united states holocaust memorial museum

Transcription

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UNITED STATE S HOL OCAUST ME MORIAL MUSE UM
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW, Washington, DC 20024-2126 | ushmm.org
9 780896 047136
UNITED STATES
HOLOCAUST
MEMORIAL MUSEUM
5. PIOSENKA NIEZAPOMNIANA
(Unforgettable Song) 2:30
6. ERIKA 2:14
7. GERMANIA! 3:07
8. OLZA 4:24
9. CZARNY BÖHM
(Black Böhm) 2:00
10. MAMINSYNEK W KONCENTRAKU
(Mama’s Boy in a Concentration Camp)
11. HEIL,
. SACHSENHAUSEN! 2:29
12. POZEGNANIE ADOLFA ZE ŚWIATEM
(Adolf ’s Farewell to the World) 5:04
13. TANGO TRUPONOSZÓW
(Corpse-Carrier’s Tango) 3:28
14. SEN O POKOJU
(Dream about Peace) 3:25
15. DICKE LUFT!
(Thick Air!) 1:39
16. ZIMNO, PANIE!
(It’s Cold, Sir!) 1:20
17. MOJA BRAMA
(My Gate) 1:28
18. PIESíNí O WANDZIE Z RAVENSBRÜCKU
(Song about Wanda
USHMM 0004
from Ravensbrück) 3:47
ISBN 978-0-89604-713-6
19. CZTERDZIESTU CZTERECH
(Forty-four) 1:41
20. WIELKA WYGRANA!
(Big Win!) 2:09
ALEKSANDER KULISIEWICZ BALLADS AND BROADSIDES
1. MUZULMAN–KIPPENSAMMLER
(Muselmann–Butt Collector)
2. MISTER C 1:48
3. KRAKOWIACZEK 1940 3:18
4. REPETA!
SONGS FROM SACHSENHAUSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP, 1940–1945
ALEKSANDER KULISIEWICZ (1918–1982) was a student in German-occupied Poland in October 1939 when the
Gestapo arrested him for antifascist writings and sent him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.
A talented singer and songwriter, Kulisiewicz composed 54 songs during five years of imprisonment. As a “camp
troubadour,” Kulisiewicz favored broadsides—songs of attack whose aggressive language and macabre imagery
mirrored his grotesque circumstances. But his repertoire also included ballads that often evoked his native Poland
with nostalgia and patriotic zeal. His songs, performed at secret gatherings, helped inmates cope with their hunger
and despair, raised morale, and sustained hope of survival. The selections presented here provide a representative
sample of Kulisiewicz’s extraordinary artistic output and a sense of his personal reactions to the realities of life in
a Nazi concentration camp. Notes include Polish texts with English translations and annotation.
U N I T E D S TAT E S H O L O C A U S T M E M O R I A L M U S E U M
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TRACKS
This compact disc focuses exclusively on Kulisiewicz’s own song repertoire from Sachsenhausen.
These recordings, preserved on reel-to-reel tapes by Kulisiewicz after the war, are of variable
quality, reflecting the conditions in which they were produced, from home recordings to studio
or concert hall productions. The selections are arranged chronologically and are intended to
provide both a representative sample of Kulisiewicz’s artistic output and a sense of his personal
reactions to the realities of life in a Nazi concentration camp.
14
.
12. POZEGNANIE ADOLFA
ZE ŚWIATEM
18
(Adolf ’s Farewell
to the World) 5:04
19
4:13
2. MISTER C
1:48
3. KRAKOWIACZEK 1940
(Corpse-Carrier’s Tango)
3:18
4. REPETA!
21
(Second Helping!)
(Unforgettable Song)
23
25
7. GERMANIA!
27
3:07
8. OLZA
29
4:24
9. CZARNY BÖHM
31
2:00
33
2:49
47
1:20
17. MOJA BRAMA
51
1:28
18. PIESíNí O WANDZIE Z
RAVENSBRÜCKU
(Big Win!)
55
1:41
20. WIELKA WYGRANA!
35
52
(Song about Wanda
(Forty-four)
11. HEIL, SACHSENHAUSEN!
2:29
45
16. ZIMNO, PANIE!
(My Gate)
(Mama’s Boy in a
Concentration Camp)
42
1:39
(It’s Cold, Sir!)
2:14
39
3:28
3:25
15. DICKE LUFT!
(Thick Air!)
2:30
6. ERIKA
(Black Böhm)
14. SEN O POKOJU
(Dream about Peace)
1:14
A living memorial to the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum inspires leaders and citizens to confront hatred, prevent genocide,
promote human dignity and strengthen democracy. Federal support guarantees
the Museum’s permanence, and donors nationwide make possible its educational
activities and global outreach.
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ALEKSANDER
KULISIEWICZ
4
Aleksander Kulisiewicz (1918–1982) was a law student in German-occupied Poland in
October 1939 when the Gestapo arrested him for antifascist writings and sent him to the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. A talented singer and songwriter,
Kulisiewicz composed 54 songs during five years of imprisonment. After liberation, he
remembered his songs as well as ones he had learned from fellow prisoners and dictated
hundreds of pages of them to his nurse in a Polish infirmary.
As a “camp troubadour,” Kulisiewicz favored broadsides—songs of attack whose aggressive language and macabre imagery mirrored his grotesque circumstances. But his repertoire also included ballads that often evoked his native Poland with nostalgia and patriotic
zeal. His songs, performed at secret gatherings, helped inmates cope with their hunger and
despair, raised morale, and sustained hope of survival. Beyond this spiritual and psychological importance, 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.”
Haunted by sounds and images of Sachsenhausen, Kulisiewicz began amassing a
private collection of music, poetry, and artwork created by camp prisoners. In the 1960s,
he joined with Polish ethnographers Józef Ligęza and Jan Tacina in a project to collect
written and recorded interviews with former prisoners on the subject of music in the camps.
He also inaugurated a series of public
recitals, radio broadcasts, and recordings featuring his repertoire of prisoners’ songs, now greatly expanded to
encompass material from at least a
dozen Nazi camps. Kulisiewicz’s 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. The archive he created, the
largest collection in existence of music
composed in the camps, is now a part
of the Archives of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C.
Aleksander Kulisiewicz, ca. 1980. Konrad
Strzelewicz, Zapis: Opowiecz Aleksandra
Kulisiewicza (Krakow, 1984)
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ORPHEUS RAISING HELL
IMPRESSIONS OF THE LATE ALEKSANDER KULISIEWICZ
By Peter Wortsman
6
The late Aleksander Kulisiewicz (Alex to his friends) lived in a world turned topsy turvy.
While others did backward somersaults of denial to compensate for the rude disruption of
World War II to their everyday lives—turning a blind eye to the unsightly reality, deflecting attention from themselves, and feigning normalcy—Alex had the effrontery, whether
foolish or courageous, to stand upright and look the lies and liars in the eye.
Neither a Jew nor Gypsy, Communist, homosexual, Jehovah’s Witness, high-profile
Polish intellectual, or other likely candidate for the Nazi roster of undesirables, Alex could
have kept his mouth shut and bit his tongue like most of his contemporaries, but instead he
stuck his tongue out.
“Genug Hitler, Heil Butter!” (Enough Hitler, Heil Butter!) he wrote in an anonymous
jibe titled “Homemade Hitlerisms” in a student newspaper that the Gestapo traced back to
its author. He was arrested in 1939, at the age of 22, and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the grim finishing school where he spent the next five years in hell and found his
true calling as a modern day Orpheus, a troubadour of the unutterable. In 54 of his own
songs composed and performed surreptitiously during his incarceration, Alex snubbed his
nose at the German authorities to amuse and boost the morale of his fellow inmates. He
also committed to memory hundreds of other songs and poems gathered from those who
suspected that their own end was near. Following an informant’s denunciation and the
subsequent brutal interrogation, he was injected with diphtheria bacilli to shut him up for
good. But thanks to medicines smuggled into sick bay, Alex lived to go on singing.
Following liberation, once the tragic farce of the Third Reich had played itself out,
amnesia was the new norm. Back in his native Krakow, Alex again found himself out of step
with the times. While postwar Poland engaged in a new regimen of compliance and denial
dictated by Moscow, Alex took his cues from conscience and memory. The doctors at the
tuberculosis clinic where he was laid up diagnosed his restless muttering as a mark of madness, but a more indulgent nurse took dictation. Out poured 716 pages. He once suggested
that the resolve “to spit out the songs as long as I have the breath left in my lungs to do so”
may well have helped him battle the deadly disease. The disembodied voices deposited in
his memory clamored to be heard. For Alex, the will to live was inextricably bound up with
the need to remember.
“There was a time when I wanted to forget about all this and live a normal life,” he confided, “but at night these songs kept coming back to me.” At the cost of his livelihood, the
professional journalistic career he had entered after his convalescence, Alex took his music
to the stage.
At one of his first public appearances at a festival in Italy in 1965, “Le Musiche della
Resistenza” (Music of the Resistance), neofascists planted a bomb, which fortunately was
discovered and defused in the nick of time. He went on to sing his songs throughout
Europe, with frequent appearances in Germany (both East and West), where he always
emphasized that “the youth are not guilty, only the bastards who committed the crimes.”
Alex was not out to settle any scores. His single-minded purpose was to deliver the precious
messages with which he had been entrusted. Accepting no remuneration, save for travel
expenses, he sang on until death finally silenced him in 1982.
I was privileged to meet and interview Alex in Warsaw in 1975 and subsequently published a short profile, “A Singer from Hell.” 1 The article stirred some interest and a reader
in Milwaukee with connections in Jewish cultural circles arranged to bring him to the
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United States for a concert tour. In New York, I introduced him to the late Moe Asch,
founder of Folkways Records, for whom Alex taped and I produced the album, Songs from
the Depths of Hell. 2
In the many interviews I conducted in the course of my research throughout Eastern
Europe and Israel with men and women who had survived the pit of civilization, I kept
coming back to the same question: Did anyone pause to make music, art, poetry at the
threshold of death? A few of my respondents remembered stray verses, a tune hummed, a
popular prewar ditty. Most often, however, they just shrugged and threw up their hands.
“Who the hell had time for such frivolous nonsense? We were busy staying alive!”
All responses seemed to support my suspicion that art was at best nothing but a vanity
dresser full of costume jewellry, at worst a cunning camouflage for atrocities, canned music
to jam out the screams. Then a cultivated doctor in Krakow, himself a survivor, suggested
I look up Aleksander Kulisiewicz.
I managed to meet him in Warsaw in 1975. The following is freely quoted from my
recollections 3 :
His sad, soft eyes have not forgotten what they saw. His songs—so many disembodied voices—are the only real survivors. Some of them he wrote; others he remembered,
each with a face and a story. “Alex,” someone whispers, “is there room in your head for my
song too?”
“Now,” Alex sighs, “I have to go back… there.” He shuts his eyes. Silence. Then like a faraway echo, a deep voice floods the room. It moans in basso profundo a terrible-beautiful
song. “Lullaby for My Little Son in the Crematorium.” This is no lullaby to fall asleep to.
This is Aaron Liebeskind’s song. The young clockmaker from Bilgoraj who watched in
Treblinka while they shot his wife Edith, while they swung his little boy head first against
a wall. The man who tried to sing his son awake. Who could not and turned gray overnight.
Who fled Treblinka and, with a borrowed name, found his way to Berlin. Who was arrested
again, sent to Sachsenhausen and on to Auschwitz. Who could not finally escape the gas.
I glance down at my tape recorder. The spools are not turning. I look closer. They have
not been turning. They have recorded nothing. I groan and feel sick in the stomach. Alex
finishes his song. He looks from me to the machine. I am about to cry. He takes a deep
breath and speaks without anger. “Don’t think I sing for you or for myself… . No!… I sing
for Aaron Liebeskind.” We fix the spools. He sings the song again from the beginning with
even greater tenderness.”
An astounding performer—though the word, “performer,” with its underlying hint of
counterfeit effect, belied the painful honesty of his “act,” and he never knowingly tried to
astound—Alex was a one-man choir-orchestra who never needed a microphone to fill a
space of whatever size with his voice. He spilled his guts and gave his all every time he
opened his mouth, whether on an outdoor stage, in a concert hall, a recording studio, or a
hotel room. Rage, joy, terror, revulsion, love and longing, all these emotions and more welled
up in his dark sunken eyes and colored his infinitely flexible, mellifluous baritone voice. The
effect seemed a bit uncanny, like that of a medium at a séance. Alex was a macabre ventriloquist who could bring forth a complete musical spectrum of voices from the depth of his
being. Enjoined not to applaud, the listener had no other recourse but to tremble.
“Every time I sing, I return to this damned concentration camp,” he once wrote. “Once
again I have to experience this, not only to reproduce the sounds, but also all the horror included in the songs. I must not be an actor. The line between documentary retrospection
and the singer’s theatrical art growing into mannerism is very tenuous. In Germany, they
would say: ‘What a good actor!’ Nobody would believe the authenticity.”
In none of the songs in his repertoire is this versatility of range and painstaking authenticity more evident than in Alex’s searing rendition of “Jüdischer Todessang” (Jewish
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Deathsong), a work written and orchestrated by his fellow Sachsenhausen inmate, the
German-Jewish composer Rosebery d’Arguto, who organized and directed a clandestine
Jewish camp choir. All 25 singers and their director were later sent off to Auschwitz and
silenced in the gas chamber. Alex was the only surviving witness to the last rehearsal in
1942. Suddenly SS-men burst into the barracks screaming, “Alle raus!” (Everybody out!),
as Alex recalls in his version of the song, which manages to evoke, not only every voice in
the choir, from tenor to bass, but also the thump of the human heart, the creak of the
floorboards, the shriek of the SS and the deathlike silence that followed. 4
Perhaps the most striking—and for listeners, indeed, unsettling—feature of the songs
he himself wrote in Sachsenhausen is the comic element. His own lyrics can get raucous
and downright raunchy, as in “Heil, Sachsenhausen!” in which the singer, “a shit-caked
Polak clod,” imagines buying himself “a nice German girl”:
She, the sweet young mommy.
Me, the stupid daddy,
We’ll make a few striped babies:
Black and white and red…
Things can also get sidesplittingly hilarious, as in “Mister C,” in which a mythic Mister
C (Churchill) snuffs out his cigar and proposes to pay for Adolf ’s funeral—written in 1940,
when the end was nowhere in sight. In the camp, we must imagine Alex as a tragicomic
clown, a Charlie Chaplin in pinstripes who could elicit tears or titters with a wink or a yowl.
And while he discouraged applause at his postwar performances and a chuckle would have
been unthinkable, mirth was surely the richest gift he gave to his comrades, a rip-roaring
belly laugh that vented their pent-up rage and let them at least pretend to be alive.
Even death could be a quasi-comic relief, an escape hatch, as he once implied in a letter:
“In the camp I had much, so much to do with death—endlessly. I was, among other
tasks, a corpse-carrier. On occasion, we carted off people who appeared to be dead
and afterwards, in the cellar where we stacked them, suddenly came back to life.
There was nothing awful about this for us. We were so damned hardened. And in
each case, these 99 percent dead told us (or indicated with their lips) that we should
let them die, they were mad that we’d awakened them. One of them said: ‘It was so
pleasant…’”
In the camp, Alex longed for the future with the trompe l’oeil of laughter as the only
escape from a suffocating present. Afterwards, he looked back in grief to embrace the
inescapable and reaffirm life. A latter-day Orpheus, Alex peered fearlessly into the abyss, eyes
and ears open wide, to retrieve in each of his songs the imprint of life as the consummate
memento of love. “To believe in love in a concentration camp, that was not easy,” he recalled.
“But we had to believe.”
You may by now have gathered that my once wavering faith in the value of cultural artifact, Occidental or other, has since returned, fortified in large part by Alex’s example. What
are we humans but scavengers in the great rubble heap of history, memory-burdened creatures
rebuilding our anthills at the site of past destruction? Our very DNA, the recipe of our
survival as a species, is a recycled gift from the dead. Or as Alex put it in a letter to my
mother mourning my father’s death: “What remains of us all? Only memory.”
In “The Singing Bone,” a lesser known, albeit profound fairy tale of the Brothers
Grimm, a wandering shepherd-turned-minstrel finds a little white bone out of which he
carves a mouthpiece for his flute or horn. But the bone will not play the tune the minstrel
intends. It has its own repertoire:
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Oh dear little shepherd boy,
The bone you blow on knows no joy,
My brother slayed me.
Beneath the bridge he lay me.
All for the wild boar’s hide,
To make the king’s daughter his bride. 5
12
No mere accommodating instrument this, no mouthpiece for a ditty—the bone cannot
help but echo the cries of the misdeed that robbed it of life. The shepherd’s breath, like an
author’s ink or a paleontologist’s glue, literally re-members the dismembered.
Alex accompanied himself on such an enchanted instrument. “I don’t play it,” he once
said of his guitar, “it plays me.” Sometimes the guitar played sympathetic comrade to his
lonely voice, sometimes a clown to mock the futility of his song, sometimes a taskmaster
whipping the crooning slave shackled to it, sometimes a rhythmic, ominous reminder of
the end. The guitar had a history of its own—several histories! Alex’s accounts of the
instrument’s origins varied. In one version Alex liked to tell, it belonged to an old Jew, a
merchant or a musician who took it with him on his last tour to destinations unknown.
“You won’t be needing this where you’re going,” an SS-guard snickered and relieved the old
man of his burden. The same guard, later detailed to Sachsenhausen, panicked as the
Allied armies approached. “Hold this!” he said to Alex. The guard disappeared and Alex
held on to the guitar. A somewhat more prosaic provenance might well have been the
depot of abandoned objects immediately following the camp’s liberation. Wherever he got
the guitar, none who heard it play can deny the richness of its timbre and the haunting
music Alex was able to coax out of its belly. Part Sancho Panza, part Rosinante, the guitar
was his true companion in life.
Alex is gone now, but we still have his music, his singing bones ringing in our ears. The
ordinary world keeps tilting to the left and to the right, blindly following the marching
orders of demagogues of every sort. No music meant for easy listening, these songs were
written and sung to raise hell.
1. Peter Wortsman, “A Singer from Hell,” Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine 26, no. 3 (1977).
2. Songs from the Depths of Hell, Folkways, 1978; reissued on CD by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1993.
3. Peter Wortsman, “A Singer from Hell.”
4. “Jüdischer Todessang” appears on the CD Songs from the Depths of Hell.
5. Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, 1812. My translation.
Peter Wortsman is the author of a book of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die, and a stage play, The
Tattooed Man Tells All, among other works. His original song “A Nursery Rhyme for Dead Children” has
been performed around the world. Interviews he conducted with survivors in 1975 in Austria, Poland, and
Israel constitute the Peter Wortsman Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Aleksander Kulisiewicz’s guitar. USHMM, Kulisiewicz Collection
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MUZULMAN–KIPPENSAMMLER
MUSELMANN–BUTT COLLECTOR
Laszek jestem ja poganin,
Wszyscy mnie tu mają za nic,
Poga-poga-poganiają mną....
A ła łałł!
A ja zasie, miły draniu,
Mam ich w d-dużym p-powazianiu,
W du-du-d-du-du...w
dużym powazianiu ich mam....
A ła łałł!
I’m a God-forsaken Polish pagan,
To everyone here I’m less than nothing,
They pu- pu- pu- push me around....
Ow-ow-oww!
But little stinker that I am,
I don’t give a da...ng about them.
I don’t give a d- d- da...ng
about them at all
Ow-ow-oww!
Za drutami słońce świeci,
Za drutami skaczą dzieci,
A na drutach czarny, smutny trup....
U-u uuu...
Cienki jestem, cieniuteńki
I lekutki, głupiusieńki,
W brzuchu burczą puste flaki—tu
U-u uuu!
Beyond barbed wire the sun shines brightly,
Beyond barbed wire children play,
But on the barbed wire
a sad, charred body droops....
Oo-woo-woo!
I’m so thin, so very trim,
So light, so slight, so empty-headed,
Belly empty—guts are growling, too.
Oo-woo-woo!
Z przodu ja mam winkiel czerwony,
Z tyłu ziółty—ten!—
sraken-kreuz!
In front I wear a red triangle patch,
On my backside—ptui!—
a yellow shit-caked swastika!
Może jesteś ty Italiano,
Może Iwan lub Mojsie ty?
Could you be an “Italiano”?
Or are you “Ivan”? Maybe “Moishe”?
Muzulman, muzulman,
W morde bym ci dał:
Kippy zbierasz pan!
Muzulman, muzulman,
Kopnięć mało, duzo chleba,
Ze sie zezryć ani nie da.
Hei-li, hei-li, esiu-esiu!
Trajluj dalli führu-esiu....
Boże, czyż mi źle?!
Muselmann, Muselmann,
I’d like to slap you in the snout,
Mr. Butt Collector!
Not too many kicks, and lots of bread—
So much, it all can’t be forced down.
Heil! Oh, heil, my li’l SS-man!
Tra-la, taradiddle, li’l Führer!
I ask you, God: Have I got it so bad?!
Muzulman, muzulman!
Bracie, pyska daj—
B r a c i e biedny mój.
Muzulman, muzulman,
Oczy gasną, wargi sine,
Z dziecka—popiół! ...Boga nie ma!
Cholera, psiakrew
Na mego vorarbeitra!
Niech go ma krew zaleje dziś!
Muzulman, muzulman,
Jakiś wielki pan,
Jakiś wielki pan.
Hell and damnation—
Curses on my foreman!
May my blood this day spill over him!
What a lordly sir,
What a lordly sir.
Hopaj-siupaj, połamańcze,
J-jupaj-siupaj! Jo se tańce!
Rzygam ciepłą krwią.
Patrzycie na mnie,
Patrzycie ludzie—
I pośród l u d z i ... podły mój skon.
Muselmann, Muselmann!
Brother, let me kiss your snout,
BROTHER, my poor brother!
Eyes grow dull, lips grow cold,
A child turned into a pile of ashes!
There is no God!
Hop, Hop! Hi-ho! Twisted thing!
Yippee, yahoo! Look I’m dancing!
I’m vomiting warm blood.
And you’re watching me,
Watching me, people—
Amid HUMAN BEINGS, I die my horrid death.
Muzulman, muzulman,
Mama, moja mama,
Cicho umrzeć daj.
Mama, my mama,
Let me die in peace.
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MuZulMan–KippensaMMler
Sachsenhausen, 1940
Music: Menashe Oppenheim (“Zulejka,” 1936)
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Aleksander Kulisiewicz joined a traveling circus in the summer of 1939 and toured the Polish provinces as a
clown. In his act, he would lie dead-still on the sawdust, and as the band struck up the pseudo-oriental tune
“Shanghai” another clown would pummel him with an outsized rubber hammer. The circus atmo-sphere, with
its raucous music and mock brutality, made a profound impression on him:
Later, in 1940, when in Sachsenhausen I once again put on a “clown’s costume”—this time a tragic version of it—I was obsessed with that circus song. I thought to myself, the camp is some sort of dark,
perverted circus of sadists and miscreants. But here they don’t hit you with inflated rubber clubs. Fellow prisoners looked like striped clowns on whom an entire menagerie was unleashed. There was
no sawdust, only cold dirt. No one had to pretend to be dead.
Kulisiewicz fixed on the haunting “Shanghai” melody for his first song creation at Sachsenhausen,
“Muselmann,” inspired by an encounter with a Muselmann, an emaciated inmate who had lost the will to live.
(The word, in German, means “Muslim,” and its use in camp jargon evoked the “otherness” and otherworldliness of prisoners nearing death by starvation.) First performed in July 1940 in a private concert in Cell Block
65, “Muselmann” was revised and expanded in 1943, after the arrival in Sachsenhausen of several hundred
Italian prisoners. This is the version Kulisiewicz sings here.
The circus melody known to Kulisiewicz as “Shanghai” originated from a Yiddish “foxtrot orientale”
known as “Zulejka,” which was also known in a Polish version. Note to Polish readers: In “Muzulman” and
certain other Sachsenhausen songs, Kulisiewicz intentionally employs dialect instead of literary Polish. The
lyrics reproduced throughout this book preserve the author’s original spelling.
Wiktor Simiński (1897–1974), whose illustrations accompany several songs in this album, was arrested by the
Gestapo in September 1939 and deported to Sachsenhausen in early 1940. A gifted amateur artist, he created more
than 100 drawings, watercolors, and hand-carved artifacts in the camp, and soon after the war began painting
scenes relating to his imprisonment. Simiński maintained a close friendship with fellow inmate Aleksander
Kulisiewicz, with whom he planned a publication devoted to art in Sachsenhausen.
Kippenstecher (Kippensammler; cigarette-butt
collector), by Wiktor
Simiński, postwar.
Center figure: “Apparently:
Arbeit macht Frei (Work
makes you free)? Oh,
splendid! We do it!!!”
Inset on left: “Free Trade”:
Prisoner on left: “Give me
bread”; Prisoner on right:
“Give me cigarettes.”
Inset on right: “Cigarette
Manufacture.” USHMM,
Kulisiewicz Collection
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MISTER C
MISTER C
Roczek wtóry, mój ty Boże,
Bryka sobie Hakenkreuz.
Żadna siła go nie zmoże,
Bo inaczej, to — Kniebeug!
It’s the second year, dear God,
And the swastika’s still frolicking;
There is no power that can exhaust it,
So we’d all better get down on our knees!
Taki straśnie wielki Führer,
Taki z pędzlem Räuber-goj,
We łbie pluszczą mu pomyje,
Blödes Volk mu ryczy: Heil-l-l!
Such a terribly great, ferocious Führer,
Such a robber-goy—with paint brush, yet!
And his head’s filled up with dirty dishwater,
While his stupid Volk shriek: “Heil!”
A...Mister C cygaro pali,
Mister C cygaro ćmi,
Europa się nań wali,
A on giełdę ma i spleen.
Meanwhile, Mister C puffs his big cigar,
Mister C blows out some smoke;
Europe crumbles all around him,
But he’s got the coin and he’s got the blues!
Mister C cygaro stłumi,
Adolfowi plunie w “Sieg,”
Pogrzeb fundnie mu na Rugii,
Może w dziewięćset czterdzieści trzy.
Mister C
Sachsenhausen,1940
Music: Henryk Wars (“Czarny Jim,” 1939)
“Mister C” is Winston Churchill, the cigar-chomping British Prime Minister who, between the fall of France
and the United States’ entry into World War II, personified captive Europe’s last hope for defeating the Germans. Written after news reached Sachsenhausen of the demoralizing Allied retreat from Dunkirk in northern France, “Mister C” debuted at a secret gathering in Cell Block 3 where, Kulisiewicz recalls, “the most biting
and obscene antifascist satires were performed in several languages.”
Certain lines of “Mister C” are purposely obscure. “Isle of Rugia”—the German Baltic island Rügen—evokes
an ancient borderland clash between Slavic and Germanic groups. “Eastern wind” hints at the prisoners’ hopedfor support from the Soviet Union despite the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression treaty still in effect.
KRAKOWIACZEK 1940
KRAKOWIACZEK 1940
Mister C will snuff out his smoke,
And he’ll spit on Adolf ’s “Sieg!”
He’ll pay for Adolf ’s funeral on the Isle of Rugia—
Maybe as early as ‘43!
Krakowie, Krakowie,
Malowany grodzie,
Dziwują się ludzie,
Tej twojej urodzie!
Oh Krakow, oh Krakow,
Lovely city,
Everyone’s astonished
By your beauty!
Może, ach, może...ach, może,
Oj, któz to wiedzieć może?
Morze głębokie, nieboże,
Angielskie zwłaszcza morze.
Maybe, oh, maybe, oh, maybe,
Ah, who can really know for sure?
The sea is deep, poor fellow,
Especially the English sea.
Krakowie, Krakowie,
Malowany grodzie,
Syn mój rozstrzelany,
A ja tu o głodzie.
Oh Krakow, oh Krakow,
Lovely city,
My son shot dead
And I’m here starving.
Jum-pą tiu, di di di, di di di,
Jum-pą day, di di di you!
Może, może—któż to wiedzieć może?
Może w s c h o d n i wietrzyk mu pomoże?
Yoom pom tiu, di di di, di di di,
Yoom pom day, di di di you!
Maybe, maybe ... who can really know for sure?
Maybe the “Eastern Wind” will help.
I szwargocą szwaby,
Że “urdeutsche Krakau”—
A ja pod Berlinem,
Na mój hejnał czekam.
And the Krauts gibber
“Krakow is so very German,”
And I’m near Berlin
Waiting for my trumpet call.
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Krakusowa góra
Słoneczkiem się pali,
U mojej Kasieńki
Złoty sznur korali!
The royal hill of Krakow
Shimmers in the sun,
Around my Kasia’s neck—
A golden string of beads!
Krakusowa góra
Słoneczkiem się pali,
Kasia zapłakana,
A nam pasiak dali.
The royal hill of Krakow
Shimmers in the sun,
Kasia in tears
And we wear their stripes.
Ale pięści wściekłe
I Kasieńka własna,
Oby was zalała
Krew siarczysta jasna!
But my fists are furious
And Kasia is forever mine,
So may you all be cursed—
With boiling red blood!
KraKowiaCZeK 1940
Sachsenhausen, 1940
Music: Polish folksong (unidentified)
Kulisiewicz generally names the older melodies on which he based his new creations. “Krakowiaczek 1940”
is among the exceptions. The melody—introduced in the recording by some virtuoso whistling—is identified
only as a folksong. Krakowiaczek literally means little Krakowiak, the emblematic folk song and dance of the
Krakow region. But the diminutive form also expresses affection, proclaiming Kulisiewicz’s love for his vanquished native city.
The song also honors Dr. Jan Miodoński, a medical professor arrested November 6, 1939, during the
Sonderaktion Krakau, the Nazi attempt to crush Polish intellectual life by imprisoning or killing instructors
at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University. Deported to Sachsenhausen, Miodoński boldly confronted prison guards
who threatened some of his older colleagues.
The mention of waiting for a trumpet call refers to the Hejnał, a fanfare that sounds hourly from the tower
of St. Mary’s Church in Krakow’s central square, an ancient theme familiar to all Krakow inhabitants.
REPETA!
SECOND HELPING!
Stoi Häftling przy repecie,
Głoduś, głoduś w kiszki gniecie,
A sztekriba ta bestyja,
Żółte oczka ma.
A sztekriba ta bestyja,
Żółte oczka ma—Szwabicha!
Prisoner standing, waits for “seconds,”
Hunger gnawing at his insides,
But that spoiled turnip—beastly thing,
Leers at him with rotting eyes!
But that spoiled turnip—beastly thing,
Leers at him with rotting eyes—filthy Kraut!
Stoi Häftling i sumuje,
A sztekribke pochlipuje,
A sztubowy chłop morowy,
Chochlą w morde go!
A sztubowy chłop morowy,
Chochlą w morde go—
przez ryja.
Prisoner standing, contemplating,
Thinks of turnip, whimpers, moans,
Until the steward—solid henchman,
Smacks him with the serving spoon!
Until the steward—solid henchman,
Smacks him with the serving spoon—
right on the snout!
Oj, Maryja! On przez ryja,
A sztekriba nie pomyja,
Flaki charczą, marsza grają:
“Du siegreiches Reich!”
Flaki charczą, marsza grają:
“Du siegreiches Reich!”...za-kichany!
Holy Mary! Right on the snout!
Well at least that turnip’s not dirty dishwater!
His stomach rattles a marching tune:
“Oh, glorious, victorious Reich!”
His stomach rattles a marching tune:
“Oh, glorious, victorious Reich!”—be damned!
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repeta!
Sachsenhausen, 1941.
Music: anonymous (“Precz, precz od nas smutek wszelki!” 1824)
Kulisiewicz recalled that mealtimes at Sachsenhausen offered camp Kapos (inmate overseers) a special
opportunity to torment their fellow prisoners. “Second Helping” may present a typical scenario: a starving prisoner’s meager and revolting food ration is served up with beatings by the kitchen steward.
Kulisiewicz wrote this while he was quarantined with typhus, remarking how popular it became. Performed
with guitar accompaniment, the song would end with a so-called “Parade March”—a burlesque promenade
around an imaginary cauldron of rotten-turnip soup.
Kulisiewicz modeled “Repeta” after a Polish students’ song about food, drink, and merriment, “Precz, precz
od nas smutek wszelki!” (Begone, begone from us all sorrow).
23
Repeta! (Second helping!), detail, by Wiktor Simiński, postwar. Prisoner near door:”Achtung!” (Attention!);
Prisoner under table: “Mister Orderly, maybe a cigarette?”; Prisoner escaping through the window: “Oh, it’s
going to get hot in here!” USHMM, Kulisiewicz Collection
PIOSENKA NIEZAPOMNIANA
UNFORGETTABLE SONG
Wiatr za drutami szepce do snu:
Pamiętasz Polskę, biedaku mój?
Dawne marzenia, których dziś nie ma—
Pozostał głuchy ból.
Breeze rustling through the wires
lulls me to sleep:
“Do you remember Poland, poor fellow?”
Daydreams of long ago today are no more—
Only a dull ache remains.
Tyle, ach tyle czekałem dni,
Poczekam jeszcze tysiące trzy!
Twarde jest życie, twarde są pięści!
Pamiętaj! Pomścij! Milcz!
Too many days I’ve waited in vain,
Still I’ll wait a thousand more!
Life is hard, but so are my fists!
Remember! Revenge! Say nothing!
Piosenka niezapomniana,
Jedyna, umiłowana,
Piosenka, którą zdławiło “Heil!”
Unforgettable song,
My dearest, my only one,
Beloved song that stifled their “Heil!”
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ERIKA
ERIKA
Piosenka, o czymś, co było,
Minęło—lecz będzie żyło!
Mój Boże, z piosenką umrzeć daj.
Dear song about things that once were,
About things past—but that will endure!
Dear God, with a song on my lips let me die.
Brlą pą pą, brlą pą pą,
Brlą parlą pą, brlą parlą pą....
Brlą parlą pą, brlą parlą pą....
Brrum pum pum, brrum pum pum...
Brrum-pity pum, brrum-pity pum...
Brrum-pity pum, brrum-pity pum...
Zaśpiewa cała Polska ma
I skrzydła znów odrosną!
Wrócimy wszyscy, wszyscy tam,
Gdzie Wisła czeka wiosną.
All my Poland will sing out,
With wings reborn again she’ll soar!
We all will return again, there,
Where the Vistula awaits in spring.
Pod naszą bramusią wali w pysk SS,
Piosenka krwią okupiona,
Mocarna—niezwyciężona,
Piosenka, która się spełni—wam!
Dear song, paid for in blood,
Mighty, invincible,
Dear song, whose words will come true for you!
Bo muszą—oj, muszą! Bracie, fajno jest!
Brlą pą pą, brlą pą pą, pą!
Nie czekaj, nie zwlekaj, jeno nura daj!
Miniesz kilometrów kilka,
Będzie stała tam Erika—
Und alles schon vorbei.
They’re smashing our mugs, the SS men,
out by our beloved camp gate;
They’ve got to—they must! Brother, ain’t it great!
Brrum pum pum, brrum pum pum!
So don’t delay, don’t hesitate—dive for cover!
After a march of many a mile,
There she’ll be waiting—Erika!
And everything’s behind us now.
Pójdż z nami, süsses Fräulein, maszerować,
Na pewno trochę użyjesz.
Przed tobą i za tobą będą padać
Häftlingi—żadne mecyje.
I kopniaczek w nereczki,
I kopniaczek w pachwinę,
Ach, sicher, będziesz miała o czym gadać,
Minutkę—może godzinę.
25
Come march with us, sweet Fräulein,
You’re guaranteed a good time!
Prisoners around you will be dropping like flies—
No big deal, you’ll be just fine.
A little kick in the kidneys,
A little kick to the groin,
Oh, I expect you’ll have something to talk about,
For a minute, maybe even an hour!
I trupeczka jednego,
I trupusiów dziesięciu,
Niesiemy wszyscy ślicznie, ślicznie razem,
Pokazać temu dziewczęciu!
Niesiemy wszyscy ślicznie, ślicznie razem,
Pokazać temu dziewczęciu!
Und sie heißt Erika,
Und sie heißt Erika.
And one corpse,
And ten corpses!
We bring ‘em back, nicely, all together now,
To show ‘em to this sweet young girl!
We bring ‘em back, nicely, all together now,
To show ‘em to this sweet young girl!
And she’s named Erika,
And she’s named Erika.
24
piosenKa nieZapoMniana
Music: Juliusz Krzemieński (“Piosenka nieaktualna,” 1934)
On September 1, 1940, to mark the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the prisoners of Cell Block
65 organized an evening’s entertainment during which Kulisiewicz performed the prewar hit “Piosenka
nieaktualna” (Old-fashioned Song). Hearing this sentimental ballad about a once-popular song caused some
prisoners to be overwhelmed with nostalgia. This prompted Kulisiewicz to write a rather more optimistic
text, one proclaiming a message of resistance through song.
Bund Deutscher Mädel
members, ca. mid-1930s.
Photo courtesy of Bund
Deutscher Mädel Historical
Research Web site
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eriKa
Sachsenhausen, 1941
Music: Karel Vacek (“U našich kasáren,” 1937)
“Erika actually existed,” Kulisiewicz wrote. The teenage daughter of a high-ranking SS officer, “she stood near
the camp grounds in her crisply-ironed Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform and watched, without expression, as we
prisoners returned from our work details carrying the bodies of our dead.” But the song “Erika” is less about a
real-life girl than the fantasies of sex and vengeance she unknowingly provoked in Kulisiewicz and his comrades.
Kulisiewicz borrowed his melody from a popular Czech marching song. The final, repeated line of “Erika,”
however, mockingly parodies a favorite Nazi song of the same name by Germany’s “March King,” Herms Niel.
GERMANIA!
GERMANIA!
Wojenko, wojenko malowana,
Spłodziłaś na miętko Wodza-Pana!
Moskwa “gore,” Reich się wali—
Jeno Berlin jeden stoi,
A sławy—żarcia w nim po kolana,
Oj, joj, joj!
War, war, tarted up war,
In the heat of passion you spawned quite a ruler!
Moscow’s tops, the Reich’s crumbling,
Berlin alone still stands.
And his royal highness? He’s stuffing his face.
Oy, oy, oy!
Dałbym ci ja i pół świata,
Germanija,
Ma-ni-ja!
Abyś była jak ....Kroacja,
Germanija!
Abyś była jak—Monako
Całą taką E-u-ro-pą.
Niech ci wnet kastracja sprzyja,
Ess-ma-ni-ja!
I’d give you half the world,
Germania!
Ma-ni-a!
If only you could be like little Croatia,
Germania!
If only you could be like tiny Monaco,
Picture all Europe exactly like that!
May we suggest you consider castration?
SS-ma-ni-a!
27
Wojenko, wojenko—heißgeliebte,
Wyłamiesz ząbuśki w tej gonitwie!
Triumfalne biją dzwony—
A Stalingrad nie zniemczony!
Ze czeterech świata stron lizą kryple...
Heil! Heil! Heil!
Miała, miała i pół świata,
Germanija,
Ma-ni-ja!
Łajno w portkach—z łajna łata,
28
Zasranija!
Lepiej tycim być Monako,
Niźli taką E-u-ro-pą...
Menschenskind, kastracja sprzyja?
Esss-ma-ni-ja!
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War, war, hotly loved war,
You’ll chip your teeth chasing around that way!
Bells are tolling out in triumph—
But Stalingrad’s not Germanified!
From all four corners of the world,
cripples, crawling, crying…
“Heil! Heil! Heil!”
You had half the world,
Germania!
Ma-ni-a!
Now you’ve got crap in your pants
and crap to patch your pants!
Shit-caked country!
Better to be like tiny Monaco,
Rather than a Europe like that…
My dears, consider castration?
SS-ma-ni-a!
GerMania!
Sachsenhausen, 1941/43
Music: Jindřich Harapát (“Travička zelená,” 1936)
As an antidote to despair over Hitler’s seemingly unstoppable war machine, the brazen and ribald
“Germania!” proved extremely popular. Rather than risk performing the entire piece, prisoners took to
singing aloud only the word Germania—ironically endearing the song to the SS guards who, Kulisiewicz
reports, regretted that it did not have more lyrics.
After Germany’s crushing defeat at Stalingrad in February, 1943, Kulisiewicz added the second verse,
peforming it with exaggerated gestures so his non-Polish audience could scarcely miss his meaning. For
example, the word Germania was sung while imitating a Hitler Parade March—knees raised high with a
springing motion, face contorted into a grimace suggesting overweening pride; heißgeliebte [passionately or
hotly loved] was illustrated by a sauntering walk and batting eyes; “Stalingrad is not Germanified,” by a bashful tugging at a pant-leg.
In performance, Kulisiewicz was often joined by his French fellow inmate, Roland Tillard, who accompanied “Germania!” on that stereotypically German folk instrument, the accordion.
OLZA
OLZA
Wielka jest, śliczna jest Mississippi,
Missouri, Ganges, Amazonka, Nil.
I dumna jest Limpopo,
Bo płynie przecież po to,
By o niej się marzyło,
O innej wcale nie.
How mighty, how lovely the Mississippi,
Missouri, Ganges, Amazon, Nile.
And the Limpopo is proud,
Its waters so abound,
The object of our dreams,
Others don’t compare.
Czarna krew, wrząca krew w Kongo kipi,
Bosambo pomści ją—i za lat sto!
Bo każdy ma swe Kongo
I miłość swą ogromną—
I plemię, które przeklął
Za krzywdę i za zło!
Hot black blood boils over in the Congo,
Bosambo takes revenge for a hundred years of hell!
Yes, everyone has his Congo
His torrid love affair—
And a race that he reviles
For its evil and injustice!
Pod mym Cieszynem Olza
Goryczą samą mi śpiewa.
Siwiutkie śpią nad nią drzewa—
Żołdactwo żłopie z niej łzy!
Ach, tylko jedna w świecie rzeka,
Na którą noce blade czekam,
Near my beloved Cieszyn,
The embittered Olza sings.
On her banks gray trees sleep softly—
As uniformed bandits guzzle down her tears!
Ah! My one and only river,
I wait for you through pale nights.
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Straszliwie do niej ach daleko,
Do mojej Olzy spośród gór...
Today you are so far away,
My Olza, amid mountains...
Tyle dni, smutnych dni poza nami,
Nikogo nie mam, kto by pojął mnie.
I tułam się, i wlokę,
Samotny w kaźni noce—
I tęskno mi za Tobą,
Bogdanko Słodkich Wód...
Many tear-stained days have passed,
And there’s no one who can understand.
I drag on and I wander,
Alone through tormented nights—
Oh! How I yearn for you,
Sweet water’s ladylove...
Przyjdzie dzień—mój i wasz!—
dzień świtania
I zmiłowania nikt nie będzie znał:
Sczerwienią Twoje fale,
Odżyją baśni stare...
Nad rzeką moją panem
Był—będzie p o l s k i lud!!
The day will dawn—yours and mine!
A pod Cieszynem Olza,
Ta sama Olza popłynie—
I nikt jej w biegu nie wstrzyma,
Żadne szachrajstwo, ni pięść!
Bo niedaleka już godzina:
Nadążysz z Odrą do—Szczecina,
Moja Ty Olzo, któraś była
Tą najwierniejszą z wszystkich rzek.
And near Cieszyn on the Olza,
The same Olza will flow—
Nothing now will hold her back,
No swindle, not force!
The day draws near:
You will race with the Oder toward Szczecin,
You, my Olza,
Most faithful of all rivers.
When they will see no mercy:
Your waters will run red,
Old legends will revive...
On the banks of my river where Poles once ruled
There, POLES will rule again!!
olZa
Sachsenhausen, 1942
Music: Henryk Wars (“Jest Jedna Jedyna,” 1938)
Kulisiewicz spent his formative years in the town of Cieszyn where his father worked as a teacher, and his nostalgia for that picturesque region on the Olza River southwest of Krakow was deep and enduring. He later
wrote that when he was a prisoner he “often dreamed of returning to the banks of this beloved river.” With
its inventory of exotic waterways, this song begins on a note of passive escapism. But it soons turns to a patriotic call to action and a prophesy that soon Cieszyn will return to Polish rule.
The song’s reference to Bosambo, a fictional tribal leader, derives from a 1935 British film, Sanders of the
River, starring Paul Robeson, based on the book of the same name by Edgar Wallace. The Oder River, which
flows to the Baltic port city of Szczecin, is mentioned because the Olza is a tributary of the Oder.
31
CZARNY BÖHM
BLACK BÖHM
Czy to w dzień, czy to w noc,
Trupy wędzę—wesół, hoc!
Puszczam czarny, czarny dym,
Bom ja czarny, czarny Böhm.
Whether it’s by night or day,
I smoke corpses—full of joy!
I make a black, black smoky smoke,
‘Cause I am black, black Böhm!
I kobietki i staruszki,
I dzieciaki chciałbym też,
Sto kominów bym tu miał,
So genau jak w Birkenau.
And some chicks and some hags,
I’d like some kiddies, too.
I wish I had a hundred chimneys,
Exactly like in Birkenau!
Hulaj dusza! Czort-Katiusza!
Aber Juden sind nicht da!
Jejku, bo w czterdzieści trzy
I esmany bydą szły!
Cha! Cha! Cha! Cha! Cha!
Hip hooray! Russkies to hell!
But still there are no Jews here!
Oh, my! Could be in ‘43
They’ll send some SS-guys to me!
Hah, hah, hah, hah, hah!
3/17/08
Wtenczas zdrów i wtenczas hoc,
Wędził bede w dzień i w noc.
Tłusty, tłusty pójdzie dym,
A z nim....czarny, czarny Böhm.
Cha! Cha! Cha! Cha! Cha!
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Then healthy, then happy,
I’ll smoke ‘em by day and by night;
A real fat smoky smoke will rise—
And with it, black, black Böhm.
Hah, hah, hah, hah, hah!
CZarny BöhM
Sachsenhausen, 1942
Music: Ukrainian folk melody (“E shumyt e hudyt”)
32
Wilhelm Böhm, nicknamed “Czarny” (black) Böhm, was among the more grisly denizens of Sachsenhausen
camp. Short and hunchbacked, with long, ape-like arms, Böhm, a camp Kapo, was also distinctly charred in
appearance due to his work as a cremation specialist. Wildly enthusiastic about his job, Böhm had been
known to cry out to passing prisoners, “Come to Böhm! You’ll surely be coming my way soon, so why not
now?” Kulisiewicz reports that in 1941–1942 Böhm helped cremate some 18,000 Soviet prisoners of war
murdered at Sachsenhausen. He is thought to have died of a contagious infection in 1943.
Kulisiewicz first performed “Czarny Böhm” at a cabaret staged by the inmates of Block 23 on New Year’s
Eve 1942. The first three stanzas of the song are meant to represent the voice of the ghoulish Böhm, while the
final stanza shifts to Kulisiewicz’s own point of view.
MAMINSYNEK W
KONCENTRAKU
MAMA’S BOY IN A
CONCENTRATION CAMP
Miała matka trzech synów,
Volksdeutsche gnili w domu—
A trzeci z braku laku
Zdychał w koncentraku.
There was a mother, had three sons,
Two Volksdeutsche boys they loafed at home—
But the third, with nothing better to do,
Wasted away in a concentration camp.
Przybyli doń, przybyli,
Anieli z ge-gestapo
I wnet go pozdrowili
W lewy ząbek łapą!
They showed up one day, just showed up,
Angels from the Ge-Gestapo
And greeted him without ado
With a paw to his left front tooth!
Jechali z nim, jechali,
Z trupkami—byle dalej...
A on ich w pulmaniku
Ślicznie, ślicznie chwalił.
(verflucht!)
They rode with him, rode along,
A bunch of stiffs there with him,
While he flattered them sweetly, sweetly
In a Pullman wagon.
(damn!)
Umyli go, umyli—
Na zimno, na czerwono
I miał on gołą swoją
Wielce tym zdziwioną...
They washed him down, washed him down—
With cold, then red-hot water
And the boy’s close-shaved head,
Was greatly struck with wonder…
I czuł się szczęśliw, syty,
Po mordzie, w nerki bity—
Jedyny Häftling w świecie
W kulturnym kacecie!
And he felt blissful, satisfied,
Face and kidneys tenderized—
The only prisoner in the world
In a cultured concentration camp!
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I wrócił do matuli
Cichutko i potulnie...
Reichspostem jako—popiół
W posrebrzanej urnie.
(jeszcze nie koniec!)
And he came back to mama dear,
So quietly and meekly…
By Reich post—a pile of ashes—
In a silver-plated funeral urn.
(not over yet!)
I wisi u Marysi,
Nad łóżkiem u Maniuli—
I liczy, ile Mania
Frajerów mu tuli...
And now he hangs from Mary’s ceiling,
Just above sweet Mary’s bed—
And tallies up how many chumps
She cuddles up to in his stead.
MaMinsyneK w KonCentraKu
Music: Polish Legionnaire’s song (“Miała Matka trzech synów,” 1915)
Possibly because its call-and-response formula elicited much audience participation, “Mama’s Boy in a
Concentration Camp” became one of the best-loved Polish prisoner songs at Sachsenhausen. Kulisiewicz
notes that his listeners often made up verses of their own, some with themes and images even more outrageous than his own. He borrowed the melody, several lines of text, and the overall narrative structure from a
popular Polish Legionnaire’s song, “Miała Matka trzech synów” (There once was a mother, she had three sons).
Volksdeutsche were ethnic Germans holding citizenship in a country other than Germany; during World
War II, many Polish Volksdeutsche served with the German army either as volunteers or as unwilling conscripts. In “Ge-Gestapo,” Kulisiewicz’s “stammer” alludes to the “G-G” or Generalgouvernement (General
Government)—the German-controlled civil adminstration of occupied Poland. The reference to “his left
front tooth” satirizes the Hitlerites’ reflexive hatred of anything leftist. Here, as elsewhere in his songs,
Kulisiewicz deliberately and arbitrarily makes mention of “the left.”
HEIL, SACHSENHAUSEN!
HEIL, SACHSENHAUSEN!
Jestem sobie na wpół dziki
Scheissen-Poluś, cham.
Und warum denn do Afryki?
Tu kolonie mam!
Kupili cie, chłopie,
Kupili z gnatami—
Krew ci z mordy kapie
Alles scheiss-egal!
I’m a half-wild savage,
A shit-caked, Polak clod.
Why then sail off to Africa?
I have a colony right here!
They bought you like a slave, boy,
Bought you—lock, stock and barrel.
Blood drips from your mug,
Everything’s equal crap!
Aj, Sachsenhausen!
Kolonia gwarna, parna—
Germania richtig dzika...
Heil, Sachsenhausen!
Giry tycie jak bambusik,
Trupie łebki to kaktusy.
Heil! Es lebe Kulturkampf!
Oh, Sachsenhausen!
A colony noisy, stifling—
A Germany that’s truly wild…
Our legs are thin as bamboo shoots,
The “death’s heads” look like cactuses,
Heil! And long live Kulturkampf!
Mädchen sobie zafunduję
Polaczysko ja...
Gibt’s denn so was?... wy bestyje!
Śliczne oczka ma.
A z tej mädchen-matki
I z durnego tatki
Będą kindchen w kratki:
Schwarz und weiss und rot...
I’ll treat myself to a young German girl,
Crummy Pole that I am...
Yeah? So what, then?...You brute!
She has such lovely eyes.
She, the sweet young mommy,
Me, the stupid daddy,
We’ll make a few striped babies:
Black and white and red...
Aj, Sachsenhausen!
Błogosławiony raju—
Wszak wielbi ciebie ludzkość...
Oh, Sachsenhausen!
Blessed paradise you are—
Why, humanity adores you…
35
A jak będę jutro zdychał,
Lewą nóżką ci zafikam:
Heil! Es lebe Kulturkampf!
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Page 36
And if tomorrow I should croak,
I’ll high kick with my left leg for you:
Heil! And long live Kulturkampf!
heil, saChsenhausen!
Sachsenhausen, 1943
Music: Mieczysław Miksne (“Madagaskar,” 1938)
36
A local tragedy inspired “Heil, Sachsenhausen.” In July 1943, Hans Zahn, director of the motor pool at the
Sachsenhausen subcamp of Oranienburg, and his 15-year-old daughter, Eliza, were caught forwarding letters
from a Polish prisoner. Subsequently accused of having “intimate contacts” with Poles, Eliza was interrogated
and tortured by the Gestapo and eventually committed suicide in prison.
With this incident in mind, Kulisiewicz unleashed “Heil, Sachsenhausen,” a broadside aimed at Nazi “racial”
policy, 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 prisoners-of-war, most
of whom were ethnic Slavs. Whether or not Eliza Zahn was ever tried for “race defilement” remains unclear.
But Kulisiewicz viewed the charge as Rassenschande, and “Heil, Sachsenhausen” is a model send-up of many
assumptions dear to the Nazi worldview.
“Heil, Sachsenhausen” is based on the Polish-Jewish cabaret song “Madagaskar,” itself a rejoinder to a government scheme to deport Poland’s Jews to that island off the coast of East Africa. The term Kulturkampf
(culture war) was first used to describe the 19th-century political struggle between the German government
and the Catholic Church; Kulisiewicz viewed the Nazi effort to eradicate Polish civilization as a form of
Kulturkampf. “Black and White and Red” refers to the intermingled colors of the Nazi German and Polish
national flags. The reference to “left leg” alludes to the political prisoners’ leftist or communist sympathies.
.
POZEGNANIE ADOLFA ZE SíWIATEM
ADOLF’S FAREWELL TO THE WORLD
Nad Wołgi falą “goniąc” Moskala,
Szlachetna trup-pa zwiewała,
Und immer naprzód, und immer weiter
A szkopów Rasija gnała.
By Volga’s waters, “chasing” the Russkies,
The noble troop-p-ps were buggering off!
“And ever forward, and ever further”—
While Mother Russia was whipping the Krauts!
Żegnaj mi Moskwo, żegnaj Samaro,
Mój Leningradzie daleki!
Oj, jubel minie, kiedy na Krymie
Zerżną mnie w portki na wieki.
Bid farewell to me Moscow, farewell Samara,
My distant Leningrad, farewell!
Oh, soon the party will be over, when, in Crimea,
They’ll take the crap out of me for good.
Ja, ja—ist stimmt das...
Ja, ja—it’s really true...
Żegnam was góry, góry Uralu
I ciebie z twoją armadą.
Ty jesteś Stalin—Stalin ze stali,
Ja jestem impotent—Adolf.
Farewell to you mountains, fair Ural Mountains,
You with your army, I bid farewell.
You are Stalin, man-of-steel Stalin,
I’m just an impotent Adolf.
Prashchay więc wdzięczna mi Europo
Za moją “Arbeit und Freude”!
Gdzieś w siódmym niebie,
pod siódmym płotem,
Może za żonę cię pojmę.
Farewell, then, Europe,
So grateful for my “Arbeit und Freude”!
In the Seventh Heaven,
beneath the seventh fence,
Perhaps I shall take you as my bride.
Adieu też wszystkie śwabskie dziewice,
Któraż mi karty rozłoży?
Chłopak ja byłem dumny i święty,
Bom nigdy nie cudzo-włożył.
Adieu to you, too, all you Kraut virgins,
Who’ll read the cards for me now?
I was a proud and saintly boy,
I never stuck it where it didn’t belong!
Sieg Heil, General—mój Gówner-nament,
Dobroci dzieło ogromne.
Emeryturę sutą dostaniesz
Za goebbelsiowski mój Bromberg.
Sieg Heil, my General-Gouvernexcrement!
Magnificent creation of goodness.
A handsome pension you’ll receive,
For my—as Goebbels would say—“Bromberg.”
37
Gitara brzękła, Germania jękła,
Victoria zmarzła wśród tundry.
A oś Adolfa jak Bardia pękła
I został znów bezprizorny.
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A guitar plinked, Germania sighed;
Victoria froze on the tundra!
Adolf ’s axis broke, like Bardia,
And he was left orphaned, homeless again.
poŻeGnanie adolfa Ze ŚwiateM
Sachsenhausen, 1943
Music: Polish folksong (“Nad Ebru falą”)
38
Soviet prisoner-of-war Andrei Sarapkin attended a remarkable recital at Sachsenhausen on May 1, 1944.
He later wrote an account for the Moscow newspaper, Izvestia. It reads, in part:
In those days the whole camp had thrilled to the news of Russia’s defeat of the German Army at
Stalingrad. Aleks performed a group of Polish national songs. Then completely out of the blue, he
sang “Hitler’s Farewell to the World.” The title of the song we learned only later. He performed
loudly, fingers tapping on the wooden beams of the barrack bunks. It was difficult to believe that
at Sachsenhausen, in the Kingdom of the Hitlerite SS, someone could perform such a song. Every
line and couplet could lead to the gallows.... In the terrible conditions of the camp, Aleks’s love of
song and life turned his songs into banners and weapons.
In tribute to the victors at Stalingrad, Kulisiewicz introduced some Russian words into his song text:
prashchay means “farewell” or “goodbye forever”; bezprizorny are abandoned children living in the streets.
With the term “troop-p-ps” purposely represented as a stammer, Kulisiewicz punningly associates the
“noble” German troops (Polish, trupa) with the word for “rear end” (pupa). The Russian city of Samara was
an important industrial and evacuation center during World War II. “Seventh Heaven” alludes to a line in
a sentimental song popular in Nazi Germany. Arbeit und Freude is a twist on the title of the propaganda
periodical Freude und Arbeit (Joy and Work), published in several languages (including Polish) in the
1930s. Bromberg was the German name for the Nazi-occupied Polish city of Bydgoszcz. Bardia was a
Libyan port town, the scene of a decisive British victory over Axis forces in November 1942; the retreat
from North Africa signalled a major reversal for Germany, anticipating its devastating military defeat at
Stalingrad in February 1943.
TANGO TRUPONOSZÓW
CORPSE-CARRIER’S TANGO
Ta psiajucha Germania cholerna
Męczy człeka już czwarty rok.
W krematorium truposzów przypieka;
Tym to ciepło, milutko—bo...
Bo przypieka tam c z ł o w i e k człowieka,
Ni to piekarz, ni rzeźnik to;
Więc do pieca, synalku, nie zwlekaj!
Immer langsam—und sicher—und froh!
Germania, cursed dog from hell,
She’s tortured us four years already.
In the crematorium she roasts corpses,
It’s warm and cozy for them in there.
‘Cause there one HUMAN bakes another,
Neither baker nor butcher is he;
So be off to the oven, my boy!
Ever slow, ever steady, and ever full of joy!
Po szturchańcu pierwszym jest ci lepiej,
W mordę leją, a ty humor masz.
I kopniaczek trzeci się przylepi,
A po czwartym, mokre portki, ach!
Pięciu drani w jedne kopie nery,
I wypluwaj, bracie, zębów sześć!
Siódmy obcas skacze ci po brzuchu!
I dopiero wtedy fajno jest.
After the first poke, you’re feeling better.
They punch you in the mug—
you’re laughing still.
The third kick’s the one that really sticks,
With the fourth you wet your pants!
Five rotten scoundrels kick you in the kidneys,
Brother, now spit out six broken teeth!
A seventh boot-heel jumps on your belly—
Only then do you feel really great!
Kostusia śliczna, joj! okey!
Biedula bez partnera,
A że w oczka wpadłeś jej,
Więc oczkiem cię pożera.
Do Leichenkeller prosisz ją,
Wyciągasz giry wnet,
Niedługo pójdzie z ciebie swąd
Trupim w czułym tête à tête!
Oh lovely Lady Death! Okay!
Poor old thing, she’s all alone!
And since she’s got her eyes on you,
She devours you with those eyes!
Graciously you ask her down to the corpse-cellar,
And in no time you kick the bucket,
Soon, dear fellow, you’ll reek of charred flesh,
In a tender, cadaverous tête-à-tête!
39
Za minutkę, bracie, jesteś w niebie,
Ciepluteńkie pączki frygasz dwa,
Trzech aniołków w pupcie cie poskrobie
I wykrzyknie: “So ein hübscher Arsch!”
Czwarty anioł, toć milunia Ania
Pięć kielichów wlewa w durny pysk.
Z aniołkami lulaj dziesięcioma,
Lulaj w niebie, lulaj... C’est la vie!
40
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Page 40
One minute later, brother, you’re up in heaven,
Two warm doughnuts stuffed in your face,
Three little angels sweetly scrub your bottom,
And cry out in German, “My! What a lovely ass!”
A fourth angel, darling little Ania,
Pours five shots of whisky down her stupid throat,
Lulla, lullaby, with ten sweet angels,
Sleep in heaven, sleep now. C’est la vie!
tanGo truponosZów
Sachsenhausen, 1943
Music: Wiktor Krupiński (“Po kieliszku,” 1932)
Quarantined to his barrack during an outbreak of typhus, Kulisiewicz conceived of the “Corpse-Carrier’s
Tango,” a ghoulish rejoinder to those in his audience who clamored for some “happy music.” The song’s setting is the Sachsenhausen morgue, realm of the Sonderkommandos—prisoners whose “special detail” was to
collect and dispose of the bodies of the camp’s numerous dead. “To fully understand the tragic-parodic nature
of this song,” Kulisiewicz noted, “one must recall the atmosphere of the ‘corpse-cellar’ detail, where the
corpse-carrier, himself often near death, would nap for 10–15 minutes alongside the piles of naked, foulsmelling bodies.”
Kulisiewicz borrowed the melody for his song from “Po kieliszku” (After the First Drink), a prewar hit
popularized by the “Polish Al Jolson,” Tadeusz Faliszewski (1898–1961). By 1940, Faliszewski was himself a
prisoner at Mauthausen-Gusen camp in north-central Austria, where he was often called upon to entertain
inmates with his most popular songs, among them “Po kieliszku.”
Kulisiewicz wrote and illustrated this Czech version
of “Dream about Peace”
(see page 42) on camp
stationery. Presented on
October 28, 1944—but
headed “March 21, 1945!”—
his greeting to his Czech
comrades reads: “I wish
you the best of everything,
dear brothers: 100 kilos of
lard, regards from Šteker,
a smile from Vala, and
most of all peace and
PEACE! Head held high!
Yours, Alex. P.S. As soon
as possible, may you be
welcomed with kisses from
a sweet girl like this!”
Courtesy of Barbara and
Krzysztof Kulisiewicz
41
42
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Page 42
SEN O POKOJU
DREAM ABOUT PEACE
Śniła mi się nasza wioska,
Mazowieckie nasze piaski,
A pod gruszą, śliczna, słodka,
Strojna w swej urody blaski—
Marysieńka moja stała...
I dreamed of our village,
Our Mazovian sands,
And under the pear tree, sweet and pretty,
Bathed in the glow of her luminous beauty,
There, my dear Mary stood.
Śniło mi się groźne, srogie,
Bryzgające pianą w górę,
Nasze cudne polskie morze!
A nad morzem—srebrnopióre
Mewy niosły się jak wiatry...
Śniła mi się nasza chatka.
Nad kądzielą pochylona
Przędła sobie moja matka.
Samiusieńka, opuszczona,
Stara—jak gołąbek biała.
I dreamed of our little farmhouse.
My mother at the spindle,
Bent over, spinning wool.
All alone was she, forsaken,
Old in years, her hair dove-white.
sen o poKoju
Sachsenhausen, 1943
Music: Aleksander Kulisiewicz.
Text: Zdzisław Karr-Jaworski, Aleksander Kulisiewicz
Śniły mi się nasze łąki,
Pola strojne ciężkim kłosem,
Rozśpiewane hen skowronki
Wydzwaniały drżącym głosem
Radość wielką: Pokój światu!...
I dreamed of our meadows,
Fields adorned with heavy heads of wheat.
In the distance, singing larks
Heralded in trembling voices
Great joy: “Peace on earth!”
Śniły mi się Wisły wody,
A w nich rybek pełne krocie,
Nasze pralechickie grody
Ukąpane w słońca złocie—
Niewzruszone i wspaniałe!
I dreamed of the Vistula’s waters,
Abundantly flowing with schools of fish.
Our ancient Slavic stronghold,
Drenched in the sun’s golden rays—
Splendid and unyielding!
Śniła mi się puszcza ciemna,
Mchem jej stopy podścielone—
Puszcza głucha i tajemna.
Wiecznym śniegiem otulone
Śniły mi się moje Tatry.
I dreamed of the dark wilderness,
A carpet of moss beneath her feet—
A wilderness silent, mysterious,
Cloaked in an eternal snow;
I dreamed of my Tatra mountains.
I dreamed of our awesome, relentless,
Wondrous Polish sea,
Spraying foam in the air!
And just above the waters,
Silver-winged gulls were flying like the wind…
In early 1942, Polish prisoners newly arrived at Sachsenhausen told Kulisiewicz about a “gorgeous and unforgettable” song they had heard at Gusen (a subcamp of Mauthausen), “Prisoner’s Dream.” While the poem
itself was memorable, no one could quite recall the original choral arrangement. Kulisiewicz, also struck by
the poem, decided to create his own setting, in the process changing its title and eliminating certain nationalist and religious imagery. Some listeners protested, but Kulisiewicz felt the changes were necessary if (as he
believed) an ecumenical spirit were to prevail among the culturally diverse prison population. “A song that
presented a vision of peace,” he later commented, “had to avoid being provocative.” Yet Kulisiewicz, perhaps
sublimating a patriotic impulse of his own, set the poem as a mazurka, the musical genre that since Chopin’s
day had come to symbolize the Polish nation.
The poem “Prisoner’s Dream” by Zdzisław Karr-Jaworski (1909–1941) dates from before the war. It was
set to music by Lubomir Szopiński (1913–1961) when both men were imprisoned at the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, Poland. Szopiński brought the song with him when he was transferred to Gusen
in 1941. Geographical references in the poem include: Mazovia, a central Polish region that includes the
capital, Warsaw; Vistula, river running through Warsaw and Krakow; and the Tatras, mountain range on
Poland’s southern border.
43
The brickworks near the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp where many
inmates perished from the
exertions of grueling labor.
At least 1,000 homosexual
men are known to have been
held at Sachsenhausen.
USHMM, courtesy
of Gedenkstätte und
Museum Sachsenhausen,
Oranienburg
44
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Page 44
DICKE LUFT!
THICK AIR!
Miał, miał Ober-hau-hau
Wybite zęby dwa;
Wył, wył-ł, obżarty był,
Z pyska mu ślina szła...
I był sobie Kiciu mały,
Taki mały, mały Kić....
Spał, spał, robił “miau-miau!”—
I nie chciał wcale wyć.
I nie chciał wcale wyć.
Commandant Woof-Woof
With two teeth knocked-out,
Howled, howled, stuffed like a pig—
Saliva dribbled from his mug.
And then there was Little Kitty,
Such a bitty, Little Kitty,
He napped, napped and yapped “meow-meow”—
He didn’t want to howl at all.
He didn’t want to howl at all.
Dididi didi didi,
Dididi... di-cke Luft!
Dididi didi didi,
Dididi dicke Lu-uft!...
Di-didi didi didi,
Di-didi di-cke Luft!
Di-didi didi didi,
Di-didi dicke Lu-uft!
Uwaga! Achzehn! Attention!
Wniemanje! Pozor! Pst!
Verboten ist zu schieben,
Verboten “miau-miau” wird!
Caution! Achtung! Attention!
Vnimanie! Pozor! Psst!
Funny business not allowed!
No “meow-meowing” either!
Dididi didi didi,
Dididi dicke Luft,
Dididi didi didi,
Dididi dicke Lu-uft!
Di-didi didi didi,
Di-didi dicke Luft!
Di-didi didi didi,
Di-didi dicke Lu-uft!
45
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Page 46
diCKe luft!
Sachsenhausen, 1943
Lyrics and music: Aleksander Kulisiewicz
46
Es gibt dicke Luft! (“thick air coming!”) was the byword at Sachenshausen when authorities threatened to
break up a liaison between homosexual inmates. The persecution of gay prisoners peaked in the summer of
1942 when the Gestapo systematically delivered “registered homosexuals”—those marked by a pink triangle—to the Strafkompanie (punishment unit), an often fatal assignment. Homosexual activity nevertheless
remained a fixture of life, notably among the so-called “asocial” (black triangle) and “criminal” (green triangle) prisoners. Of these, certain Prominents—privileged and protected inmates—managed to organize occasional get-togethers at their cell-blocks, complete with music and dancing. Kulisiewicz reports that in early
November 1943, he was approached by a “green badge” prisoner who was also a camp Prominent:
He ordered me to write some sort of “real” camp foxtrot, rousing and full of energy. He even proposed
the title, “Dicke Luft.” My honorarium: one-and-a-half portions of bread. I came up with a melody
overnight—a friend transcribed it into notation the next day to give me the polish of a real composer—and the following evening I presented myself to my employer. [...] He requested only that I
introduce short pauses to the rhythm to give the tune some “bounce.” I wasn’t quite sure what he
wanted, so he corrected it himself.
Kulisiewicz later learned that his dance tune had been featured at a secret social gathering of gay Prominents.
For his own first performance, on New Year’s Eve 1943, he added words to the melody, transforming “Dicke
Luft” into a cartoonish vignette about two dubious characters: rabid, gluttonous “Kommandant Woof-Woof ”
and insolent “Little Kitty.”
Achtung, Attention, Vnimanie, Pozor mean “Attention” in German, French, Russian, and Czech. Rather than
“achtung,” however, Kulisiewicz sings the sound-alike “achtzehn” (eighteen), prisoners’ code for “achtung.”
Note: This home recording of “Dicke Luft” is badly distorted in places. Despite its deficiencies, the producers believe its unique historical significance merited inclusion within this CD.
ZIMNO, PANIE!
IT’S COLD, SIR!
Był sobie prominencik
na dziadowskim bloku,
A zwał się Lulusiński—
lokaj bez uroku,
A przy nim pan
wiadomy hrabia
Obrabiał otoczenie swe.
Heißgeliebter Graf...
Once there was a Prominent
in the Beggar’s Block,
His name, Lulusiński—
a lackey lacking charm.
He served as valet
to a well-known Count
Who well knew how
to cultivate his surroundings.
“Most Beloved Count...”
Zi-zi-zi-zi-zimno, panie,
Zi-mno!...zi-mno!
Nie-nie-nie-nie-nie ma chleba,
Głod-no!...głod-no!
“It’s co-co-co-co-cold, sir!
F-freezing! Freezing!
No-no-no-no-no bread, sir!
Hunger! Hunger!”
Bitte um bischen Zigarette,
Bitte, ach, bitte, bitte, bi…
Bitte o ciepłą mą kobite,
Bitte—wybite oczko lśni.
“Please, just a puff of cigarette?
Please, oh, please, please, please…
Please, then, how ‘bout a nice, warm dame?
Please!”—his oozing eye would plead.
Zi-zi-zi-zi-zimno, panie,
Zimno!...zi-mno!
Zi-zi-zi-zi...zi...zi...zi-mno!
Zi-mno...
“It’s co-co-co-co-cold, sir!
F-freezing! Freezing!
It’s co-co-co-co-co-co-cold!
F-freezing....”
47
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Page 48
ZiMno, panie!
Sachsenhausen, 1944
Music: unidentified
At Sachsenhausen, certain members of the Polish gentry sought to preserve their high-caste status by cooperating with the camp command. “It’s Cold, Sir!” challenges this “turncoat” behavior by ridiculing two upperclass Prominents, pseudonymously called Lulusiński and The Count. Both were informers, responsible for
denouncing numerous underground activists to the Reich Criminal Police. Kulisiewicz’s impudent gesture
itself eventually met with reprisal. In the middle of the night, in February 1945, he was pulled from his barrack
and interrogated by officers of the SS. The police, not surprisingly, had been acting on a “tip” provided by
collaborationist friends of Lulusiński and The Count.
“Nice, warm dame” is a sly reference to the Puff (brothel) Kulisiewicz attests had begun operating in
Sachsenhausen in 1944.
48
Untitled, by Wiktor
Simiński, postwar.
Prisoner: It’s cold, Sir.
I have no bread.
Signs on barracks:
There is but one way
to freedom. USHMM,
49
Kozioł ! (Scapegoat!), detail,
by Wiktor Simiński, postwar.
An SS officer supervises
punishment of prisoners
in front of a camp gate,
Sachsenhausen. USHMM,
50
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Page 50
MOJA BRAMA
MY GATE
Moja, moja, moja brama—
Zamykana, zamykana haargenau;
Moja, moja, moja brama—
Zakichana, zakichana, alte Sau!
My, oh, my, my gate—
Locked, locked, tightly and precisely locked!
My, oh, my, my gate—
Rotten, rotten, old and filthy, lousy pig!
Moja, moja śliczna moja bramusia,
Wszystkich połknie i nikogo
nie puszcza!
Moja, moja, drania-brama...
Będziesz, łajzo, wyłamana—
na sto dwa!
My, oh, my pretty little gate,
You swallow everyone up,
you don’t let anyone out!
My, oh, my nasty gate…
You’ll be busted to pieces,
I guarantee it, filthy scum!
Moja BraMa
Sachsenhausen, 1944
Music: Zsigmond Lajos Kertész (“Szép a rózsám,” 1933)
One form of torture routinely meted out at Sachsenhausen went under the innocent name of “Sport.” “My
Gate” recalls a typically malicious competition devised by the SS, the “Indian Dance.” As guards barked out the
moves, prisoners were forced rapidly to raise their arms, look to the sky, whirl around, drop to the ground, and
stand again. This sequence would be repeated over and over. Kulisiewicz reports that inmates “vomited after
such ‘dancing,’ that the entire Apellplatz [assembly area] swayed before one’s eyes, and with it the damned gate
of the SS command.”
Kulisiewicz first heard this popular central European tune sung to the Serbo-Croatian lyric, “Moja mala
nema mane.”
51
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PIESíNíO WANDZIE Z
RAVENSBRÜCKU
SONG ABOUT WANDA FROM
RAVENSBRÜCK
Była bajka o złym wilku,
Była bajka o złym smoku,
Był Rydygier, była Wanda,
Był królewski Krak....
There once was a tale of a wicked wolf,
There once was a tale of a wicked dragon,
There was Knight Rüdiger, Queen Wanda,
And Krak, the King.
Wanda miała płowe włosy,
Wanda miała modre oczy—
I przeklęła Wanda Niemca,
Przeklął Niemca świat!
Wanda with her flaxen hair,
Wanda with her deep-blue eyes—
One day Wanda cursed a German,
The whole world cursed the Germans!
Szumi wam Wisła,
Szumi do snu
Piosenkę starą
Od wieków stu...
Ach, od wieków stu!
Takie same płowe włosy,
Takie same modre oczy,
Takie same młode usta—
Co by chciały żyć.
Same flaxen hair,
Same deep-blue eyes,
Same girlish lips—
Yearning still to live.
Szumi wam Wisła,
Szumi do snu
Piosenkę starą
Od wieków stu...
Ach, od wieków stu!
The Vistula hums softly for you,
Lulls you to sleep
With an ancient tune
From long ago…
Oh, so long ago!
The Vistula hums softly for you,
Lulls you to sleep,
With an ancient tune
From long ago…
Oh, so long ago!
Wiecznie będzie baśń o wilku,
Wiecznie chytre paszcze smoka!
Wanda p r z e t r w a w Ravensbrücku—
Kraków wiecznie nasz!
Ever the fable of the wolf,
Ever greedy the dragon’s jowls!
But Wanda WILL OUTLAST Ravensbrück—
Krakow—ever ours!
Znowu będzie wilk i krzywda,
Znowu będzie rzeź okrutna,
Wtargnie Niemiec, porwie Wandę!
Kraków będzie i c h .
Once again a wolf and suffering,
Once again a savage slaughter,
A German invades, steals Wanda away!
Krakow will be THEIRS.
pieŚŃ o wandZie Z ravensBrüCKu
Sachsenhausen, 1944
Music and words by Aleksander Kulisiewicz.
Hm hm hm hm, hm hm hm hm...
Hm hm hm...hm hm hm hm...
Hm hm hm hm, hm hm hm hm...
Hm hm hm...hm hm hm hm...
Za górami, za lasami,
Pod Berlinem—za drutami,
Pod Berlinem, w Ravensbrücku
Czeka Wanda ma.
Beyond the mountains, beyond the forests,
Near Berlin, behind barbed-wire,
Near Berlin, in Ravensbrück
There my Wanda waits.
For conspiring to kill a Nazi official, the Germans sent Kulisiewicz’s teenage half-sister Łucja to the
Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944. On learning of her imprisonment, Kulisiewicz wrote this ballad,
a fantasy-compilation of childhood legends and folktales whose villains, heroes, and strange, twisting plots
brought to mind aspects of his own experience of life in a concentration camp.
In the song, the wolf is based on the title character of a favorite childhood tale of Kulisiewicz, Bajka o
żelaznym wilku (Story of the Steel Wolf; 1911) by Wacław Sieroszewski. The dragon was a legendary nemesis of early Polish settlers. Krak was a mythical dragon-slayer and founder of Krakow. Queen Wanda succeeded
to the throne upon the death of her father, Krak, but drowned herself in the Vistula River rather than marry
a German suitor, Knight Rüdiger.
53
Aleksander Kulisiewicz
with his half-sister Łucja,
Krakow, ca. 1950.
Photo courtesy of
Barbara Kulisiewicz
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CZTERDZIESTU CZTERECH
FORTY-FOUR
Czterdziestu czterech będzie wisieć dzisiaj tu!
Czterdziestu czterech nie doczeka dzisiaj snu.
Czterdzieści cztery serca jeszcze drżą.
Słyszycie wyrok? Oto wyrok on:
Jawohl! Vier und vierzig!
Cha, cha, cha, cha!
Forty-four will hang here today!
Forty-four won’t see the end of this day.
Forty-four hearts still tremble with fear.
Do you hear the verdict? The verdict is here:
Jawohl! Forty-four!
Ha, ha, ha, ha!
Straszny ich strój, straszny strój
I wisielcze powrozy na karku!
Ach, Boże mój! Boże mój,
Niby jesteś—a milczysz w letargu!
Patrz—mamo, patrz! Mamo, patrz:
Synek z góry ze sznura spoziera.
Chichocze wiatr!
A w całym świecie—niedziela.
Frightful their garb, frightful indeed—
A hangman’s rope adorns their throats!
Oh, My Lord! My Lord!
You’re supposedly here—yet silent, inactive!
Look—mother, look! Mother, look!
Your son staring down from the scaffold...
—Snickering breeze!—
Just another Sunday all over the world.
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CZterdZiestu CZtereCh
Sachsenhausen, 1944
Music: Anonymous (“Wizja szyldwacha,” 19th-century soldiers’ song)
56
Sachsenhausen provided a steady supply of slave labor to the German war industry. Among the enterprises
taking advantage of this workforce was Heinkel Aircraft, manufacturer of state-of-the-art combat and reconnaissance planes in nearby Oranienburg. With prisoner sabotage a constant threat, personnel were tightly
supervised at the Heinkel plant. Yet at least one attempt to cripple production proved successful, and word
of it soon reached Kulisiewicz in Sachsenhausen:
A group of saboteurs, communist prisoners from Sachsenhausen (Russians, Germans, Poles), carried out
an act of sabotage at Heinkel Aircraft toward the end of 1943. More than 120 newly assembled bombers
never made it off the ground. Several prisoners were immediately shot. On December 31, 1943, the
Heinkel Commandant proclaimed: “If, in 1944, sabotage is found to be behind this, I will hang forty-four
of you riff-raff, eleven for each of the four corners of the world!”
Kulisiewicz wrote “Forty-four” under the influence of this strange and arbitrary threat. He performed it
unaccompanied in a half-sung, half-spoken style, embellishing the word wiatr (breeze) with a fearsome
imitation of the wailing wind.
WIELKA WYGRANA!
BIG WIN!
Proszę państwa,
już niedługo z wojną miłą,
Już ta bujda się sprzykrzyła;
Proszę państwa,
już niedługo—a już pięknie
Wszystko pięknie, hej!
Nie pomoże Goebbels z piórkiem,
Łzy polecą wszystkim ciurkiem.
A “rebiata” wnet
zanucą,
Zanucą, o jej!
Ladies and gents,
we’ve not long to go with this nice little war,
This tall tale’s grown stale already.
Ladies and gents, we’ve not long to go until
everything’s lovely again,
Everything’s lovely—Ha!
Goebbels with his quill won’t be able to help,
Tears will trickle down everyone’s cheeks,
And the good ol’ Russian boys
will soon start singing,
Singing—oh boy!
Dziś wasza wielka jest wygrana,
A więc tańczcie na k o l a n a c h !
Dziś wasze wielkie scheiss-zwycięstwo,
Dziś w Berlinie jubel-bal!
I przyszedł Adolf—pokorny, drżący:
“Do góry rączki! Do góry rączki!”
Nie znamy słowa “kapitulacja,”
Defaszyzacja, bracie, jest!
Today’s the day of your Big Win!
So start dancing—on your KNEES!
Today’s the day of your big-shit victory,
Today in Berlin, a big jubilee!
And Adolf came—humbled, trembling:
“Hands up! Put your little hands up!”
We don’t know the meaning of “capitulation”—
Defascistization, brother, is what it is!
Był pan Duce, był pan Tiso,
był pan Hacha,
Z Manulescu mamy stracha.
Był pan Filoff, był pan Tenno, pan Pavelitsch
I Volksdeutsche dobrze mieli.
Było tyle, tyle chleba—
Renegatom czas do nieba!
Misters Duce, Tiso, Hácha—
they were all there,
And Manulescu gave a big scare.
Misters Filov, Tenno, Pavelić were there too,
And the Volksdeutsche had it good.
There were gobs and gobs of bread—
“Now off to heaven, renegades!”
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I będziecie nam dyndali,
Anieli—oj, wnet!
You’ll be dangling from the rafters,
Angels—and soon!
Dziś wasza wielka jest wygrana!
Dziś za późno na kolana!
Stugębna zdycha
“Übermenschheit”
I szlag trafił “Sieg und heil!”
Today’s the day of your Big Win!
Today’s too late to get on your knees!
The hundred-mawed “Über-humanity”
is biting the dust,
And “Sieg und heil” has gone to hell!
wielKa wyGrana!
Sachsenhausen, 1945
Music: Bolesław Mucman (“Panna Andzia ma wychodne,” 1936)
Kulisiewicz noted:
This was the last song from Sachsenhausen. Overwhelming joy filled every heart. The text was thrown
together, slapdash fashion, in response to military gunfire approaching from all around. We prisoners
could not have sensed that in a few days—April 20—we would begin a macabre death march from
Sachsenhausen to Wittstock-Schwerin.
Written during the war’s chaotic final days, “Big Win!” was Kulisiewicz’s entry in an “international music
revue” staged by French, German, Czech and Polish inmates. To this cosmopolitan affair, Kulisiewicz invited
an Italian prisoner, Guilio Amadeo Bellugi, to accompany his singing on the accordion. The aptly named “Big
Win!” also known as “Victoria,” took the prize for the gathering’s best song, and earned Kulisiewicz an elaborately carved cigarette box that he kept with him until the end of his life.
The term Duce (“leader” in Italian) was the title of the Fascist dictator Mussolini. Tiso, Hácha, Filov, and
Pavelić were respectively the leaders of Nazi puppet regimes in Slovakia, the Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia, Bulgaria, and Croatia. Manulescu was the Romanian foreign minister during World War II, and
Tenno means “emperor” in Japanese.
Cigarette box detail, (photograph)
by Wiktor Simiński, 1944. Handcarved box, awarded to Kulisiewicz
for his song “Big Win!” features
the Polish White Eagle and flags
of the Allied Nations as well as
Simiński’s monogram, prisoner
number, and dates of incarceration.
The figures below represent a
liberated prisoner (left) and a
falling, skeletal SS-man (right).
USHMM, Kulisiewicz Collection
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Page 60
aleksander Kulisiewicz, voice and guitar
unknown performer or performers, accordion (tracks 5, 7, 9, 20)
recording engineer, editor, digital transfer technician, tone master: Victor Fonarov
translations: Barbara Milewski
research and annotations: Barbara Milewski and Bret Werb
research assistance: April Shaw and Pampa Rotolo
director of publishing: Lea Caruso
art director: Amy Donovan
editor: Bruce Tapper
production Manager: Dwight Bennett
designer: Lise Jacobsen
Coproducer: Barbara Milewski
producer: Bret Werb
60
Thanks to Leon Tadeusz Błaszczyk, Professor Emeritus, University of Warsaw, for sharing his deep knowlege
of Polish music, language, and culture; to Barbara Kulisiewicz, Krzysztof Kulisiewicz, Tomasz Lerski, and Maja
Trochimczyk for sharing resources and expertise; to Lawrence Swiader, Jacek Nowakowski, Michlean Amir, and
Bruce Falk, all of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for institutional and archival guidance. The
producers also wish to thank the Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for its generous support of
this project.
“U našich kasáren” by Karel Vacek © Harry Fox Agency; used with permission. “Jest Jedna Jedyna” and “Czarny
Jim” by Henryk Wars © Elizabeth Vars and Robert Vars; used with permission. “Szép a rózsám” by Zsigmond Lajos
Kertész © BMG Songs; used with permission. The essay, “Orpheus Raising Hell: Impressions of the Late Aleksander
Kulisiewicz,” © 2007 by Peter Wortsman.
archival monophonic recordings from the united states holocaust Memorial Museum aleksander
Kulisiewicz Collection: Tracks 1, 13, 17: RG-55.001.06*0002 (performance, Bologna, Italy, 1965); track 2:
RG-55.001.09*0002 (Polish Television, Katowice, 1966); track 3: RG-55.001.04*0006 (Polish Radio, Warsaw, 1965);
tracks 4, 6, 11, 12, 16: RG-55.001.04*0005 (Polish Radio, Warsaw, 1964); track 5: RG-55.001.04*0014 (Polish Radio,
Kraków, 1978); tracks 7 and 8: RG-55.001.04*0012 (Polish Radio, Warsaw, 1964); track 9: RG-55.001.04*0012
(Polish Television, Kraków, 1969); tracks 10 and 20: RG-55.001.02*0005 (Polish Radio [Warsaw] 1964); tracks 18
and 19: RG-55.001.04*0010 (Polish Radio, Warsaw, 1969); track 14: RG-55.001.04*0002 (Polish Radio, Warsaw,
1964); track 15: RG-55.001.02*0007 (home recording, Kraków, 1969).
a production of the united states holocaust Memorial Museum, 2008
Book: ISBN 978-0-89604-713-6; Cd: ISBN 978-0-89604-605-4
COL.016A.MSC
cover_resized2:Layout 1
3/17/08
5:44 PM
Page 1
4:13
(Second Helping!) 1:14
2:49
TOTAL TIME
54:19
UNITED STATE S HOL OCAUST ME MORIAL MUSE UM
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW, Washington, DC 20024-2126 | ushmm.org
9 780896 047136
UNITED STATES
HOLOCAUST
MEMORIAL MUSEUM
(Unforgettable Song) 2:30
6. ERIKA 2:14
7. GERMANIA! 3:07
8. OLZA 4:24
9. CZARNY BÖHM
(Black Böhm) 2:00
(Mama’s Boy in a Concentration Camp)
11. HEIL,
. SACHSENHAUSEN! 2:29
12. POZEGNANIE ADOLFA ZE ŚWIATEM
(Adolf ’s Farewell to the World) 5:04
(Corpse-Carrier’s Tango) 3:28
14. SEN O POKOJU
(Dream about Peace) 3:25
15. DICKE LUFT!
(Thick Air!) 1:39
16. ZIMNO, PANIE!
(It’s Cold, Sir!) 1:20
17. MOJA BRAMA
(My Gate) 1:28
18. PIESíNí O WANDZIE Z RAVENSBRÜCKU
(Song about Wanda
USHMM 0004
ISBN 978-0-89604-713-6
(Forty-four) 1:41
20. WIELKA WYGRANA!
(Big Win!) 2:09
ALEKSANDER KULISIEWICZ BALLADS AND BROADSIDES
2. MISTER C 1:48
3. KRAKOWIACZEK 1940 3:18
4. REPETA!
SONGS FROM SACHSENHAUSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP, 1940–1945
ALEKSANDER KULISIEWICZ (1918–1982) was a student in German-occupied Poland in October 1939 when the
Gestapo arrested him for antifascist writings and sent him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.
A talented singer and songwriter, Kulisiewicz composed 54 songs during five years of imprisonment. As a “camp
troubadour,” Kulisiewicz favored broadsides—songs of attack whose aggressive language and macabre imagery
mirrored his grotesque circumstances. But his repertoire also included ballads that often evoked his native Poland
with nostalgia and patriotic zeal. His songs, performed at secret gatherings, helped inmates cope with their hunger
and despair, raised morale, and sustained hope of survival. The selections presented here provide a representative
sample of Kulisiewicz’s extraordinary artistic output and a sense of his personal reactions to the realities of life in
a Nazi concentration camp. Notes include Polish texts with English translations and annotation.

united states holocaust memorial museum

Transcription

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