Overview
- Description
- Kulisiewicz recalls that a local tragedy sparked the creation of "Heil, Sachsenhausen." The event took place in July 1943 in the Sachsenhausen subcamp of Oranienburg, where Hans Zahn, director of the camp motor pool, and his 15-year-old daughter Eliza were arrested for forwarding letters from a Polish prisoner. Accused of having had "intimate contacts" with Poles, Eliza was interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo. She died soon afterward, a possible suicide.
"Heil Sachsenhausen" protests Nazi "racial" laws, specifically the ban on Rassenschande ("race defilement" or "mixing"). Sexual relations between German "Aryans" and Jews had been illegal since the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935; further decrees enacted during the war also outlawed sexual relations between Germans and (primarily Slavic) prisoners of war, the offenders being subject to stringent penalties. Whether Eliza Zahn was, in fact, tried for "race defilement" remains unclear. To the Gestapo and the camp command, the act of abetting a prisoner to communicate illegally with outsiders may have been the more serious crime. But to Kulisiewicz the charge was Rassenschande, and the incident provoked him to skewer through song many assumptions dear to the Nazi German world view. The German term Kulturkampf ("culture war"), heard in the refrain, originally described the 19th century political struggle between the German government and the Catholic Church; Kulisiewicz uses the word to denote the Nazi effort to destroy Polish culture. - Date
-
Composed:
1943
- Contributor
-
Lyricist:
Aleksander T. Kulisiewicz
Composer: M. Miksne
Performer: Aleksander T. Kulisiewicz
- Biography
-
Aleksander (Alexander) Kulisiewicz (1918-1982) was born in Kraków, Poland in 1918. He was a law student in German-occupied Poland when, in October 1939, he was denounced for antifascist writings, arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin. An amateur singer and songwriter, Kulisiewicz composed 54 songs during more than five years of imprisonment at Sachsenhausen. After Russian troops liberated the camp on May 2, 1945, he remembered his songs, as well as those learned from fellow prisoners, dictating hundreds of pages of text to his attending nurse at a Polish infirmary. The majority of Kulisiewicz’s songs are darkly humorous ballads concerning the sadistic treatment of prisoners. Performed at secret gatherings, imbued with biting wit and subversive attitude, these songs helped inmates cope with their hunger and despair, raised morale, and offered hope of survival. Beyond this spiritual and psychological purport, Kulisiewicz also considered the camp song to be a form of documentation. “In the camp,” he wrote, “I tried under all circumstances to create verses that would serve as direct poetical reportage. I used my memory as a living archive. Friends came to me and dictated their songs.” In the 1950s, Kulisiewicz began amassing a private collection of music, poetry, and artwork created by camp prisoners, gathering this material through correspondence and hundreds of hours of recorded interviews. In the 1960s, he inaugurated a series of public recitals of his repertoire of camp songs, and issued several recordings. Kulisiewicz’s major project, a monumental study of the cultural life of the camps and the vital role music played as a means of survival for many prisoners, remained unpublished at the time of his death. He toured both Europe and the United States performing concerts of his works and the works of other Holocaust survivors until about 1980. He died in Kraków, Poland, on March 12, 1982. His archive is the largest extant collection of music composed in the camps.
- Format
- MP3
Physical Details
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- You do not require further permission from the Museum to access this archival media.
- Copyright
- Copyright Undetermined
- Conditions on Use
- Owner of copyright, if any, is undetermined. It is possible this is an orphan work. It is the responsibility of anyone interested in reproducing, broadcasting, or publishing content to determine copyright holder and secure permission, or perform a diligent Fair Use analysis.
Keywords & Subjects
- Geographic Name
- Sachsenhausen.
Administrative Notes
- Legal Status
- Licensed Agreement
- Recorded Sound Provenance
- This song was included in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's web exhibition, "Music of the Holocaust" https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/music/ curated by the Museum's musicologist.
- Recorded Sound Notes
- For more information, refer to the Aleksander Kulisiewicz collection of sound recordings in RG-91 or RG-55 at USHMM.
- Recorded Sound Source
- Bret Werb
- Record last modified:
- 2024-06-10 10:46:25
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn671448
Also in "Music of the Holocaust" web exhibition
Songs included in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's web exhibition, "Music of the Holocaust" https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/music/. Music was heard in many ghettos, concentration camps, and partisan outposts of Nazi-controlled Europe. While popular songs dating from before the war remained attractive as escapist fare, the ghetto, camp, and partisan settings also gave rise to a repertoire of new works. These included topical songs inspired by the latest gossip and news, and songs of personal expression that often concerned the loss of family and home. Classical music—instrumental works, art songs, opera—was also produced and performed during this period, notably by prisoners at the Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto and transit camp in Czechoslovakia, as well as in several other ghettos and camps. For many victims of Nazi brutality, music was an important means of preserving and asserting their humanity. Such music—particularly the topical songs—also serves as a form of historical documentation. Like “audio snapshots,” these works offer a telling glimpse into the events and emotions that their creators and original audiences experienced firsthand.
Stand Fast
Recorded Sound
Sunbeams
Recorded Sound
From Land to Land
Recorded Sound
The Name Jew
Recorded Sound
Though
Recorded Sound
The Cornstalk
Recorded Sound
Second Helping
Recorded Sound
My Gate
Recorded Sound
Potato
Recorded Sound
It's Cold, Sir!
Recorded Sound
Our Town Is Burning
Recorded Sound
The Lonely Child
Recorded Sound
By the Ghetto Gate
Recorded Sound
At the Edge of a Forest
Recorded Sound
Hunger March
Recorded Sound
Never Say That You Have Reached the Final Road
Recorded Sound
Yisrolik
Recorded Sound
Mister C
Recorded Sound
Dachau Song
Recorded Sound
Black Böhm
Recorded Sound
There Lies Treblinka
Recorded Sound
Verdict
Recorded Sound
We Long for a Home
Recorded Sound
Over Yonder in the Sunshine
Recorded Sound
Zipper's recitation of the Dachau song
Recorded Sound
Forward, You Witnesses!
Recorded Sound
Auschwitz
Recorded Sound
There in the Camp
Recorded Sound
A Child of Our Time
Recorded Sound
Muselmann—Cigarette Butt Collector
Recorded Sound
Radasky's commentary on Treblinka song
Recorded Sound
Weingarten
Recorded Sound
The Soldiers of the Moor
Recorded Sound