Conference Agenda

Singing played a central role in the earliest Holocaust survivor testimonies. As Allied war correspondents recorded what they saw in former sites of mass death and suffering, a select few were able to broadcast the voices of witnesses over the radio. At the newly-liberated Bergen Belsen, BBC journalists recalled that despite “a tremendous effort that quite exhausted them,” survivor singers performing “wanted the world to hear their voice.”

What does the act of singing do for a survivor in relation to testimony? A singing voice (rather than a spoken one) can surmount language barriers through melodic or harmonic elements which perform critical affective labor. Saul Friedländer writes that maintaining a “sense of disbelief” is critical to our understanding of the Holocaust, where historical knowledge cannot rationalize away the event’s complexities and contradictions. The symbol of the singing survivor has emerged again and again in relation to music and the Holocaust, as song lyrics can allow us to apply a testimonial framework more readily than instrumental music. As a sonic element whose timbral, tone, and vibrational qualities reveal something about trauma that a written account cannot, the voice is, in the words of Nina Sun Eidsheim, “an object of knowledge,” no longer heard as merely a disembodied entity, but as a world unto itself. Survivor singers, their voices worn by physical hardship, knew this; “the song was the only truth,” Łódź ghetto survivor Miriam Harel recalled in her postwar reminiscing.

This paper traces how female survivor singers used their own bodies as instruments to sound out personal and collective trauma in the immediate postwar period. Often their repertoire concerned familial relationships, friendships, and sexual violence which defied redemptive frameworks to express what historian Zoë Waxman has called “unheard testimony.” By listening to the recordings of Henny Durmashkin, a Vilna-born soprano who appeared with the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra; Lin Jaldati, an Auschwitz survivor later known as the Yiddish diva of East Berlin; and Fasia Jansen, an Afro-German survivor of a Neuengamme soup kitchen, this contribution explores how sung testimonies are a uniquely aesthetic, affective expression of trauma.

After the Holocaust, thousands of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) attempted to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine. From 1946 to 1948, the British government diverted many of them to the Cyprus detention camps. Though Jewish immigration to Palestine would subsequently displace Palestinian-Arabs, these DPs had few other options. This study is an exploration of musical performances in the Cyprus detention camps, which give us insight into this dilemma. Yemenite-Jewish singer Shoshana Damari and Polish-Jewish composer and pianist Moshe Wilensky, both of whom were already members of the Yishuv (Jewish communities in Mandatory Palestine), were sent to the camps to perform as part of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC)’s aid efforts. My methodology draws from archival research on the JDC and engages with my family history of internment in Cyprus.

The songs that Damari and Wilensky performed in Cyprus were mostly Zionist-coded Shirei Eretz Yisrael (Songs of the Land of Israel). These songs had no unified message, but rather spoke to different aspects of immigration and violence in relation to multiple conflict zones. Wilensky composed “Miriam Bat Nissim,” for instance, specifically for Damari, herself a Jewish immigrant from Yemen, like “Miriam” in the song. The song’s text and Arab vocal techniques emphasized Damari’s ethnic difference, signalling to European DPs the diverse population of Jews they would encounter in Mandatory Palestine. “Miriam Bat Nissim” suggests Jewish-Arab coexistence, but, in contrast, they also performed “Shir Ha Chavlanim,” which disturbingly posited attacks on Arab villages as necessary for creating a Jewish homeland, implicitly asking DPs to be ready to fight once more.

Music in European DP Camps has been extensively researched (Gilbert 2010; Anderton 2015). However, little work focuses on the distinct context of the Cyprus detention camps of the same period. Damari and Wilensky’s performance speaks to two tragedies: the Holocaust that occurred, and the Nakba to come. While the performances are ostensibly a site of Zionist community building, they simultaneously force us to grapple with the boundary between being victims and being perpetrators. In acknowledging this moral complexity, this study contributes to conversations that critically connect the Holocaust and the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The distinguished composer Ursula Mamlok (1923-2016) was one of many young Jewish musicians who fled from Nazi Germany to the United States during the late 1930s: a group that included Lukas Foss, Andre Previn, Ruth Schonthal, and Claude Frank, to name a few. In 1937, the budding 14-year-old composer began to keep a diary about her musical life in Nazi Berlin. She continued to add to the diary until 1944. During those seven years, Mamlok fled from Germany to Ecuador before making her way to New York, where she continued her musical studies at the Mannes School of Music, a haven for refugee musicians.

In the first half of the diary, Mamlok documents her musical activities in Berlin. She frequently attended concerts and opera while engaging in intensive studies of piano, composition, and music theory. Despite her seeming preoccupation with her artistic development, Mamlok repeatedly expresses concerns about the looming threat to Jewish survival. On Kristallnacht, the 15-year-old Mamlok was prematurely forced to confront her own mortality.

Mamlok made unsuccessful attempts to leave for Palestine and The Netherlands before fleeing with her parents in February 1939 to Guayaquil, Ecuador, where she studied for a year at the local conservatory. In 1940, she sailed alone to New York, where she studied composition with the composer-conductor George Szell. The diary concludes with Mamlok's notes on the opening week of the 1944 Black Mountain College summer music festival, honoring the seventieth birthday of Arnold Schoenberg.

Mamlok's diary is a unique document describing the life of a young Jewish woman musician, first in Nazi Germany, and later as a refugee in South and North America. She perceives people and events from a specifically female point of view, creating sharp verbal portraits of her family, friends, acquaintances, and teachers, along with descriptions of her musical experiences. The diary reflects Mamlok's ambition and her fierce determination to master the craft of composition, even in the face of catastrophe. At the same time, it serves as a self-conscious chronicle of her transition from adolescence to adulthood.