Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation: the Jewish Folklorists of Poland, Detroit,
2003, p. 195.
10 For more on salvage ethnography, see for example Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
Imagining Europe: the Popular Arts of American Jewish Ethnography, in Divergent
Centers: Shaping Jewish Cultures in Israel and America, ed. Deborah Dash Moore and
S. Ilan Troen, New Haven, 2001; Roger D. Abrahams, Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism
in Folkloristics, Journal of American Folklore 106: 419, 1993, esp. 1112. On specifically Jewish
responses to catastrophe, see for example From a Ruined Garden: the Memorial Books of Polish
Jewry, ed. and transl. Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin (NY 1983), 2nd edn
Bloomington, 1998; and David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in
Modern Jewish Culture, Cambridge, MA, 1984.
11 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, The Folk Culture of Jewish Immigrant Communities:
Research Paradigms and Directions, in The Jews of North America, ed. Moses Rischin,
Detroit, 1987, esp. 81.
12 See, for example, Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation, pp. xxii, 39, 1401.
13 Cited in Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation, p. 12.
14 Shmuel Krakowski, Memorial Projects and Memorial Institutions Initiated by Sheerit
Hapletah, in Sheerit Hapletah, 19441948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle. Proceedings
of the Sixth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, October 1985, ed.
Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf, Jerusalem, 1990; The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941
1944, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki, New Haven, 1984. For some examples of diaries, see among
many others Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, ed. Abraham I. Katsh,
London, 1965; The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Alan
Adelson, London, 1996; The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, ed. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw
Staron and Josef Kermisz, Chicago, 1999.

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15 Philip Friedman, Problems of Research on the Jewish Catastrophe, Yad Washem

Studies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance 3, 1959, esp. 27; Krakowski,
Memorial Projects, pp. 38994; Laura Jokusch, Judische Geschichtsforschung im Lande
Amaleks: Judische historische Kommissionen in Deutschland 19451949, in Zwischen
Erinnerung und Neubeginn: Zur deutsch-judischen Geschichte nach 1945, ed. Susanne
Schonborn, Munich, 2006; Laura Jokusch, A Folk Monument for our Destruction and
Heroism: Jewish Historical Commissions in the Displaced Persons Camps of Germany,
Austria, and Italy, in We Are Here: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in
Postwar Germany, ed. Avinoam Patt and Michael Berkowitz, Detroit, forthcoming;
Aleksiun, Polish Historiography, pp. 4129.
16 Friedman, Problems of Research, p. 27.
17 Jokusch, Folk Monument. Another important contemporaneous initiative, which
revealed even more explicitly the inseparability of historical documentation and preserving
memory, was the yizker-bikher (memorial books of eastern European Jews), in which surviving
communities sought to document as fully as possible the history of their towns, including their
pre-war existence as well as their destruction during the Holocaust. In addition to constituting
perhaps the single most important act of commemorating the dead on the part of Jewish
survivors, the yizker-bikher were explicitly conceived in the hope that future scholars would
turn to these books as historical resources when it came to recording Jewish life in eastern
Europe and its destruction: Kugelmass and Boyarin, From a Ruined Garden, p. 1.
18 See, among others, Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in
Postwar Germany, transl. Barbara Harshav, Princeton, NJ, 1997; Atina Grossmann, Jews,
Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, Princeton and Oxford, 2007;
Angelika Konigseder and Juliane Wetzel, Lebensmut im Wartesaal: Die judischen DPs
[Displaced Persons] im Nachkriegsdeutschland, Frankfurt/M, 1994; Mankowitz, Life Between
Memory and Hope; Mark Wyman, DP: Europes Displaced Persons, Ithaca and London, 1998.
19 Cited in Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation, pp. xxi (Ginzburg and Marek) and 92,
101 (Bastomski).
20 Another significant music collection project that was being pursued around this time was
that of the pioneering Ukrainian ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski. Although the bulk of
Beregovskis work was done earlier, in the 1930s and early 1940s, he also conducted post-war
expeditions to sites of former ghettos and camps. Draft materials from his collection are held at
the Vernadsky National Library of the Ukraine, though it is unclear to what extent the postwar materials have been preserved. Beregovskis work is ripe for further research and scholarship, but lies beyond the scope of this article. See Mark Slobin, A Fresh Look at Beregovskis
Folk Music Research, Ethnomusicology 30: 2, 1986, pp. 25360; Lyudmila Sholokhova, The
Research and Expeditionary Work of the Folklore Division of the Cabinet for Jewish Culture
at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 19441949, in Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuyle:
Judisches und Antisemitisches in der russischen Musikkultur, ed. Ernst Kuhn, Jascha Nemtsov
and Andreas Wehrmeyer, Berlin, 2003.
21 Of the three projects discussed here, that of Katsherginski has been the best documented, although even here the source material is relatively sparse. Relatively little has been written
about the Central Historical Commission, and even less about its music collection; similarly
with Boder. See references cited below.
22 For a comprehensive account of Katsherginskis life, see Bret Werb, Shmerke
Kaczerginski, Partisan-Troubador, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 20 (Making Holocaust
Memory), 2008.
23 Willem de Vries, Sonderstab Musik: Music Confiscations by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter
Rosenberg Under the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe, Amsterdam, 1996, p. 30. See Shmerke
Katsherginski, Partizaner geyen! Fartseykhenungen fun vilner geto, Buenos Aires, 1947, p. 67;
Rachel Pupko-Krinsky, Laurel Trees of Wiwulskiego, in The Root and the Bough: the Epic of
an Enduring People, ed. Leo W. Schwartz, New York and Toronto, 1949.
24 Pupko-Krinsky, Laurel Trees, p. 160.
25 Katsherginski, Partizaner geyen!, p. 69.
26 Krakowski, Memorial Projects, pp. 3945.
27 See Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust, pp. 739.
28 Nakhmen Blumental, Iz shoyn, heyst es, oykh shmerke nito?, in Shmerke
Katsherginski ondenk-bukh, Buenos Aires, 1955, p. 32; Introduction, Shmerke Katsherginski
ondenk-bukh, p. 11.

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29 The Kielce pogrom was the climax of a wave of antisemitism in Poland that began in late
1944. In July 1946, over forty Jews were killed and fifty wounded in this small Polish town
following charges of the ritual murder of a Polish child. Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and
Hope, p. 18. For an extended account of the Kielce pogrom see also Jan T. Gross, Fear: AntiSemitism in Poland after Auschwitz, New York, 2006.
30 Werb, Shmerke Kaczerginski.
31 Sh. Katsherginski bay der sheyres hapleyte, Undzer Vort, Bamberg, 1947 (not
paginated).
32 Moses Josef Feigenbaum, Peulota shel havaada hahistorit hamerkazit beminkhen,
Dapim le-kheker ha-shoah ve-ha-mered 1, Jan.-April 1951, pp. 10710; Moses Josef
Feigenbaum, Life in a Bunker, in The Root and the Bough, ed. Schwarz, p. 142; Jokusch,
Judische Geschichtsforschung; Jokusch, Folk Monument.
33 Fun letstn khurbn 1, 1946, p. 1; Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope,
p. 215.
34 Kaplan later published this material in the form of a book: Israel Kaplan, Dos folksmoyl in natsi-klem: reydenishn in geto un katset, Tel-Aviv, 1982.
35 Fun letstn khurbn 2, 1946, p. 50.
36 Fun letstn khurbn 3, 1946, p. 40.
37 For more on the Commissions work, see Feigenbaum, Peulota shel havaada,
pp. 10710; Jokusch, Folk Monument.
38 David P. Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, Urbana, 1949, p. xi.
39 Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, p. xi.
40 Carl Marziali, Voices of the Holocaust, Catalyst (Illinois Institute of Technology
alumni newsletter), summer 1999, pp. 13.
41 Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, p. xii.
42 Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, p. xii.
43 Alan Rosen, Evidence of Trauma: David Boder and Writing the History of Holocaust
Testimony, in Historical Research on the Holocaust: Its History in Context, ed. David Bankier
and Dan Michman (Jerusalem, forthcoming).
44 Fun letstn khurbn 1 1946, p. 2.
45 Emphasis in original. Preface, Lider fun di Getos un Lagern, ed. Shmerke Katsherginski
and H. Leivick, New York, 1948, pp, xix, xxiv.
46 Lider, ed. Katsherginski and Leivick, pp. xv, xviii.
47 Boder interview with Israel Unikowski, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Archive (hereafter USHMM): RG-50.472
0012.
48 See interviews with Bella Zgnilek, USHMM: RG-50.472
0017; Henja Frydman,
USHMM: RG-50.472
0024; and Bertha Goldwasser, USHMM: RG-50.472
0019.
49 Emphasis in original. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past, Durham, 2003, pp. 291,
309, 311.
50 For a brief overview, see Michael Berenbaum, Consciousness of the Holocaust:
Promises and Perils, Dimensions 15: 1, 2001, pp. 257.
51 See in particular Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: the Ruins of
Memory, London, 1991; Lawrence L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust, London, 1998; Eva
Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust,
New York, 2004.
52 See, among others, Idith Zertal, Israels Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood,
Cambridge, 2005; Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, New York, 1999; Norman
G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering,
New York, 2000.
53 Charles Maier, A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy, and Denial,
History and Memory 5, 1992, pp. 13651.
54 http://www.terezinmusic.org/terezin/?GCS_Session0d3244c077c29b2ff751b685b29190
d7; Jerry Silverman, The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust, Syracuse, NY,
2002, p. xv; Foreword in We Are Here: Songs of the Holocaust, ed. Eleanor Mlotek and Malke
Gottlieb, New York, 1983, n.p.
55 Emphasis in original. The Joy of Jewish Memories Songbook: Nostalgic Melodies in
Contemporary Settings, ed. Sol Zim, Hollis Hills, NY, 1984, p. 7.
56 Abigail Wood, Commemoration and Creativity: Remembering the Holocaust in
Todays Yiddish Song, European Judaism 35: 2, 2002, pp. 4356, esp. 44.

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57 Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust, pp. 489, 703, 97. For discussion of songs used at
commemoration ceremonies, see Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural
Mediations of the Holocaust, Amherst, 2003, pp. 1608; Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust,
pp. 1967; We Are Here, ed. Mlotek and Gottlieb, pp. 12, 94; Wood, Commemoration and
Creativity, pp. 478.
58 For a fuller discussion of spiritual resistance, see Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust,
Introduction.
59 See, for example, Berenbaum, Consciousness of the Holocaust, pp. 278.
60 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 261.
61 See, for example, Wood, Commemoration and Creativity.
62 There are growing attempts to make this material more accessible. Yad Vashem is
working with the Israeli National Sound Archives to make some of the Central Historical
Commissions recordings publicly accessible on the web. The Illinois Institute of Technology
has launched an online project that aims ultimately to make available Boders recordings and
interview transcripts (http://voices.iit.edu/). Katsherginskis book can now be reprinted thanks
to the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, under the auspices of the National Yiddish
Book Center.
63 I am indebted to Heather Wiebe for the concept of buried monuments.
64 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, London,
1993, p. 133.