Sing, Memory

December 1, 2022

After SS guards broke up a rehearsal by a secret Jewish choir at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, choir director Rosebery d'Arguto asked fellow musician Aleksander Kulisiewicz to help preserve the camp's musical heritage. Polish nationalist Kulisiewicz was not Jewish, but with the aid of an eidetic memory, he preserved the songs and poems of dozens of prisoners around him. Paris-based U.S. journalist Eyre drew on archival research to tell Kulisiewicz's story.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2023
An uplifting story of music emanating from the depths of one of the 20th century's most horrific periods. Drawing on abundant archival sources, Paris-based journalist Eyre makes his book debut with a well-researched dual biography of two men who brought the consolation of music to the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen: Polish nationalist and amateur musician Aleksander Kulisiewicz (1918-1982) and Jewish choral conductor Rosebery D'Arguto (1890-1942). Although Aleks, as he's referred to throughout, had been a member of antisemitic groups as a young man, he later renounced those views. After Germany invaded Poland, he joined an underground network of tutors, which led to his arrest when Nazis rounded up teachers, students, and intellectuals. Rosebery had been a choir director in Berlin before leaving for Warsaw in 1938; returning for what he thought would be a brief visit, he was arrested in 1939. Eyre depicts in harrowing detail the brutality inflicted on the camp inmates, including Aleks and Rosebery. Aleks managed to survive by his wits and an astute sense of camp structure and hierarchy. He took to composing poems and lyrics, bearing witness to the carnage and inhumanity sometimes by overlaying his own words on existing melodies. When he discovered that Rosebery had convened a choir in the Jewish barracks, he was astounded, and the older man quickly became Aleks' musical mentor. He was devastated when Rosebery was sent to Dachau and then to Auschwitz. When the camp was evacuated and the war ended, Aleks emerged emaciated, ill with tuberculosis, and deeply depressed. Mentally, he claimed, "he still lived in the camp," making it impossible to feel joy or even friendship. Two marriages failed, and he was a distant father to his children. Instead, he became obsessively devoted to gathering music, poetry, and art of the camps, including the 50 songs that he had created and others he had memorized, and worked tirelessly to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. A significant new chapter of Holocaust history.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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.