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Sing, Memory

The Remarkable Story of the Man Who Saved the Music of the Nazi Camps

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A Polish musician, a Jewish conductor, a secret choir, and the rescue of a trove of music from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

On a cold October night in 1942, SS guards at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp violently disbanded a rehearsal of a secret Jewish choir led by conductor Rosebery d'Arguto. Many in the group did not live to see morning, and those who survived the guards' reprisal were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau just a few weeks later. Only one of its members survived the Holocaust. Yet their story survives, thanks to Aleksander Kulisiewicz. An amateur musician, he was not Jewish, but struck up an unlikely friendship with d'Arguto in Sachsenhausen. D'Arguto tasked him with a mission: to save the musical heritage of the victims of the Nazi camps.

In Sing, Memory, Makana Eyre recounts Kulisiewicz's extraordinary transformation from a Polish nationalist into a guardian of music and culture from the Nazi camps. Aided by an eidetic memory, Kulisiewicz was able to preserve for posterity not only his own songs about life at the camp, but the music and poetry of prisoners from a range of national and cultural backgrounds. They composed symphonies, organized clandestine choirs, arranged great pieces of music by illustrious composers, and gathered regularly over the course of the war to perform for one another. For many, music enabled them to resist, bear witness, and maintain their humanity in some of the most brutal conditions imaginable.

After the war, Kulisiewicz returned to Poland and assembled an archive of camp music, which he went on to perform in more than a dozen countries. He dedicated the remainder of his life to the memory of the Nazi camps. Drawing on oral history and testimony, as well as extensive archival research, Eyre tells this rich and affecting human story of musical resistance to the Nazi regime in full for the first time.

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    • Library Journal

      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.

    • Kirkus

      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.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

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