Overview
- Description
- In Sachsenhausen, a number of upper-class Poles sought to preserve their social advantages by courting favors from the camp command. Kulisiewicz rebukes two such prisoners-"Lulusinski" and the "Count"-in this brief song from 1944. Both "aristocrats" had betrayed members of the Polish Communist underground to the Reich Criminal Police Office, leading to the arrest of several inmates. In turn, other camp elites denounced Kulisiewicz to the authorities for writing and performing his derisive song. He was removed from his barrack in the middle of the night in February, 1945, and interrogated by the SS Police. The "Beggars Block" named in the song's first line was camp slang for an enormous barrack housing 600-800 prisoners. This is a camp adaptation of an unidentified tune.
- Alternate Title
- Zimno, panie!
- Date
-
Composed:
1944
- Contributor
-
Lyricist:
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
- Performed by Aleksander Kulisiewicz
- Recorded Sound Source
- Bret Werb
- Record last modified:
- 2024-06-10 10:46:26
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn671468
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.
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