Drawing on oral history and testimony, as well as extensive archival research, this powerful story recounts the transformation of Polish nationalist Aleksander Kulisiewicz after an unlikely friendship with a Jewish conductor in Sachsenhausen who tasked him with a mission: to save the musical heritage of the victims of the Nazi camps. Illustrations.
Drawing on oral history and testimony, as well as extensive archival research, this powerful story recounts the transformation of Polish nationalist Aleksander Kulisiewicz after an unlikely friendship with a Jewish conductor in Sachsenhausen who tasked him with a mission: to save the musical heritage of the victims of the Nazi camps.
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.Sing, MemoryAfter 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.
A Polish musician, a Jewish conductor, a secret choir, and the rescue of a trove of music from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
