Tango of Death: The Creation of a Holocaust Legend (Jews, Judaism, and the Arts, 3) 9004525068, 9789004525061

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
1 Memory and Myth
1 Serendipity
2 Legend and Myth
3 Holocaust Legends
4 Methodology
5 Ethics
2 Music in the Camps
1 Nazi Concentration Camps
2 Music in the Camps
3 Singing
4 Camp Orchestras
5 Purpose of Camp Music
6 Repertoire
7 Memories of Wagner
8 Wagner Myths
3 The Tango of Death
1 Singing Tangos
2 Three Versions
3 Which One Is It?
4 The Orchestra of Death
1 Nuremberg
2 Provenance
3 The Photographer
4 The Photograph
5 Location
6 The Court
7 Returning to the Iconic Image
5 The Death of the Orchestra
1 Reasons for Doubt
2 Fictionalizing Testimony
6 The Fugue of Death
1 The Poet
2 The Poem
3 The Title
4 Inspiration
5 The Legend
7 Preserving History
1 Imagining Horror
2 Capturing the Imagination
3 Memorializing and Obfuscating
4 Visualizing the Tango of Death
5 Preserving History
Literature
Subject Index
Name Index

Citation preview

Tango of Death

Jews, Judaism, and the Arts Series Editors Nathan Abrams Steven Fine Diana Matut Edna Nahshon Ilia Rodov

volume 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/jja

Tango of Death The Creation of a Holocaust Legend By

Willem de Haan

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Zeev Porath, “Review with orchestra”– a testimony drawing from the Janowska camp. Collection of Zeev Porath: drawings, sketches, and memoirs from the Janowska camp. Ghetto Fighters House Archives. Art Collection. Catalogue, No. 4251. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Haan, Willem de, author. Title: Tango of death : the creation of a Holocaust legend / by Willem de Haan. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2023. | Series: Jews, Judaism, and the arts, 2589-5494 ; volume 3 | Summary: “A legend that captures the imagination of audiences and shapes representations of the Holocaust is that in Nazi concentration camps Jewish musicians were forced to play a Tango of Death as men, women and children made their way to the gas chambers. This book traces the origins of this legend to a little known concentration camp in Ukraine where musicians were forced to perform a Jewish tango before they were murdered themselves. By reconstructing the creation of this legend, the book shows how the actual history is hidden, distorted, or even lost altogether”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022037532 (print) | LCCN 2022037533 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004525061 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004525078 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Janowska (Concentration camp) | Jews--Persecutions--Ukraine--Lʹviv. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Ukraine--Lʹviv. Classification: LCC D805.5.J36 H33 2022 (print) | LCC D805.5.J36 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/18094779--dc23/eng/20220815 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037532 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037533

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2589-5494 isbn 978-90-04-52506-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-52507-8 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Willem de Haan. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Illustrations viii 1

Memory and Myth 1 1 Serendipity 3 2 Legend and Myth 7 3 Holocaust Legends 8 4 Methodology 13 5 Ethics 15

2

Music in the Camps 18 1 Nazi Concentration Camps 20 2 Music in the Camps 22 3 Singing 22 4 Camp Orchestras 24 5 Purpose of Camp Music 26 6 Repertoire 28 7 Memories of Wagner 29 8 Wagner Myths 31

3

The Tango of Death 34 1 Singing Tangos 34 2 Three Versions 39 3 Which One Is It? 47

4

The Orchestra of Death 51 1 Nuremberg 52 2 Provenance 57 3 The Photographer 59 4 The Photograph 61 5 Location 63 6 The Court 65 7 Returning to the Iconic Image 67

5

The Death of the Orchestra 69 1 Reasons for Doubt 75 2 Fictionalizing Testimony 77

6

The Fugue of Death 81 1 The Poet 82 2 The Poem 84 3 The Title 87 4 Inspiration 89 5 The Legend 91

7

Preserving History 96 1 Imagining Horror 97 2 Capturing the Imagination 99 3 Memorializing and Obfuscating 102 4 Visualizing the Tango of Death 105 5 Preserving History 110

Literature 117 Subject Index 132 Name Index 135

Acknowledgements A study like this involves the painstaking collection of a wide variety of historical source materials: proceedings of trials against perpetrators and collaborators of war crimes, eyewitness testimonies, oral history interviews with survivors, memoirs, documents, drawings and photographs. Since large parts of this book were written during the pandemic at a time that most libraries were closed, I was largely dependent on the internet. Fortunately, most of the materials were available online, but in some cases I had to rely on colleagues who were generous enough to share documents from files that were not accessible. I also received help when documents were in Polish, Russian or Ukrainian. For their generous support I wish to thank my colleagues Bret Werb, Staff musicologist at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC; Joseph Toltz, Research Fellow at the Conservatorium of Music and the University of Sydney; David Alan Rich, Visiting Research Associate of the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna; Dieter Pohl, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Klagenfurt; and Sergey Vasiliev, Associate professor of international criminal law at the University of Amsterdam. I also wish to thank Ton Robben, Frank Bovenkerk and Dina Siegel, emeritus Professors and Professor of criminology at the University of Utrecht, Sarah Clovis Bishop, Professor of Russian at Willamette University; Roswitha Breckner, Associate Professor of visual studies at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Vienna; Klaas Rozemond, Associate Professor of criminal law at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, David Barnouw, former spokesperson and Madelon de Keizer, former Senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Leo Cornelissen, President of the Dutch Wagner Society, Karel Kraaijenhof, Musician and composer; and Hans Aarsman, Photographer and publicist. I also wish to thank my friends Henk van Alst, Piers Beirne, Colin Brace, Günther Robert, Peter Sluiter, Marcel Toth, Jaco Vos, and Gabryela Wasowicz. I would never have been able to write this book without the great generosity and continued support of my love and life companion, Kathy Davis. Hazel Johnstone did the copy-editing. Quotations are from the original text or translation. In the case that no English translation was available, I translated the quotation myself. I wish to acknowledge the permission to republish parts of my chapter ‘Todestango: Music in Nazi Death Camps.’ In: Dina Siegel and Frank Bovenkerk (eds.) Crime and Music. Springer 2020, 171–204.

Illustrations 1 Concentration and Extermination camps in Nazi-Germany. Courtesy of Henk van Alst 2 2 Eduardo Bianco. Courtesy of Todo Tango 42 3 Jerzy Petersburski, 1926. Courtesy of the Polish National Archive 46 4 Janowska camp orchestra. Courtesy of the International Court of Justice 52 5 S S officers Warzok and Willhaus leaving a barracks. Courtesy of the International Court of Justice 56 6 Janowska camp orchestra in front of a barracks. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Courtesy of Herman Lewinter 58 7 Janowska camp offices. Archive Soviet Extraordinary State Commission. State Archive of the Russian Federation 62 8 “Review with orchestra” by Zeev Porath. Courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum 64 9 Mass graves at Janowska camp, 1944. Archive of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission. State Archive of the Russian Federation 71 10 Paul Celan, Paris. Photo: Gisèle Freund. Credit: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP 83 11 Janowska memorial stone. Courtesy of Professor Harold Marcuse, University of California, Santa Barbara 107

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Memory and Myth Among all the associations the word ‘tango’ could evoke, the execution of Jews in Nazi death camps1 is probably the most unlikely. Yet this book tells the compelling story of how an orchestra of Jewish prisoners was forced to play a Tango of Death during executions in a concentration camp in Ukraine. The camp is known in Russian as Янов (Yanov) or Яновский (Yanovsky) and in Ukrainian as Янівський (Yanivsky) or Янівськa (Janowska) for its location on Janowska Street in the Ukrainian city of Львів (Lviv). It is located on the right-hand side of the following map (Figure 1). Historically, the city was Polish, called Lwów (pronunciation – Lvoev), and located in the center of Europe: “at the midpoint of imaginary lines connecting Riga to Athens, Prague to Kiev, Moscow to Venice.” (Sands 2016, XXV) On ­September 17, 1939 the Soviet Red Army occupied Lwów and called the city Львов (pronunciation – Lvov). When the Nazis occupied the city from June 22, 1941 until July 1, 1941 it was called Lemberg. On July 25, 1944 the Soviet Red Army recaptured the city and called it again Львов (pronunciation – Lvov). After the Ukrainian declaration of independence on August 24, 1991 the city regained its historic name of Львів (Lviv) and also in part its reputation as “a city of mythologies, a place of deep intellectual traditions” (Sands 2016, XXV). The story of what happened in the Janowska camp has been passed on by word of mouth, retold in survivors’ testimonies and memoirs,2 newspaper articles and postings on the internet.3 In this way, the story became a legend over time. The legend of the Tango of Death was created by conflating two main narratives: one about how a camp orchestra performed this tango as men, women and children made their way to the gas chambers and another about how the members of the orchestra during their last performance of this tango were shot one by one. According to one version of this story, the musicians were executed

1 A death camp is a concentration or extermination camp in which large numbers of prisoners are systematically killed. 2 Survivors of the Janowska camp such as Leon Weliczer Wells (1963) and Simon Wiesenthal (1998) have recalled in their memoirs that the Nazis ordered the camp orchestra to play a tango during executions. 3 See e.g. Richard Bruschi, The Tango of Death. Horror at the Rhythm of Music in a Ukrainian Nazi Camp.’ History of Yesterday, November 28, 2020. https://historyofyesterday.com/the -­tango-of-death-horror-at-the-rhythm-of-music-in-a-ukranian-nazi-camp-ca01180d87c. © Willem de Haan, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525078_002

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Figure 1 Concentration and Extermination camps in Nazi-Germany Courtesy of Henk van Alst

in the spirit of Richard Wagner.4 In another, their execution was inspired by a symphony of Joseph Haydn. Merging in the legend of the Tango of Death, these stories continue to circulate to this day. Unraveling the ­cluster of narratives that compose this legend is the aim of this book, situated at the intersection of cultural history, Holocaust studies and Jewish studies. Ever since dancing tango has become a global phenomenon (Davis 2015), the legend of the Tango of Death captured the imagination of audiences around the world. The narrative is upsetting to those who view music as a source of hope, resistance, and survival. The very idea of a tango being played as the ‘macabre orchestration’5 of executions seems outrageous, insufferable not only to those who dance tango or listen to it, but, more generally, to anyone who 4 Leonid Leshchinsky, Tango of Death. Proza.ru 2009. https://www.proza.ru/2009/10/24/1084. 5 Plegaria (Prière): Le Tango de la mort! Eduardo Bianco (Rosario 1892 – Buenos Aires 1959) http://www.musiques-regenerees.fr/GhettosCamps/Camps/BiancoEduardo_Plegaria.html.

Memory and Myth

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loves music and would like to imagine that hearing music might have been a source of comfort and strength to the prisoners in the camps (Gilbert 2005, 3). While the music played by orchestras of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps has been the subject of academic studies (e.g. John 1991; Fackler 2000; Gilbert 2005) we know almost nothing about tango music played in these camps and nothing at all about the origins of the legend of the Tango of Death. This is mainly because on the one hand the camp, where the legend originated, has long remained an ‘understudied camp’ (Zegenhagen 2009; Rich 2017) of which there is still no single monograph (Beorn 2018, 448). On the other hand, research seemed almost impossible given that so few records of musical activity in the camp have survived.6 As a result, the veracity of the legend has simply been assumed rather than seriously investigated. Uncovering what actually happened in the camp became somewhat easier “with the thawing of frozen memories” (Assmann 2008, 61) and the opening of archives after 1989. With Perestroika, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine in 1991 more historical documents became available, enabling researchers to get a more comprehensive view of the Holocaust by including the destruction of European Jewry between 1941 and 1945 in Eastern Galicia (Western Ukraine) (Pohl 1997). Against this background, I started my journey of discovery tracing the origins of the story and reconstructing the creation of the legend of the Tango of Death. 1 Serendipity To be honest, I found the theme of this book – or perhaps it found me – quite by chance. During a stay in Buenos Aires, I visited the ‘world’s most ­beautiful bookstore’ El Ateneo Grand Splendid 7 in search of something interesting to read. While perusing a book on the Holocaust, a paragraph on music caught my eye in which the author wrote that the Argentinian tango Plegaria (Prayer) had been played in the concentration camp of Buchenwald (Muchnik 2017, 127). The idea that such a famous Argentinian tango which is regularly played in milongas (tango dance venues) around the world could have been performed in a Nazi concentration camp like Buchenwald was both horrific and 6 Janowska. Music and the Holocaust https://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/camps/­eastern -europe0/janowska/. 7 Brian Clark Howard, This is the world’s most beautiful bookstore. National Geographic ­January 4, 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/things-to-see-beautiful -bookshop.

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­ nfathomable. As a long-time and passionate tango dancer, what I simply u could not imagine was that the music so near to my heart had been part of the barbaric ‘concentrationary universe’ (Rousset 1945). Undeniably, tango songs are not only about passion and pleasures of life. They are at least as much about the nostalgic longing for a love or a life that has been lost (Link and Wendland 2016, 15). Many tangos evoke the troubled emotional world of European immigrants in Argentina (Allebrand 1998, 32). As much as they may have suffered, their hardship bears no relation to the pain of the prisoners due to ill-treatment, torture and execution in the Nazi death camps. The very idea that Argentine tango could have had anything to do with those cruel and inhumane practices was initially troubling to me and not something I was at all prepared to face. Nevertheless, I was puzzled, returned to my apartment, began searching for information on the internet about what I had just read and lo and behold encountered a whole slew of stories about a so-called Tango of Death.8 The origins of these stories seemed rather obscure, with one exception. In a book on the persecution and destruction of the Dutch Jewry 1940–1945, the historian Jacob Presser remarked that in one of the camps “the band was ordered to perform the ‘Tango of Death’ at executions (a photo of this has been preserved” (Presser 1965, 454). It was just one line, but enough to raise several questions. For example, what was the name of this camp? Why did the Nazis order the band to play a tango at executions and call this tango the Tango of Death? Who took the photograph of the orchestra playing this tango? Was it a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer, a Ukrainian guard or somebody else, a visitor, perhaps? And what was the purpose of taking this picture? Was it to immortalize the performance of the orchestra or to document a war crime for posterity? I discovered that a photograph of the orchestra playing the Tango of Death had been shown at the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945–1946. At this trial, it was brought to the attention of the Western world that thousands of Jews had been murdered to the macabre strains of a Tango of Death composed, directed and played by Jewish musicians who were later killed.9 It was at this point that my curiosity as an amateur tango dancer intersected with my professional interest 8 See, for example, Paul Bottomore, Today’s tango is Plegaria - Eduardo Bianco c. Mario Visconti 03–1937. Posted on January 23, 2015 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGfcYb9R-mA. 9 Nazis Murdered Jews to Strains of ‘Tango of Death’ Nuremberg Trial Learns. Jewish Telegraph Agency, February 17, 1946. See also Ehrenburg and Grossman (1946, 308–309) and Russell (1972, 123).

Memory and Myth

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as a criminologist in the history of crimes against humanity and genocide (De Haan 2015). Of course, this still does not explain why I would want to spend years of relentlessly searching for the roots of the story about tangos being played in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. As an explanation for my ­determination to pursue this topic, perhaps a few words are in order about my previous work as a criminologist. I specialized in research on violence (­robbery, assault, manslaughter, homicide). When friends repeatedly asked me why I was dedicated to such a topic, it took me some soul-searching to figure out that my own fear of violence was the driving force. Unconsciously, I had been nurturing the hope that understanding violence would somehow protect me from becoming the victim of assault myself. My research seemed to give me some semblance of control. Over time, I began studying more large-scale forms of violence. One of my most recent projects, for example, concerned the disappearance of militant workers during the Argentine dictatorship (1976–1983) and the question whether the crimes against humanity that were committed by the military Junta were in fact genocide. As terrible as this violence seemed to me, the violence perpetuated during the Holocaust frightened me even more, albeit for a different reason. The fear of not doing justice to the immense suffering inflicted on innocent people weighs heavily on any researcher of the Holocaust. It is often said that – metaphorically speaking – no pen can describe this suffering because there are no words for it. Throughout this research, my concern has been finding the right words for doing justice to what actually happened. This is not the only reason, however, why writing this book was hard. It has, in fact, been an unsettling experience from beginning to end. I expected that reading and listening to stories of survivors of the death camps would affect me just like anyone who does research on the Holocaust. However, as someone who can be deeply moved by music, this research has often overwhelmed me in ways that I could not have foreseen. I had dreams, for example, in which I was clearly processing emotions triggered by what I had been reading about the hardships prisoners were suffering in the concentration and extermination camps, trying to imagine what it must have been like for them to listen to music under these insufferable conditions. It forced me to confront the unsettling fact that the music they loved may not have made their lives more bearable. In the camps, music was used to oppress them and turn their lives into an unendurable misery. Having to hear music they used to love and care about (or to be forced to listen to music they disliked) would not have been consoling, but rather devastating to them.

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In order to better understand the role of music in the camps, I drew on the most significant studies on music in concentration and extermination camps (Fackler, 2000; Gilbert, 2005; Werb 2014a; 2014b). They were invaluable resources with a wealth of source material and documentation showing that music was not just a matter of entertainment but a constant component of the everyday life in the camps. These studies clearly demonstrate why the common belief that music in the camps was a source of hope, resistance and survival needed to be tempered by insights into how music also served as an instrument of torture and terror (John 2001, 269). In the death camps, “it was a general policy on the part of the SS to employ music in the process of extermination” (Gilbert 2005, 194). For the SS, music had a dual purpose: “to shore up their own sense of self while destroying that of the prisoners” (Brauer 2016, 25). To the SS, the orchestras and their music symbolized that they were ‘cultured’ people despite their bloody business: “Above all, it provided a framework within which the SS could maintain a self-image of refined German culture and personal ‘decency,’ not apart from but precisely in the context of the activities in which they were involved” (Gilbert 2005, 187). In contrast, any beliefs the prisoners may have had “about music’s relationship with concepts of humanity and morality were to be destroyed. In the perverse logic of the SS, music in this context worked to determine who counted among the civilized and refined members of humanity and who was excluded, who was not even human at all” (Brauer 2016, 25). In this way, music was integrated in the modus operandi of the Holocaust, i.e. the bureaucratically organized and industrially executed destruction of European Jews (Auffarth 2006) and as such an essential element of what has been called the ‘crime of all crimes’ (Rafter 2016). Yet, while music-making by prisoners in the concentration camps has been the subject of considerable study, the role of music in the extermination camps is less well-known (Naliwajek-Mazurek 2013, 32). The same goes for the potential of music to torture prisoners and to destroy their humanity, self-assurance and sense of self (Brauer 2016, 5). In addition to imagining the impact tango music might have had on the prisoners in these camps, I had to come to terms with the legend of the Tango of Death itself and the role it plays in the collective memory of the H ­ olocaust. This collective memory has developed differently in different countries across the world, not only because of ideological differences, but also because ­collective memory “depends on transitions from history into memory that involve the framing of historical events in the shape of affectively charged narratives [in which] ‘fiction’ in the sense of making, shaping, constructing is always implied” (Assmann 2008, 67).

Memory and Myth

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7

Legend and Myth

The aim of this book is to search for the origins of the legend of the Tango of Death, uncover the meaning of this legend, and reconstruct how this meaning has evolved and continued to inform current representations of the Holocaust. The questions that need to be asked should not only focus on empirical evidence and the substance of the narratives, however, but also take the wider context into account (Assmann 2008, 67). This means looking at the ways in which the legend is created, how it has travelled over time, and the ways it has been reproduced in changing contexts of communication. What is included in or excluded from the narrative? How has it managed to resonate so widely? And why does this particular story continue to capture the imagination of ­contemporary worldwide audiences? I use the concept of legend to refer to the narrative conflation of memory and myth. Strictly speaking a myth is a story, one not based in reality. Myths tell traditional and/or religious stories involving supernatural characters, such as deities and demigods. They usually take place in a timeless past. In contrast, a legend is presumed to have at least some basis in historical fact. Legends may contain fictional elements, but the origins of the story are – or are supposed to be – rooted in some factual truth. Whilst there is a difference between the concepts of legend and myth, in actual practice the concepts of legend and myth tend to be used interchangeably to refer to widely-held but not necessarily true stories about what happened or may have happened in the past.10 These stories have acquired a symbolic value. They are affectively charged and have become engraved in collective memory (Assmann 2008, 68). Occasionally, historical research can prove that a legend is, in fact, a myth. Take, for example, the case of the heartbreaking legend of ninety-three Jewish girls from Cracow who supposedly took their own lives to avoid being forced into prostitution for the Nazi German occupiers during the Holocaust. This legend to which I will come back later in this chapter turned out to be a myth without any basis in reality. In general, however, legends and myths are ­neither entirely true, nor completely false. They are the result of a process of cultural memorialization. Imagination inevitably plays a role in the adaptation and modification of memories. In the telling and retelling of a story, actual historic events are ordered, selected, or omitted, simplified or contextualized, dramatized or passed over in silence. As fact and fiction become blurred, the logic of

10

Myth. The Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english /myth.

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the narrative transforms the story into a legend or a myth (Samuel and Thompson 1990, 8). Legends and myths are essential for coming to terms with the ‘memorial presence of the past’ (Bal 1999, vii). They can, for example, serve the purpose of healing by enabling survivors to share their memories of ‘unsayable traumatic events’ (Collado-Rodriguez 2008, 57). The trauma of what happened can only be healed when others “can understand it, sympathize with it, or respond with astonishment, surprise, even horror” (Bal 1999, x). This is why there is such an ‘abundance’ of legends and myths in the history of the Holocaust (­Dawidowicz 1976, 13). Or, as a noted Jewish historian has suggested, for orthodox Jews the Holocaust has been the ‘stuff of pious legends.11 While this may seem a bit ­exaggerated, the fact remains that there are many legends and myths in c­ irculation which recount what Seidman (2015, 3) has called ‘Holocaust martyr­ology.’ To illustrate this, I will now take a closer look at a few examples. 3

Holocaust Legends

The first example is a story told by the Orthodox Rabbi Nachman Selzer (2016) about a violinist who was a prisoner in Auschwitz. He was ordered by an SS man to play a song. As it was Yom Kippur, the holiest night of the year, the ­violinist decided to honor the ancient Jewish tradition by playing the sacred song Kol Nidrei, knowing full well that the melody would be recognized by his fellow Jewish prisoners in adjacent barracks. The Nazis who were listening were unaware of what he was playing. Carried away by the beautiful music, they enthusiastically ordered the violinist to repeat the song, again and again. As he played on, each time more passionately than before, he threw himself into the music, giving expression to the emotions that were pulsating through his soul: the intensity of his suffering, the complete degradation and stripping of his humanity, and, above all, the pride in what he and his people represented. This legend is convincing because it shows how the violinist chose this song in order to infuse a moment of sanctity into the living hell of the concentration camp. The legend has elements of a thriller and, at the same time an inspiring account of a spiritual journey, making it an incredible story that has moved audiences across the globe.12

11 12

Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, After Decades of Holocaust Legends, ultra-Orthodox ­ ommunity Confronts the Dark Facts. Haaretz Oct 31, 2016. C https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VEQe4FNALQandfeature=youtu.be.

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Another similarly cherished legend (Clendinnen 1999, 24) is based on one of the best documented and most thoroughly researched Holocaust events – the ‘true’ story (Nomberg-Przytyk 2009) of a young woman who, on her way to the gas chamber in Auschwitz-Birkenau, killed an SS officer with his own gun. The heroic story was told in many of the death camps, taking on a mythical ­status. However, the result of the often confused and exaggerated retellings produced countless variations: in the woman’s nationality, the venue, the ­precise sequence of the action and the outcome (Pfefferkorn and Hirsch 2009).13 In some versions of the story, the event took place on the ramp at the train station in Auschwitz; in other versions, it happened in a room next to the gas chamber. Depending on who told the story, the Jewish heroine was Belgian, French, Italian or Polish; she was an actress, a dancer or an ordinary woman; unusually beautiful or just plain-looking; dressed in a bathing suit or wearing an ordinary dress; ordered to take off her brassiere and underpants and dance naked or even to perform a striptease. In most versions, the woman suddenly grabbed the pistol of the SS man and shot him dead, but in one version, she scooped up a handful of gravel and threw it his face before grabbing the gun. Most versions end with the woman being shot, but in one version she saved the last bullet for herself (Nomberg-Przytyk 2009, 109). It has been called one of the ‘sadly representative ironies of this historical event’ that the identity of the SS officer is known, but not the woman who shot him (Hawthorne 2019, 282). There is no doubt that the SS officer was Josef Schillinger, but the woman who killed him has been named (in alphabetical order) Regina Cukier, ­Katerina Horovitz, Lola Lipmann, Francesca Mann, or Nora Ney (Bar-Itzhak 2009, 71). The diversity of the accounts and the irreconcilable details have relegated the story to “the stuff of legend” (Langbein 1994, 280). The most famous Holocaust legend in Jewish literature is the previously mentioned heartbreaking story of the ninety-three orthodox Jewish Bais ­Yaakov14 schoolgirls from Krakow who decided to end their lives together rather than be taken as prostitutes by Nazi German soldiers. The story, narrated in memoirs, 13

14

Literary works narrating this event include two short stories and a novel that were written by authors who were each prisoner in Auschwitz but survived the Holocaust. The short stories are, first, The Death of Schillinger by Tadeusz Borowski (published 1959 in Polish and in 1967 in an English translation but written shortly after his release from Auschwitz in 1945 and before his suicide in 1951) and, second, Revenge of a Dancer by Sara NombergPrzytyk (published in 1985 in an English translation from the unpublished Polish ­manuscript). The novel is A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova by Arnošt Lustig (­published in Czech in 1964 and in English translation in 1973). ‫( בית יעקב‬Bais Yaakov; House of Jacob) is a name for orthodox elementary and secondary schools for Jewish girls.

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novels, children’s books and referred to in sermons and classroom teachings, is based on a letter smuggled out of the apartment where the girls were being held for the soldiers to ‘visit’ them. Parts of the letter, signed by Chaya Feldman, were translated15 and published in the New York Times of January 7, 1943. In a key passage, the girls announced that “All of us have poison. When the soldiers will come we shall drink it. Today we are together and all day we are saying our last confession. We have no fear.” Publication of the letter made a deep impression. The girls’ letter was read publicly at memorial services held throughout the free Jewish world. Rabbis preached of the girls’ brave resistance in their Sabbath sermons. The tale was recounted in short stories like ‘A Child Leads the Way,’ a fictionalized account of the ‘martyrdom of the Ninety-Three’ (Asch 1948, 191–202). And, finally, the girls’ ordeal was immortalized in a liturgical poem written in Hebrew by the poet Hillel Bavli (1943, 23). His poem ‘The Letter of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ is recited in liberal Jewish American synagogues on Yom Kippur and commemorations on Holocaust Remembrance Day and taught as part of ­Holocaust ­history to Orthodox Jewish schoolchildren in Israel and throughout the ­diaspora (Horowitz 2006, 179). Many people, including the author who brought the letter to the attention of the American public in a New York Times article, considered the story of the ninety-three orthodox Jewish schoolgirls to be factual. However, over time historians began to question the authenticity of the letter and to express reservations about its historical accuracy, not in the least because so many questions remained unanswered. Who, for example, was Chaya Feldman, the girl or – as some assume – the teacher who wrote the letter?16 And who were the other ninety-two girls? Why has no burial place or mass grave for them been found? And how can we explain that no family member has ever stepped forward to claim knowledge of the girls? (Garber 1993, 75). After sixty years of comprehensive research into this event, the Yad Vashem Research Institute – the principal institution in the world for studying the history of the Holocaust – has concluded that the story actually never happened.17 The letter about the ordeal of the ninety-three maidens cannot be viewed as a record of historical fact. It is 15 16

17

The original letter was written in a hard-to-identify language, possibly a Hungarian-­ Jewish dialect of German with some Yiddish and Hebrew (Seidman 2015, 1). There appears to be no evidence of her existence as a person. Only Mr. Schenkolewski, the dear friend in New York to which Chaya Feldman addressed her letter, “emphatically insisted that he had met her” but admitted that he could “recall her disposition but not her face.” (Garber 1993, 90, note 54). Vos Iz Neias, April 27, 2009. https://vosizneias.com/2009/04/27/israel-the-myth-of-the -93-cracow-girls-who-took-their-lives-in-the-holocaust-exposed/.

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a Holocaust legend. These legends are heroic moral tales: about defiance and sanctity in the case of the Jewish violinist in Auschwitz, about ­resistance and revenge in the case of the Jewish woman arriving in Auschwitz, and about dignity and purity in the case of the Jewish schoolgirls from Krakow. All three stories thrive by giving the Holocaust a theological meaning. In addition to religious legends, there are, of course, also many secular legends about what happened during the Holocaust. Personally, I remember how, as a child, I overheard the legendary stories that were told in my family about the occupation of The Netherlands during WWII. Later, I read novels like Bitter Herbs by Marga Minco (1957, 1st ed.), The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans (1958, 1st ed.) and The Stone Bridal Bed by Harry Mulisch (1959, 1st ed.) that influenced my perception of the Second World War, the occupation, and in particular, collaboration, deportation, resistance, loyalty, and betrayal. Oddly enough, I never read the most famous Dutch book about the Nazi occupation: Anne Frank – The Diary of a Young Girl (1947, 1st ed.), even though I am presently living in the very neighborhood in Amsterdam where Anne Frank grew up and went to school. However, not having read her story is not as strange as it may seem. Even David Barnouw, the renowned expert and writer of several books about Anne Frank, confessed that neither he nor any of his colleagues at the Netherlands Institute of War Documentation had read the diary when they received the original from Anne’s father, Otto Frank in 1980.18 Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch admitted the same during a talk he gave at the opening of the exhibition “Anne Frank in the World: 1929–1945” at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts in April 1986 (Mulisch 1986). He explained this omission by arguing that the book – which, at that moment, had been translated into fifty-one languages and sold about sixteen million copies worldwide – was, nevertheless, not considered ‘real’ literature. Similarly, David Barnouw explained that he had not read the book because it was just ‘a girl’s diary.’ ‘Why would I find a girl’s book interesting?’ he asked. What did interest him, however, was what he called ‘the phenomenon of Anne Frank’ (Barnouw 2018) – that is, how the image of Anne Frank as an innocent girl, struggling to maintain hope and faith in mankind, was created in the Broadway theater, Hollywood films and numerous documentaries about her. And, how, as a result, for a great many people in the world the story of the Holocaust was reduced to the story of Anne Frank. It is this ‘afterlife’ of Anne Frank which transformed her into “a ready-made icon for those who have turned the Holocaust into a kind of 18

Anne Frank: het meisje en de mythe (Anne Frank: the girl and the myth). Gemeente Amsterdam, June 6, 2019. https://www.amsterdam.nl/nieuws/achtergrond/anne-frank -meisje-mythe/.

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secular religion” (Buruma 1998, 4). As a secular ‘Holocaust icon’ (Stier 2015), she represents the vulnerability, innocence, and torment of the Jews during the Holocaust. With an ‘aura of sweet optimism and faith’ her story has become a ‘redemptive myth’ (Goldstein 2003, 16). The story of Anne Frank has been understood by an international audience as a testimony of how Dutch society had been united in its opposition to the anti-Jewish actions of the Nazi German occupying forces and had helped ­Jewish families to survive by enabling them to go into hiding. It is also believed that Jews who were deported to the camps but managed to survive (like Anne’s father Otto Frank) were welcomed back. Unfortunately, these beliefs misrepresent what actually happened in The Netherlands during and after the war. In fact, relatively few Dutch citizens resisted the Nazi occupation or tried to rescue their Jewish compatriots by providing hiding-places.19 Many more ­civilians, civil servants and police were indifferent, looked away or collaborated with the enemy (Bovenkerk 2000), some of them even betraying Jews or hunting them down (Van Liempt 2005). Of course, Anne Frank’s diary was by no means the only story that “blurred the history of Dutch Jews and the Dutch nation during the War” (Goldstein 2003, 17). In fact, flattering stories about the resistance of the Dutch and their solidarity with the Jews “were repeated and magnified ad nauseam, in novels, popular histories, radio, newspapers, and especially, the cinema” (Judt 1992, 90).20 The belief that Jews owed their survival to the resistance and solidarity of their non-Jewish fellow countrymen became a ‘founding myth’ for the post-war Dutch nation (De Haan 1998). It is a myth that cultivated a positive national identity “at the expense of historical accuracy” (Kronenmeijer and Teshima 2011, 106). It clearly did not matter that “that resistance by Jews was proportionately greater than that of other Dutchmen” (Presser 1965, 279). 19

20

There was a National Organization (LO) that provided hiding-places and there were National Commando Groups (LKP) that committed robberies to obtain distribution vouchers and forged identity cards for people who went into hiding. In addition to Jews, people went underground for fear of arrest by the Nazis: men who refused Arbeitseinsatz (forced labor in Germany), critical intellectuals (academics, artists, pastors and priests, writers) and members of resistance groups who were wanted by the occupier. It is estimated that about 350,000 people went underground for a shorter or longer period of time, including 30,000 of the country’s 140,000 Jews. Their survival rate was more than sixteen times higher than for Jews who were deported to the concentration and extermination camps (Kennedy 2017, 375). In contrast to the heroic image painted by the socialist realist writer Theun de Vries in The Girl with the Red Hair (1956), Simon Vestdijk in Pastorale (1943) and Willem Frederik Hermans in The Darkroom of Damocles (1958) gave a rather disillusioned account of the Dutch resistance.

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Attention was diverted from the less-than-positive behavior of the general population not only during the occupation, but also after the war when Jews came back from the concentration and extermination camps or emerged from hiding. Some found their homes occupied by Dutch compatriots.21 Others were fined by the local government for not having paid real estate property tax for their house during their absence.22 For a long time the shameful disinterest, discrimination, and unfair treatment that many Jewish survivors encountered was conveniently overlooked and denied (Hondius 1994).23 It took the Dutch government 75 years to officially apologize for this appalling history.24 4 Methodology What these examples of Holocaust legends have in common is that they are ­stories typically told as if they were true. By telling and retelling them, their credibility is reinforced and, as a result, they ring true. Their significance resides less in their factual historicity than in what they represent and what they mean to a particular audience. By adding colorful details and conjuring up eyewitness testimonies, the narration is fashioned as a legend, thereby ­rendering the story completely plausible and convincing to audiences. In other words, it is not the veracity, but the construction of the narrative which transforms a story into a legend (Samuel and Thompson 1990, 8–9). This applies also to the legend of the Tango of Death. After searching for the origins of the story and uncovering its meaning, I will reconstruct how the ­legend has evolved and continues to inform current representations of the Holocaust. The path toward achieving this aim has not been a straightforward one. The diversity of the stories that eventually merged into the legend of the Tango of Death prohibited treating this episode of the Holocaust as a closed historical event. Instead, it forced me to grapple with the complications that flow from the fact that the “memorial presence of the past takes many forms and serves many purposes” (Bal 1999, vii). 21 22 23 24

Under the pretext of a housing shortage their homes were occupied. Only after researchers (Piersma and Kemperman 2015) showed that the city of A ­ msterdam had received a converted amount of between five and ten million euros, the city decided to pay ten million euros as compensation to the Jewish community. See also Hondius (2001; 2003; 2005). Speech by prime minister Mark Rutte at the National Holocaust Memorial in Amsterdam on January 26, 2020 at https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/toespraken/2020/01/26 /toespraak-van-minister-president-mark-rutte-bij-de-nationale-­auschwitzherdenking -amsterdam.

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Achieving the aim of this book required separating and interpreting different narratives that have been and are still being told about the Tango of Death, thereby creating a whirlpool of memory and myth.25 It raised the question of how to value witness statements of survivors who are living with traumatic memories of past events. Traditionally, historians have mistrusted witness statements considering them to be unreliable – that is, subjective and therefore inaccurate (Wievorka 1998, 14). However, “testimonies are by nature subjective and sometimes inaccurate. They have a fragmentary and lacunary relation to the truth to which they bear witness, but they are nonetheless all that we have available to know and to imagine concentration camp life from the inside” (Didi-Huberman 2008, 32). When Holocaust survivors were asked to testify for war documentation and judicial investigations into war crimes, their recollections inevitably contained gaps. Cognitive psychologists have found that these witnesses may recall ‘fictitious memories,’ i.e. memories of traumatic events that were never actually experienced (Wagenaar and ­Groeneweg 1990, 86). For this reason, some historians have been inclined to believe that myths are false stories about past events that should be replaced by true stories, i.e. documented reconstructions of past events. However, to be able to imagine life in the camps, witness statements are indispensable alongside the diaries, ghetto chronicles, photographs, and drawings that – ‘in spite of all’ – have been preserved as documentation (Didi-Huberman 2008). Such statements are valuable and can be useful for historical research provided they are critically examined by triangulating them with other witness statements, historical documents, and material from other sources. More recently, most historians have begun to believe that legends should not simply be treated as false stories contradicting an empirical reality but rather be seen as meaningful stories which resonate through collective memories. While yesterday’s accounts were reliant upon the ‘facts,’ today’s accounts are about their reinterpretation and representation (Friedlander 1984, 72). ­Historians are no longer drawing a fundamental line between mythical and historical narratives. Instead, they now argue that the dividing line between myth and history “does not hold or is, at best, imperceptibly thin” (Lorenz 2008, 44). A lack of match between memory and empirical evidence should, therefore, not be a reason to discard survivor stories. It should rather be a reason to set aside the issue of historical accuracy and focus instead on their contributions to cultural memory (Bal 1999, xvi). Memories of Holocaust survivors and 25

Much like the novel Tango of Death (Vynnychuk 2019) which has been described as “a whirlpool of history and mystification.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/ukrainian /­entertainment/2012/11/121116_book_2012_interview_vynnychuk_ek.shtml.

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their stories should be seen “as shaped accounts in which some incidents were dramatized, others contextualized, yet others passed over in silence” (Ibid., 5). Memory and myth must become windows into the making and remaking of collective consciousness through a process of shaping a narrative in which both fact and fantasy play a significant part (Samuel and Thompson 1990, 21). This requires considerable navigation of “the hazardous terrain between historical fact and imaginative reconstruction” (Sundquist 2013, 259). On the one hand responsible remembering of the Holocaust requires close adherence to the facts. In order to remember responsibly we need to consider that “the facts of the matter set limits on the kinds of stories that can be properly … told” (White 1992, 39). On the other hand, however, analysis and interpretation of what legends and myths represent may offer a deeper understanding of the past than a mere accumulation of historical facts could ever provide (Samuel and Thompson, 1990, 12–13). 5 Ethics This brings me to a final issue, and it is an ethical one. To merely disqualify the stories of Holocaust survivors as ‘fictional memory’ does not do j­ustice to the horrific experiences these victims have suffered. It is not realistic to expect factual accuracy from them. They do not always remember names, dates, and details because this is not how memory works. More realistically, the process of survivor recall and testimony evokes “ever more blurred and stylized memories, often, unbeknownst to them, influenced by information gained from later readings or the stories of others” (Levi 1988, 19). In general, when we tell a story we may claim that we are drawing from our memory, but that is often not the case. What is activated when we remember is, in many cases, not a memory but the story of a memory. The story of a memory is dynamic and evolves over time as it is continually reshaped and recycled to make sense of the past from the perspective of the present (Wagoner 2017). When we talk about past events, they take on different meanings. Every time we recall and talk about our memories, they are colored by the emotions they evoke in the present. We also embellish our memories by adding new ­information – for example, things that we have read or heard from others and that have made an impression on us. Over time it becomes difficult to precisely identify the sources of the stories we tell. We no longer know where all the information comes from. Our memory is fallible and the stories we tell about the past will contain distortions and inaccuracies. This is inevitable because the images,

16

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sounds, smells, and emotions we remember have been processed through ­language. It is a ­common belief that traumatic events tend to be stored better than those of routine events, but investigations have shown that the emotional ­intensity of an experience is no guarantee for the accuracy of its recall (­Wagenaar and ­Groeneweg 1990, 87). Even the extreme experience of having been ­victimized in a Nazi concentration camp does not ensure that memories of traumatic ­episodes will be accurate. As with other memories, the details of what happened will be arranged in a manner that serves the person’s own objectives (Neisser 1981). The way in which survivors tell and retell their stories is influenced by their lives before, during and after the Holocaust as much as their stories are tailored to meet the expectations of their listeners (Greenspan 1998, 286). It has been noted that the “most serious challenge in the use of survivor testimony as historical evidence is posed not by those who are inherently hostile to it but by those who embrace it too uncritically and emotionally” (Browning 2003, 40). In many publications of memories and histories of the Holocaust paying tribute to the victims prevails over historical clarification (De Haan 2008, 357). As Susan Sontag has argued in her pivotal book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) a more balanced view requires that sympathy with victims goes hand in hand ‘continuous critical thinking.’ In never-ending cycles of reflection one needs to ask oneself the critical question whether the kind of distance or detachment we maintain regarding the pain of others is ethically appropriate. In this way, it may be possible to pursue the meaning of suffering in a deeper sense, i.e. “a sense incorporating something like ethical sincerity or truthfulness” (Pihlström 2019, 422). In this study, I have adopted the standpoint that “to lose that critical perspective is … not to honor the survivors but to do them damage” (Kushner 2006, 283). Taking a critical perspective is not always appreciated by survivors or their relatives, however. For example, a daughter of a Holocaust survivor once referred cynically to ‘my interesting propensity to fact check.’ She was not alone in expressing skepticism about my project. A colleague called it ‘sensational’ and expressed a deep concern that the tone of the book could be offensive to survivors. While I respect survivors and have listened to their views, I have concluded that accepting the memories of survivors at face value is not the way to take them seriously. Survivors’ accounts of music in the camps “are, unsurprisingly, as varied as these individuals and their experiences” (Milewski 2007, 59). In order to do justice to their memories, we will have to take a critical look at their stories. This is not to deny their experiences or the emotions these experiences evoke, nor to deny that “ultimately a deep chasm remains that prevents us

Memory and Myth

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from comprehending fully what happened” (John 2001, 271). It is to allow a balanced and realistic insight into the circumstances in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. With this in mind, I started tracing the roots of the story and reconstructing the creation of the legend of the Tango of Death. In this book, I explore a variety of narratives about music in Nazi death camps; from the widespread belief that the music of Richard Wagner was played at the gas chambers in Auschwitz to the ludicrous claim that Wagner was, in fact, the composer of the Tango of Death played at executions in a Nazi concentration camp in Ukraine. I also explore how Holocaust icons serve to keep the legend of the Tango of Death alive; from the iconic photograph of the ‘orchestra of death’ shown at the Nuremberg Trial to the emblematic postwar poem Todesfuge (Death Fugue) written by the mysterious poet Paul Celan. In the final chapter, I explore how the legend of the Tango of Death continues to be reproduced in different forms and shapes. My guiding questions throughout the book are: How has this legend travelled over time and been reproduced in shifting contexts of communication? Why is it that this legend continues to be reproduced in art, literature, film, and social media capturing the imagination of so many audiences around the world? And how does this legend inform current representations of the Holocaust?

CHAPTER 2

Music in the Camps In the previous chapter, I referred to the remark by the Dutch historian Jacob Presser that “in one of the camps the band was ordered to perform the ‘Tango of Death’ at executions” (Presser 1965, 453). He did not mention a source for “this twentieth-century dance of death” (Ibid., 4). However, I discovered its o­ rigin soon enough. On February 14, 1946 at the Trial of the Major War ­Criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, the Soviet Assistant Prosecutor Colonel Lev Nikolaevich Smirnov1 charged that: The Germans executed their tortures, ill-treatments, and shooting to the accompaniment of music. For this purpose they created a special orchestra selected from among the prisoners. They requested a special tune, to be called the ‘Tango of Death.’2 On February 18, 1946 he charged, more specifically, that: In Yanov Camp the executions were carried out to the strains of the ‘Tango of Death’ played by an orchestra conducted by Professor Stricks, an internee in the camp, together with his bandmaster, Mundt.3 As might be expected of a lawyer, the prosecutor was specific in his charge, mentioning the name of the camp (Yanov, Yanowsky, Janowska) and even the names of the conductor (Stricks, Striks, Strix, or Shtricks) and bandmaster (Mundt, Mund, or Munt) of the camp orchestra that was forced to play the Tango of Death at the executions. More than half a century later, the Argentinian historian of Jewish tango José Judkovski had a different story to tell, h ­ owever. In his documentary film Tango, una historia con judíos (Tango: A ­History with Jews), he claimed that the Nazis “forced Jewish musicians, who were in concentration camps, to perform a tango while they accompanied large rows of men, women and children to the gas chambers” (Judkovski and Pomeraniec 2009, 45.14–45.32). The addition of gas chambers to the story of the Tango of 1 Lev Nikolaevich Smirnov was assistant to the chief Soviet prosecutor, General Roman Rudenko. 2 Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, Vol. 7, February 14, 1946, 451. 3 Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, Vol. 7, February 18, 1946, 21–22. © Willem de Haan, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004525078_003

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Death is noteworthy. It is a version of the story which was retold, for example, by researcher of Yiddish tango, Lloica Czackis. In the journal of European Judaism, she asserted that the Nazis “forced Lagerkapellen (camp orchestras) to play the Tango of Death to accompany prisoners as they were marched to the gas chambers” (Czackis 2009, 107). By referring to the gas chambers, these tango historians created a much broader and more dramatic narrative. It was a narrative that linked tango music to the systematic murder of six million Jews on an industrial scale in special extermination camps (Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka). In reality, there were no gas chambers in the Janowska camp where the story of the Tango of Death originated. In this camp, most prisoners were killed in mass shootings or deported to the extermination camp of Bełżec.4 This ­extermination camp, to which many prisoners of Janowska were transferred, did have gas chambers and also a camp orchestra, albeit a very small one, which played in the area between the gas chambers and the burial pits (Reder 1946, 11) where they were accompanying the transportation of corpses from the gas chambers to the graves (Arad 1987, 27, 227; Webb 2016, xi). There is no mention of a tango being played here, however. This raises the question why gas chambers feature so prominently in the legend of the Tango of Death. In this chapter, I will explore how this legend evolved from a story about what happened in the Janowska camp in Ukraine. However, before embarking on this endeavor, a few words are in order about music making in concentration and extermination camps. As I noted before, precious little is known about daily life in the Janowska camp itself.5 In order to provide the reader with some background information on the role of music in the camp life, I will draw upon existing studies on music making in the camps, the camp orchestras and their musical repertoires (e.g. Fackler 2000; Gilbert 2005; Werb 2014a). I will then return to the legend of the Tango of Death itself and show how the initial story was conflated with a myth. It is the myth that Jews were led into the gas chambers to the strains of a tango or even of opera music composed by Richard Wagner.

4 According to The Jewish Telegraph Agency of February 17, 1946, the Soviet prosecution had charged that at the Janowski and Bełżec camps famous Jewish composers and conductors were forced to create and play the special tango while mass executions and burials were taking place. https://holocaustmusic.ort.org/fr/places/camps/death-camps/Bełżec/. 5 This could also be the reason why musical activity is not among the themes figuring in the forthcoming larger study of the Janowska camp (Beorn 2018, 448).

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Nazi Concentration Camps

When Hitler assumed power in 1933, the Nazi regime began to erect forced labor- and concentration camps for the incarceration of political ­opponents of the Nazi regime. The concentration camps of Buchenwald, Dachau, ­Mauthausen, Neuengamme, Ravensbück and Sachsenhausen (Figure 1) are well-known. After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the SS converted an army barracks in Oświęcim (Auschwitz) into a concentration camp for prisoners of war. The Auschwitz I-Stammlager (main camp) became operational in May 1940. Construction of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp began in September 1941. It consisted of two camps: one for men and one for women. The Auschwitz III-Aussenlager (external camp) Monowitz was built as a forced labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben. This camp became operational in October 1942. In total, the Auschwitz complex included approximately forty-five satellite camps (Gilbert 2005, 144).6 In order to implement the so-called Endlösung (Final Solution) to what the Nazis referred to as die Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), special camps were built in occupied Poland for the systematic murder of Jews on an industrial scale. Under the code name ‘Operation Reinhard’ these extermination camps were built in Bełżec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka (Arad 1987). At first, mobil trucks were used for killing by asphyxiation but later gas chambers were built as a more efficient method of extermination. The first gas chamber was operational in Auschwitz II-Birkenau by March 1942. In other extermination camps they became operational in the course of 1942. The estimated total number of victims who were murdered in these extermination camps is 2.7 million, most of them Jews. In Ukraine several concentration camps were established which resembled these extermination camps. One of them was the Janowska camp in Lviv. This is the Yanov (Janowska) camp the Soviet Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial referred to. It is less well-known, perhaps because there were no gas chambers and crematoriums in this camp. Initially, it was a forced-labor camp. SS-­Obersturmführer (First Lieutenant) Fritz Gebauer was commandant of this Zwangsarbeitslager Lemberg (Forced Labor Camp Lvov) which was established for the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (German Armament Works) in August 1, 1941. His deputy commandant was SS-Obersturmführer ­Gustav Willhaus. When the forced labor camp was extended and became a concentration camp, Willhaus became the commandant of this Janowska camp, on May 1, 1942. 6 For a list of sub-camps of the Auschwitz concentration camp, see http://auschwitz.org/en /history/auschwitz-sub-camps/.

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A year later, on July, 1, 1943 Willhaus was succeeded by his deputy commandant SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Friedrich Warzok (Jones 1999, 173; Redzik 2014a; 2018). The camp was run by Schutzstaffel (SS) and ­Sicherheitsdienst (SD) personnel, but the guards were Ukrainian ­Hilfswilliger (Volunteers) who had been trained by the SS.7 In March 1942 when the mass deportation of Jews from Eastern Galicia began, Janowska became a transit camp where Jews were to be selected for forced labor or deportation to the extermination camp of Bełżec. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 120,000 Polish and Soviet Jews passed through Janowska (David-Fox, Holquist and Martin 2014, 255). In addition, Janowska operated as an extermination camp where Jews were killed, mostly executed by a firing squad (Beorn 2018, 460–461). It has been claimed that more Jews lost their lives in the Janowska camp than in a better-known extermination camp like Majdanek (Winstone 2015, 282). This claim may have been based on an early report which estimated that between 130,000 and 200,000 Soviet citizens had been murdered in and around the Janowska camp. According to a more accurate estimate, however, 80,000 Jews were murdered in or outside the camp (­Sandkühler 1996, 190; Beorn 2018, 447). It is unclear when exactly the Janowska camp was liquidated. On the one hand it has been claimed that the camp was dissolved after the last prisoners were killed, on November 20, 1943 (Berenstein 1962, 366).8 This was the day after an escape attempt in which only a few prisoners succeeded. Most of them were captured and killed. On the other hand, it has been claimed that on July 19, 1944 – just prior to the arrival of the Red Army in Lviv – a few Jews remaining in the camp were evacuated (Redzik 2014a, 223). Among those who, in one way or another, survived the Janowska camp are: Michał Borwicz, Samuel Drix, Yehuda Eisman, Dawid Kahane, Simon Wiesenthal, and Leon Weliczker Wells, all of whom have testified in their memoirs (Borwicz 2014, Drix 1995, Eisman 1945, Kahane 1990, Wiesenthal 1998, Wells 1963) to what they experienced in the camp.

7 They were called ‘Trawniki men’ after the location of their SS training facility in the village of Trawniki near the Polish city of Lublin (Rich 2017). 8 As part of Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival) on November 3–4, 1943. In reaction to uprisings in the ghetto of Warsaw and the death camps of Sobibór and Treblinka, SS-­Reichsführer (Leader) Heinrich Himmler ordered the mass killing of Jews in forced-labor camps. Many were transferred to Majdanek to be shot. In total, approximately 42,000 Jews were killed. It was the largest mass killing of the Holocaust. https://www.ushmm.org/learn /timeline-of-events/1942-1945/operation-harvest-festival.

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Music in the Camps

Music was an integral part of the daily routine of all the camps. Leaving aside the special case of Terezín (Theresienstadt), the ‘model-camp’ the Nazis established for propaganda purposes (Benz 2013; Wlodarski 2014), music in the camps was performed mostly by command or with the permission of the SS. Only occasionally did prisoners make music without permission. Musical performances were tolerated by the SS as long as their authority was not called into question and the ‘normal’ operation of the camp was not impaired by the activity. So-called Blockveranstaltungen (block events) took place ‘after hours’ when the SS men had withdrawn from the camp, leaving the prisoners largely to their own devices. These performances were given at private occasions like birthdays or on other days with a personal significance (Fackler 2007, 20). They took place under conditions somewhere between formal permission, ­toleration, and outright prohibition (Brauer 2012, 202). Obviously, politically motivated block performances were strictly forbidden for prisoners and could only be held conspiratorially, “not infrequently on peril of their lives” (Fackler 2007, 25). In the early concentration camps, where the conditions were more favorable than later in the extermination camps, Lagerveranstaltungen (camp events) took place in the form of cabaret evenings and variety shows with vocal or instrumental musical interludes (Fackler 2007, 21). In the ­extermination camps, where music was instrumental in the mass murder (Dahm 1997, 3), music-making was limited by the severe restrictions under which prisoners had to live. Only a small segment of them had the chance to engage with music but they had to do so despite constant hunger, impending disease and pestilence, mental and physical violence, and random acts of terror (Fackler 2007, 25). In other words, while they were playing, their lives were always in jeopardy. 3 Singing The most common form of music-making in the camps was unaccompanied unison singing of so-called KZ-Lieder (concentration camp songs). This singing on command (Fackler 2007, 17) would take place mostly on the Appellplatz (roll call area), and while marching in columns to or from work and during the hard labor itself. Prisoners would often be humiliated by forcing them to sing German songs with sarcastic new lyrics invented by the SS. In the Auschwitz camp, for example, prisoners were forced to sing the following adaptation of a popular song:

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Auschwitz is a nice little town, yes it is. There are a lot of beautiful girls living there, yes there are. Shoes and stockings are torn, hair cut off. The wind blows through the pants. Oh, it’s so hard to leave home, if there were no hope of a seeing again, again. Farewell, farewell, farewell, f­arewell, farewell, see you again. (Petzmeier 2014, 20) In addition, the SS forced prisoners to sing as an accompaniment to torture and punishment. In Auschwitz III-Monowitz, for example, the retrieval of an escaped prisoner was ‘celebrated’ by forcing the man to march through the ranks of his fellow prisoners, bang on a drum and sing: ‘Hurra, hurra, ich bin wieder da!’ (Hurrah, hurrah, I am back again!) (Fackler 2007, 4). Such grotesque spectacles are examples of how music was used to humiliate prisoners and rob them of their individuality (Brauer 2016, 26). Occasionally, prisoners would spontaneously sing for one another or together in a choir (Gilbert 2005, 148). They would sing folk songs from their region of origin or partisan political songs alluding to freedom and resistance. Singing these songs helped them to reconnect with their prewar lives by ­offering an opportunity to escape into an imaginative world outside the camp (Gilbert 2005, 150). Some new songs were created by changing the lyrics. These songs enabled prisoners to laugh at a parody or to demonstrate that their spirit had not been broken (Fackler 2007, 18–19). An example of a parody is the song W Auschwitz-Lager gdy mieszkałem (When I lived in the Auschwitz camp). A seemingly cheerful march is matched by sarcastic lyrics depicting Auschwitz as the ‘paradise on earth’ where lice infected prisoners are treated to endless roll calls in all kinds of weather. The songwriters often took great pains to portray camp life by describing the horrific circumstances in graphic detail. Examples are Zug zum Krematorium (Train to the crematorium) which tells about the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau (­Gilbert 2005, 151, 153), the Auschwitz Lied (Auschwitz song) recounting disease, forced labor, torture, the incessant longing for home and family, and Jüdischer Todes­ sang (Jewish death song) based on the Yiddish folk melody Tsen Brider (Ten ­brothers). In the new version of this song, they are revealing how they are all going to die in the gas chambers.9 Through these lyrics, the songwriters bore witness and strove to ensure that the horror of the camps would be preserved for posterity.

9 Jüdischer Todessang (Jewish death song). See Music and the Holocaust at http://holo caustmusic.ort.org/places/camps/central-europe/sachsenhausen/­kulisiewiczaleksander /jdischertodessang/.

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Camp Orchestras

In most concentration and extermination camps, professional musicians and talented amateurs of different ages and nationalities were recruited to play in camp orchestras and musical ensembles. The first of these orchestras came into existence in the 1930s in concentration camps for political prisoners (­Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau). These orchestras were composed of imprisoned amateur and professional musicians. On the instructions of the camp leadership, they had to play a role in the smooth functioning of the camp (Fackler 2003, 11). In the 1940s, camp orchestras were established in large-scale concentration and extermination camps like Auschwitz and ­Auschwitz-Birkenau. The size and quality of prisoners’ orchestras varied depending on the type of camp. In some of the camps, several orchestras were operating simultaneously, for instance in the complex of camps known as ­Auschwitz (Fackler 2007, 8). In the Auschwitz I-Stammlager (Main camp) and Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp no fewer than five orchestras were established (Gilbert 2005, 176), some of them with the size of a symphony orchestra. In addition to these orchestras, there were numerous smaller ensembles in the Auschwitz III-Monowitz and other satellite camps of Auschwitz (­Fackler 2007, 8). With the exception of the women’s orchestra in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, these orchestras and ensembles consisted exclusively of men (­Fackler 2007, 8). The expansion of the orchestras was not the result of a central command, but rather depended on the whim of camp commanders. With the expansion of Auschwitz into a gigantic camp complex, which in turn consisted of different partial camps, ensembles were formed in the women’s and men’s sections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, in the ­Auschwitz-Monowitz labor camp as well as in several of the satellite camps. On occasion, camp leaders had musicians from the main camp orchestra build up a new ensemble in their camp section, and prisoner orchestras in other camps were modeled on the example of the Auschwitz main camp orchestra (Fackler 2003, 13–14). The lineups varied, depending on the availability of musical instruments and musicians who could play them. When sheet music and instruments had to be procured, they were taken from prisoners who had brought them to the camp or they were purchased with the money that had been confiscated from the prisoners (Fackler 2003, 5). Some of the ensembles could rehearse frequently, perform regularly and even reach a relatively high artistic standard. Others had to cope with less favorable conditions like the poor physical health of the musicians, the lack of musical instruments and scores, personnel changes due to death or deportation and little time for rehearsals (Fackler 2007, 15).

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The symphony orchestra in Auschwitz I-Stammlager was the largest. Established in December 1940, the orchestra grew from about 80 to 120 members in 1944. Initially, the orchestra consisted exclusively of non-Jewish prisoners. Only after most of them were transferred to Germany in late 1944 was the conductor10 allowed to recruit Jewish prisoners for the orchestra (Henke 1998, 25). Auschwitz II-Birkenau consisted of two camps: a men’s and women’s camp. Each had their own symphony orchestra. The Birkenau men’s orchestra was established in July 1942 when, at the orders of Commandant Johann Schwarzhuber, sixteen musicians were brought over from the main camp’s orchestra. By recruiting new arrivals from Holland, Greece, Poland, France, and ­Germany the orchestra grew to between forty and fifty musicians.11 They enjoyed support from Commandant Schwarzhuber who, for example, personally ordered the provision of musical instruments and scores (Gilbert 2005, 180). The Birkenau women’s orchestra, established in April 1943, grew to approximately forty-five members, including women from Germany, Poland, France, Hungary, The ­Netherlands, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Belgium Russia, Ukraine, and Austria (Knapp 1996).12 They played an improbable combination of i­nstruments: piano, violin, cello, double bass, and percussion, with accordion, mandolin, flute, guitar, horn and recorder. Additionally, the orchestra worked with ­vocalists (Eischeid 2016, 6). In Auschwitz III-Monowitz an orchestra was created in September 1943. It consisted of between forty and fifty members. Many of them were accomplished professional musicians, including several famous jazz instrumentalists from Holland (Gilbert 2005, 179). In the extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, fewer musicians were recruited for the camp orchestras. In the Treblinka camp, a trio of violin, clarinet, and harmonica was formed which over time would become

10

11

12

The first conductor was the Polish inmate Franciszek Nierychło. In 1942, he was replaced by the well-respected Warsaw musician Adam Kopycinski who retained the position until the orchestra’s dissolution in 1945. He survived Auschwitz and founded the Wroclaw ­Philharmonic Orchestra in Poland. The orchestra played under the leadership of Jan Zaborski. In October 1942, Franz Kopka took over. From mid-1943 on, the orchestra was conducted by Szymon Laks (1901–1983), a Jewish prisoner who had already played in the orchestra as violinist and worked as a copyist of scores. He also survived the camp and wrote his memoir Musiques d’un autre monde (1948) translated as Music of another World (Laks 1989). The first conductor was the Polish Sofia Tchaikovska. In August 1943, she was replaced by the charismatic Viennese musician Alma Rose (1906–1944). She died of a sudden ­illness, presumably food poisoning. It is a myth that she was murdered by Joseph Mengele (­Newman and Kirtley 2000).

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an ensemble of ten.13 Similar small ensembles were formed in the Bełzec and Sobibór camps. The Chełmno and Majdanek camps are the only ones where almost no musical activity has been documented. In the Janowska camp, a prisoners’ orchestra was assembled in 1942 by the camp commandant SS-Obersturmführer Gustav ­Willhaus and his deputy SS-Untersturmführer Richard Rokita.14 They recruited leading Jewish musicians from Lviv. The city was the home of a large Jewish community and a centuries-old, well-organized, and vibrant musical culture. It had a National Theatre of Opera and Ballet, a Philharmonic and Symphony Orchestra, a faculty of musicology, and two conservatories, one of the Polish and one of the Ukrainian Music Society. Many Jewish musicians were employed by these institutions. This large population of professional ­musicians explains why so many professional musicians could be recruited for the Janowska camp orchestra, which was established during the summer of 1942 (Redzik 2014a, 216). Unlike the smaller musical ensembles in the ­Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec, camps, the Janowska camp sported an orchestra of approximately forty musicians. In size and quality, the orchestra was comparable only to the orchestras of the Auschwitz-II-Birkenau men’s and women’s camp. 5

Purpose of Camp Music

Ambitious camp commandants with cultural pretensions were attracted by the prestige and cultural status of having their ‘own’ camp orchestra (Fackler 2007, 8). An orchestra could also be useful for advertising the ‘orderly’ conditions within their camp to high-ranking visitors (Brauer 2012, 191). However, depending on the quantity and quality of the musicians, the camp orchestras could be used for multiple purposes. They were used for entertainment of SS officers and guards. The orchestras would have to play concerts before SS officers as well as on ceremonial occasions and Nazi public holidays like Hitler’s birthday. During the summer months, open-air concerts were held in some camps, including the Auschwitz I-Stammlager (Fackler 2007, 9). The primary audiences were the above-mentioned officers and guards; the prisoners themselves could only attend these concerts occasionally (Gilbert 2005, 188).

13 14

The ensemble was conducted by the famous Polish-Jewish violinist and dance-music composer Arthur Gold who would not survive the camp. Richard Rokita had been a violinist in a Silesian café (Wiesenthal 1998) and/or the d­ irector of a jazz orchestra before the war (Reznik 2014a, 224).

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Music was more commonly used to discipline and punish, however. The camp orchestras were forced to play during roll call at the Appellplatz and to provide the rhythm to keep the marching columns of prisoners in step as they left the camp or returned from their work as forced laborers (Fackler 2007, 9). In Auschwitz, both the men’s and the women’s orchestra were compelled to play at the entrance gate, “rain or shine, morning and night, during the departure and arrival of the work gangs, playing well-known marches and other pieces” (Brauer 2016, 22). Music was also used sadistically to ‘celebrate’ executions. In Auschwitz, for example, a prisoner who had tried to escape to no avail was hanged in front of his fellow prisoners while the orchestra was playing (Gilbert 2005, 176). In the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka, musicians were forced to ‘welcome’ – and, thereby, deceive – the new arrivals. Depending on the origins of the transported prisoners, they would be forced to play anything from opera to folk music. In Treblinka, new transports were received at a fake train station complete with waiting areas, timetables, signposts indicating baths and changing rooms, and a uniformed orchestra playing Jewish folk tunes (Gilbert 2005, 193). While some survivors remember having been ‘welcomed’ to Auschwitz with loud noise, shouting and barking dogs as they were driven out of the train wagons by SS men with bats and whips,15 others remember how music was played when transports arrived and newcomers were selected to do forced labor or be killed in the gas chamber.16 Indeed, from 1944 on when new transports were delivered to the infamous ramp at Birkenau, an orchestra would be positioned there to greet the new arrivals and provide musical accompaniment to the selections, playing popular music, songs and dance melodies. The entire staging was designed to hide the function of the extermination camp. The music allowed new arrivals to believe that things could not be so bad. In other words, the music was not meant to entertain, but rather to deceive, i.e. to soften the shock and make it easier for the SS men to control the crowd (Gilbert 2005, 178; Gilbert 2011, 441–442). The infirmary was another site where the camp commander would send musicians to perform, usually just before a selection for the gas chamber (Brauer 2016, 22). However, the sound of music may also have been used to 15 16

See, for example, the story of Lex van Weren, the Dutch trumpet player of Auschwitz (Walda 1980) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDhukbKSt2Q. It has been claimed that playing for new arrivals in Auschwitz “was the duty of the ­women’s orchestra alone, because the female musicians were always available” (Brauer 2016, 18).

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deceive the population in the surrounding villages and to cover up the crimes being perpetrated in the camps (Dahm 1997, 3). In the Majdanek camp, instead of an orchestra playing, they had dance music blasting from loudspeakers mounted on special vehicles in order “to drown out the screams of the dying” (Fackler 2007, 6). 6 Repertoire Compared to the forced singing mentioned above, the camp orchestras offered a broader spectrum of music. Their repertoire could include anything from classical music, opera and operetta melodies to marches, songs, film music, parlor music, light music, and dance music, including tango. H ­ istorical research has shown that half of the repertoire of the camp orchestras consisted of ‘light’ (marching-, operetta- and dance-) music while the other half ­consisted of classical music and excerpts from operas (Gilbert 2005, 131). In addition, the orchestras played popular prewar songs and film music (Gilbert 2005, 177; Fackler 2007, 9). All camp orchestras routinely played every morning and evening when prisoners were marched to and from the places where they were forced to work. On these occasions they played primarily German marching tunes.17 Often the most popular ones, like the well-known Alte Kameraden (Old Comrades) would have to be played repeatedly (Gilbert 2005, 183). At Sunday or evening concerts, the repertoire of the orchestras would be more refined. In the Auschwitz I-Stammlager, for example, the orchestra played on these occasions excerpts from operas and operettas, and substantial symphonic works by composers like Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and Tchaikovsky (Gilbert 2005, 188). In addition to these classical items, the Auschwitz II-Birkenau men’s orchestra played special commissions from the SS, like the potpourri Schwarze Augen (Dark Eyes) which was based on Russian songs (Gilbert 2005, 188). The repertoire of the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz II-Birkenau was more eclectic (Gilbert 2005, 188) and included arias from operas by Verdi, ­Puccini, and Rossini, orchestral music by Brahms, Mozart and Schubert, ­selections and arrangements of lighter classical works by composers like Lehár 17

In the Auschwitz I-Stammlager, the orchestra performed original compositions, ­including the camp song Arbeit macht frei (Work sets you free) composed by the first conductor Franciszek Nierychło and the Arbeitslager-Marsch (Labor camp march) by violinist ­Henryk Król (Gilbert 2005, 183).

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and Von Suppé, waltzes by Johann Strauss and, especially, the dance-hall ­Jalousie-tango which was the favorite piece of the women’s camp commandant Maria Mandel (Eischeid 2016, 8). Members of the orchestras could be ordered at any time to give private ­performances. The connoisseurs among the upper ranks of the SS would ­prefer chamber music by composers like Mozart and Schumann,18 while the lower ranks secured the services of small ensembles or individual musicians to ­provide light or even ‘degenerate’ jazz music for their drinking sessions, orgies, and other feasts (Fackler 2007, 12). 7

Memories of Wagner

Those who did not survive can no longer testify about the music that was played or if any music was played for that matter, as they made their way to the gas chambers. Only survivors of the camps can testify to what they have heard and seen. Historians have attempted to reconstruct the repertoire of the camp orchestras based on these memories.19 Survivors of Auschwitz, for example, have recalled the camp orchestra playing Wagner. One of them, a musician, has claimed that, following direct orders from the Führer, they were not permitted to perform anything else but Wagner (Gaschen 1989, 5). Another surviving musician, Henryk Eisenman, has told that when he arrived in A ­ uschwitz in early 1944, he was received with the sounds of “a full, first-class symphony orchestra performing Wagner’s Lohengrin” (Kater 2000, 80; Kater 2003, 180). Nathan Vuijsje, a Jewish trombone player in the Auschwitz I-Stammlager orchestra, remembered playing ‘parts of Wagner symphonies’ (Vuijsje 2012, 125). Wagner had however published just one symphony, in C-minor (WWV 29). It was not until the late 1980s that an unfinished symphony in E-minor (WWV 35) was discovered (Millington 2001, 310). In contrast, other survivors did not remember – or even strongly denied – that Wagner’s music was played in the camps. David Zauder, who had been a trumpet player in the Auschwitz I-Stammlager orchestra, claimed that: “I never heard Wagner until I came to the United States.”20 Anita Lasker-­ Wahllfisch, who had played cello in the Frauenkapelle (women’s orchestra) of 18 19 20

Auschwitz camp commandant Josef Kramer, for example, especially liked Schumann’s Träumerei (Reverie) to be played for him (Eischeid 2016, 49). With regard to their musical preferences, the SS have hardly left anything behind (Brauer 2012, 201). The New York Times, January 12, 1992.

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the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp told the British actor, writer and presenter Stephen Fry that: “I can’t remember hearing a single note of Wagner in all my time there.”21 Other surviving members of the camp orchestras in Auschwitz insisted that “they did not play while people were marched to the gas chambers (one of the rumors which grew in the postwar years)” (Gilbert 2005, 176). This was confirmed by former inmates of Auschwitz in Israel who testified that the camp orchestras never played works by Wagner to those marching to their death (Sheffi 2001, 59). And, last but not least, Jonathan Livny, the founding president of the Israeli Wagner Society, called the idea ‘absurd.’ Playing Wagner would have required a large orchestra with professional musicians and special wind instruments that were not available.22 In most camps, the orchestras were much too small. And, while the symphony orchestras in the Auschwitz camps were larger, they lacked professional musicians capable of playing the instruments needed for this demanding music if they had been available. In other words, while some camp survivors ‘remembered’ Jews being marched off to the gas chambers accompanied by the sounds of Wagner’s music, the claim that Wagner’s works were actually played in the camps has not been substantiated by historical research (Sheffi 2001, 58). In accounts of what kind of music the camp orchestras played, references to Wagner are rarely found. A few survivors have recalled hearing strains of Wagner, but most of the eyewitnesses made no mention of his music or strongly denied having heard it in the camps. Instead, they agreed that light music, such as Strauss waltzes, Suppé overtures, operetta arias, German marches, and the like, prevailed.23 Historians have studied documents (scores and programs) that were recovered after the war and are preserved in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. Among the circa 200 scores carrying the stamp of the Lagerkappelle, only one score is of an original work by Richard Wagner (1813–1883). It is Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (The Love-Meal of the Apostles) catalogued as 1843, WWV 69. It is an early piece of Wagner written for chorus with only a small final part for orchestra. Nowadays this little-known work is rarely performed, but in the interbellum it was popular as study material for amateur choruses. In addition to this odd composition, only four scores are preserved of arrangements based on themes composed by Wagner. The arrangements are: Otto Hohmann, 21 22 23

In his documentary film ‘Wagner and Me.’ A Wavelength Films Production in Association with the BBC, UK, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=hlmaEpw7oz0. “Were the victims accompanied by a large orchestra in Wagner occupation? With choir and soloists? It is completely absurd.” https://rexvalrexblog.wordpress.com/2014/12/17 /en-los-campos-nazis-nunca-se-interpreto-musica-de-wagner/. Alex Ross, The Case for Wagner in Israel. The New York Times, September 25, 2012.

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Erinnerung an Richard Wagners Rienzi and Erinnerung an Richard Wagners Lohengrin; Fr. Eberle, Kleine Fantasie über R. Wagners Lohengrin and Ernst Urbach, Wagners Heldenbuch/Fantasie (Szczęśniak 2017, 157). In the interbellum, such arrangements for piano or a relatively small musical ensemble were highly popular and widely distributed among amateur musicians. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that some of the musicians carried these scores along with their musical instruments on their way to Auschwitz. Although the possibility cannot be excluded completely that an occasional original work by Wagner24 was played in the camps, it is much more likely that the orchestras played arrangements rather than original scores of Wagner’s music.25 These arrangements were easier to play than the original compositions, and yet they still sounded like vintage Wagner. This may explain why a musician like Henryk Eisenman recognized melodies from Wagner’s Lohengrin, when, in fact, what he heard was the orchestra playing merely an arrangement, either Otto Hohmann’s Erinnerung an Richard Wagners Lohengrin or Friedrich Eberle’s Kleine Fantasie über Richard Wagners Lohengrin. 8

Wagner Myths

On the basis of documents (musical scores and concert programs) that were recovered after the war, it can be concluded that the camp orchestras of ­Auschwitz almost certainly did not play Wagner (Petzmeier 2014, 102). It is certainly possible that prisoners heard radio or gramophone recordings of Wagner compositions over the camp loudspeaker system. But the belief that Wagner’s music was played by camp orchestras as accompaniment to the victims as they were led to the gas chambers is unsupported by historical research and must, therefore, be considered as a myth. Yet, to merely disqualify this belief as a case of fictional memory would not do justice to the traumatic experiences of those who survived the Holocaust. Rather, we need to understand the reasons

24 25

For example, the Symphony in C major which is scored for a relatively small ensemble of 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings. Programs of concerts given by the camp orchestra of Sachsenhausen show only one title of an original composition by Wagner (Gilbert 2005, 131, 213). However, this ‘Overture Rienzi’ may, in fact, have referred to the Erinnerung an Richard Wagners Rienzi (­Remembrance of Richard Wagner’s Rienzi), a popular arrangement composed by Otto Hohmann which, like his Erinnerung an Richard Wagners Lohengrin (Remembrance of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin), has been misclassified (Fujii 2012, 84, 89, 91).

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why the music of Wagner has become associated in their memory with the gas chambers and, indirectly, with the legend of the Tango of Death. To this end, a brief excursion into the critical literature on Wagner is in order. The composer Richard Wagner is notorious for his antisemitism and believed to have been a major source of inspiration for Hitler and the Nazis. While there is no doubt that Wagner was an anti-Semite, perhaps26 even a particularly malignant one, his ideological influence on Hitler is often exaggerated (Ross 2020, 515). In fact, there is ample reason to question that Wagner was a source of Nazi ideology at all or that his antisemitism played a significant role in Hitler’s own political development. The idea that Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jews was part of his love for Wagner, as Köhler, for example, has argued (Köhler 2000, 293), is based on a myth. There is no evidence that the Final Solution to the Jewish Question originated in Hitler’s affinity with Wagner’s antisemitism, nor that Hitler’s fascination with Richard ­Wagner was ideological rather than strictly musical. Hitler never discussed Wagner’s antisemitism or his ­opinions on Judaism and Jews in public, nor did he write about them – not even in Mein Kampf (My Struggle) which derived its title from Wagner’s autobiography Mein Leben (My Life) (Porat 2006, 90, 96). All Hitler seemed to be concerned with was the music “that made him feel worthy of becoming the redemptive leader, as he saw his role” (Porat 2006, 89). His boundless admiration for the genius of the great German composer inspired him to use Wagner’s operas as a political tool to create an image of himself as the Führer and to entice millions of Germans to follow him in his political mission. The Nazi leadership did not share Hitler’s enthusiasm for ­Wagner, but that did not prevent Hitler from “dictating the master’s message – as he understood it – to Germany” (Porat 2006, 103). In order to implement the legacy he took from Wagner in his party, ­Hitler deliberately created rallies held at the Reichsparteitagsgelände (Nazi party rally grounds) in Nuremberg, investing much time and effort in planning these mass meetings and making sure they always opened with the overtures to Rienzi and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Porat 2006, 96–97). Wagner’s music was included in pro-Nazi and antisemitic propaganda films like Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) and Jud Süss (Jew Suss). The Walkürenritt (Ride of the Valkyries)27 taken from Wagner’s epic opera cycle Der Ring des 26 27

“Since the end of the war, the source, nature and intensity of Wagner’s antisemitism have been abundantly researched and vociferously debated – with little or no consensus emerging regarding its role in Wagner’s Weltanschauung.” (Porat 2006, 91) It is the beginning the third act of the opera Die Walküre which is the second part of the cycle.

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Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) (1851–1856) was often used in newsreels, as background music for images of air raids by the Luftwaffe (German Air Force), for example, on military installations in and around the city of Paris.28 Melodies from the overture to Rienzi were plugged on the Großdeutscher Rundfunk (Greater German Broadcast) to introduce official announcements and the funeral march from Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods)29 was played on the radio whenever a prominent Nazi died (Carr 2008, 50; Sheffi 2001, 56) While Wagner’s antisemitism was not a source of the Nazi ideology – which was, to put it mildly, rather eclectic – his music enabled Hitler to mesmerize the masses and to instill in them the feelings self-righteousness and racial superiority that ultimately enabled them to commit or stand by what, in hindsight, would be called the Holocaust. It is, therefore, unsurprising that many Holocaust survivors felt a deep aversion for the antisemitic composer whose music was so loved by Hitler and used by him as a source of inspiration (Siegel 2013). It is understandable that they might have believed that Wagner’s music would have been played in the death camps, even as the victims made their way to the gas chambers. For some of the survivors of the Holocaust, preserving the Wagner myth is essential to their memorializing the Holocaust. What they hear (or rather avoid hearing) is ‘music of death’ reminding them of the horrors of the camps. If we consider what the Wagner myth means to survivors having to live with the memories of life and death in the camps, then we can understand that while, on a strictly historical level, the ‘sonic image of Wagner in Auschwitz’ is unfounded, it cannot be denied that “on a psychological level, it gets to a deeper truth” (Ross 2020, 558). The above leads me to the conclusion that the “historically shaky but emotionally tenacious idea that Wagner had been heard in the death camps” (Ross 2020, 639) may have been the catalyst for the conflation of, on the one hand, the myth that Jews were led into the gas chambers to the strains of Wagner and, on the other, the story that a Tango of Death was played by an orchestra of prisoners at executions in a Ukrainian concentration camp. In the next chapter, I will tackle the initial story upon which the legend is based. What was the name of this tango? Who composed it? Who called it the Tango of Death? And, why? 28 See https://www.net-film.ru/en/film-63986/ at 7.10 minutes. 29 It is the fourth and concluding part of the opera cycle.

CHAPTER 3

The Tango of Death In the previous chapter, we have seen that the Soviet prosecution at the Nuremberg trial charged that the Nazis forced the orchestra of prisoners in the Janowska (Yanov) camp to play at executions an especially composed ‘­execution melody’ to be called Tango of Death. While it has been claimed that “all music played by prisoners during executions received the generic name of Tango of Death” (Czackis 2009, 116), this chapter continues to trace the roots of the story by looking more specifically at which tango actually accompanied those who were to die in that concentration camp in Ukraine. What was the actual title of that tango and who was the composer? As we will see, there are basically three versions of the story of the Tango of Death. The first is that this tango and its composer were Argentinian, the second that they were Polish, and the third that its precedence can simply not be determined. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Argentinian historians of tango (­Nudler 1998, 28; Judkovski 1998, 26) are convinced that the Tango of Death was an Argentinian tango. As we will see, this belief is based on the memory of a survivor of the Janowska camp recalling a song the prisoners used to sing. These are reasons enough to start with a few words about the singing of tangos by prisoners in concentration and extermination camps. 1

Singing Tangos

In the 1920s and 1930s, tango was extremely popular, not only in Argentina but also in Europe. Dancing tango was fashionable in France and Germany, but “no other country of Europe became such an object of tango-fever as Poland.”1 It should, therefore, come as no surprise that prewar tangos were played by the orchestras of prisoners in concentration and extermination camps like ­Auschwitz or Janowska. Survivors of these camps have remembered tangos being played along with other popular music of the interbellum.2 Auschwitz survivor Bernhard Klieger, for example, remembered that: ‘We heard tangos and other hit music’ (Klieger 1963, 38). 1 Jerzy Placzkiewicz, Tango in Poland, 1913–1939. https://www.todotango.com/english/history /chronicle/165/Tango-in-Poland-1913-1939/. 2 See also Brauer (2012, 202). © Willem de Haan, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004525078_004

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Among the circa 200 scores of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp orchestra in the collection of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum (Szczesniak 2017), twelve are of tangos.3 With their melancholic melodies and lyrics drenched in nostalgia, tangos are believed to have had a special appeal to Jews. This would explain why tango melodies were often sung by Jewish prisoners in the death camps. Apparently, singing these melancholic songs of longing and love ­supposedly offered them the opportunity to escape their grim reality and alleviate their terrible loneliness, if only for a moment. The ‘singability’ of these melodies inspired several writers to create new songs with lyrics in German or German-Yiddish, the common languages of the Central and Eastern ­European Ashkenazi Jews (Werb 2014a, 110), but also in other languages, like Polish, Czech and Russian (Gilbert 2011, 438). These songs, created by substituting elements of the text without substantial change to the music, are called contrafacta (Czackis 2009, 116). Writing and singing these songs enabled prisoners to share the hardships of camp life – hunger, hard labor, disease, and death – as well as to express “emotions ranging from nostalgia to anger, pain, despair, loss of faith, guilt at having survived family members, frustration, uncertainty, and the desire for revenge” (Gilbert 2011, 450). Some of these new songs were written especially for satirical purposes. But more commonly these songs were written as a testimony to posterity about the abuses taking place in the camps. They show the ingenuity and creativity of the prisoners and have become a symbol of their will to survive (Czackis 2003; 2004).

3

Most of these tangos were by German composers: Gerhard Mohr (1901–1979), Du hast den schönsten Mund /Monika-Luise!; Frank Fux [Fox] (1902–1965), Weisst du noch (Tango Serenade aus dem Algefa-Film “Aufruhr im Damenstift,” arr. Gerhard Mohr); Michael Jary (1906–1988), Roter Mohn Tango aus dem Algefa-Film “Schwarzfahrt ins Glück”; Gerhard Winkler (1906–1977), Klein Sennerin/Lied und Tango; Gino Redi (1908–1962), Die Phantastische Nacht /Tango Bolero; Friedrich Schröder (1910–1972), Ja, so war es zu Grossmutters Zeiten Lied und Tango; Ralph Maria Siegel (1911–1972), In Freundschaft (Tango und Konzertlied, arr. Franz Stolzenwald); Idem., Unter der roten Laterne von St. Pauli (Tangolied); Idem., Heut wird ein Märchen wahr (Tango); Franz Josef Breuer (1914–1996), Weit ist der Weg in die Heimat (Lied und Tango, arr. Franz Stolzenwald); Stassi D. Tombulis (unknown) Traum von Haiti (Ein Südsee Tango, arr. Franz Stolzenwald). The only non-German tango was by the Danish composer Jacob Gade (1879–1963) Jalousie (Tango Tzigane, arr. Georges Martine) (Szczęśniak 2017, 162–171).

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After the war, several attempts were made to collect these camp songs. Important are the Kaczerginsky4 and the Kulisiewicz5 collections, both at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.6 The efforts of these collectors were hampered by the fact that many survivors only recalled fragments of the songs and were often unable to remember where or when they had heard them or to identify the authorship of the lyrics (Gilbert 2005, 150). Yet hundreds of songs were recovered, including many tangos.7 Here are a few examples. Der tango fun Oshvientshim (The Auschwitz tango) is a newly created song based on the tune of Niewolnicze Tango (Slave tango), a popular ­Yiddish song from the Warsaw ghetto. The lyrics were supposedly written in Polish by an unnamed 12-year old Jewish girl who did not survive the Holocaust (Kaczerginski 1948, 127). The voice in the song mourns the lack of cheerful music in the camp and expresses the hope that this song will be uplifting for the prisoners. The end of the song goes like this:

4 Shmaryahu (‘Shmerke’) Kaczerginski (1908–1954) was a Yiddish-speaking poet and musician who dedicated much of his time to collecting prewar Yiddish songs and songs of the Holocaust. It has been claimed that the songs were originally collected at the direction of the Nazis who commissioned the prisoner Kacherginsky to collect texts and scores for the intended Hitler’s ‘Museum of the Disappeared Subhumans’ in Berlin. See https://jewish.ru /ru/stories/reviews/3109/ After Kacherginsky managed to escape to the partisans, he con�tinued to collect the lyrics of the songs which were included in the collection. According to musicologist and curator of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., Bret Werb: “Kaczerginski’s magnum opus, the anthology Lider fun di getos un lagern (Songs of the Ghettos and Camps), published in New York in 1948, remains unsurpassed to this day as a resource for research in the field of Jewish folk and popular music of the Holocaust period.” (Werb 2014, ii). 5 Aleksander Tytus Kulisiewicz (1918–1982) was a law student in Nazi-occupied Poland when, in October 1939, he was denounced for anti-fascist writings, arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. Travelling as a journalist through Poland and other Eastern European countries, he conducted interviews with survivors and compiled an extensive archive (Milewski 2014, 145). On microfilms and audio tape he documented the genesis of over 600 Polish concentration camp songs and 200 songs by prisoners of other nations. The archive also contains folders with sketches, watercolors, reproductions of sculptures and poems from 21 different concentration camps. Kulisiewicz’s near-finished 3,000-page typescript of song texts, musical notation and extensive annotations – the product of twenty years of painstaking research – includes some 500 songs representing the musical activity of 36 different camps. https://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/collection /data/122648298. 6 For other early collections of prewar Yiddish songs and songs of the Holocaust, see Werb (2014). 7 The Kaczerginski collection of Holocaust songs includes 38 tangos (Judkowski 1998, 26). The Kulisiewicz Collection also contains a number of tangos, including some arrangements of tango music for string quartet. Kulisiewicz Collection. USHMM, RG-55.003.0.

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37

Oh, freedom and free times are calling. The Negro soon brings his ­mandolin and will soon tinkle his song here. And the Englishman and Frenchman sing a tune. From sorrow will come a trio and also the Polack soon will take up his little flute and make the whole world feel. Let song then rouse the hearts that yearn for the freedom they lack. Our ­slave-tango … (Gilbert 2005, 157) An anonymous verse called Gazownia (Gas chamber) was written to the tune of a romantic Polish tango Jest jedna jedyna (There is only one). In the new song, the original line – “There is only one, which I love the most. I will sacrifice everything for her, all nights and days” – is changed into: “There is only one gas chamber, where we will all get to know each other, where we will all meet each other, maybe tomorrow – who knows?” Gilbert notes that many of these newly created camp songs reflect this kind of ‘numbed calmness’ and ‘astonishing equanimity’ toward the grim reality around them (Gilbert 2005, 151–152). A particularly striking example is a song remembered by a survivor of the Janowska camp where the story of the Tango of Death originated. It is retrieved from a document in the Kulisiewicz collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The document, in Polish and German, is showing the name of the survivor (Anna Muzyczka), year of birth (1923), year of arrest (1941) and period of detention in the Janowska forced-labor camp (until December 4, 1943). This is the verse she remembered, and Aleksander Kulisiewicz translated into English: Hear it how the fiddle sobbing plays bloody notes of sweet string music. Hear how your heartbeat fades away. And so death tango plays. Have no fear, my dear. Sand will cover up your body, bright star candles be your nightlight and your pillow be a single stone. But happy will you be so all alone. Shots are falling, bullets flying. Separation! Poison! Keep playing. And if death grabs your hand, just be ready, death’s a friend.8 These agonizing lyrics of suffering touch on experiences where music and song “are - must be! - silent: absolute hopelessness” (John 2001, 299). We need to pay particular attention to this song because at the top of the typewritten document, the German words Das Todestango (The Tango of Death) are written in pencil and underlined as if this were the title of the song.9 Survivor Anna 8 Kulisiewicz (1979, 9). 9 Kulisiewicz Collection. USHMM, RG-55.003.0. Remarkably, in the title, like in the lyrics of the song (in German), the word Todestango is preceded by the incorrect prefix ‘das’ instead of ‘der.’ This could be explained by the fact that Anna Muzyczka was not a native speaker of German.

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Muzyczka did not – or could not – identify the person who created these words which has been reason to conclude that the author of these lyrics is unknown (Kulisiewicz 1979, 9; Beyssade 2018, 86). Other survivors of the Janowska camp, however, have named who they believed to be the author of the Tango of Death. Survivor Yehuda Ayzman claimed that a Jewish girl wrote the song which he, admittedly, did not know well enough to include it in his collection.10 Probably he had the Jewish girl in mind who was believed to have written the before mentioned song Der tango fun Oshvientshim (The tango from Auschwitz). A more likely candidate for being the author of the Tango of Death is the Polish poet Emanuel Schlechter (1904–1943). This suggestion comes from Nazi hunter Szymon Wiesenthal, also a survivor of the Janowska camp. In his memoir, he claimed that a certain Zygmunt Schlechter composed the music of the Tango of Death (Wiesenthal 1998, 22). There was no composer Schlechter imprisoned in the Janowska camp whose first name was Zygmunt11 but there was the writer Emanuel (born as Edmund) Schlechter who organized literary evenings in the camp. Also writing under pseudonyms like Eman Schlechter, Eman Mundek and Olgierd Lech, he was a scriptwriter of several famous prewar films and the author of numerous (still widely known) prewar hits, including at least twenty tangos (Reznik 2014b). It is most likely that he was the one who wrote the lyrics of the tango survivor Anna Muzyczka remembered. Supporting this conclusion are the chilling similarities between these lyrics and the song Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden), composed in 1817 by Franz Schubert to a poem of Matthias Claudius (1740–1815). In this poem, Death comes to claim an adolescent girl. In the first stanza she is not prepared to go quietly and sings: “Pass by, alas, pass by! Go, you savage skeleton! I am still young, go, oh dear! And do not touch me.” In the second stanza, Death seeks to calm her and allay her fears: “Give me your hand, you fair and tender creature; I am a friend and do not come to punish you. Be of good cheer! I am not savage. Gently you will sleep in my arms.”12 In Claudius’ poem, Death tells the girl (‘you fair and tender creature’) that she should be hopeful because he is a friend and does not mean any harm 10 11

12

Yehuda Ayzman, A gravestone for my mother (Eismann 1945, 1). See Werb (2014a, 217; 2014b, 41, note 5); Toltz and Boucher (2018, 314). Bret Werb has suggested that Wiesenthal may have mistakenly combined Emanuel Schlechter’s last name with the first name of his frequent songwriting partner Zygmunt Wiehler, a pianist, conductor and composer of symphonic, choral, operetta, dance and film music. Personal communication. https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/music-history-monday-death-and-the-maiden/.

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(‘punish you’). In the lyrics of the tango, Death is telling the girl (‘my love’) that she should not be afraid when she hears the violin play the Tango of Death and fears that her end is approaching. In the poem, Death asks the girl to give him her hand; in the tango he takes her by the hand. In the poem, Death reassures the girl that she will sleep softly in his arms; in the tango he promises her that she will be happy under a blanket of sand with her head on a stone. These striking similarities suggest that the lyrics of the tango, remembered by survivor Anna Muzyczka, could well have been written by Emanuel Schlechter. A man of his intellectual stature could have been expected to know the song by Schubert and he might easily have been inspired by the poem by Claudius. Having identified the author of the song, we are left with the question of who was the composer of the tango the orchestra of prisoners in the Janowska camp was forced to play at executions. As we will see, the melody of the song Anna Muzyczka remembered has been identified as an Argentinian tango and considered – in my view erroneously – as the Tango of Death. After searching the archives and taking stock of the literature, I found alternative versions of the story of the Tango of Death. In one story the tango and the composer are unknown, but in another they were Polish. I will discuss all three versions and make the case that the tango the orchestra of prisoners in the Janowska camp played at executions and called the Tango of Death was, in fact, Jewish. 2

Three Versions

In the first version of the story, the melody and the composer of the Tango of Death are unknown. The original source of this story is the Soviet ­Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR.13 In its report Hitler crimes against peaceful 13

The commission was appointed by decree of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on 2 November 1942. Chair of the commision was Nikolay Mikhailovich Shvernik, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR. The commission published a total of 54 reports. Articles with excerpts from the reports were published in the Pravda, Izvestia and Red Star newspapers. They also appeared in English in the daily Soviet War News issued by the Press Department of the Soviet Embassy in London between June 28, 1943 and September 18, 1945. A collection of the communiqués issued by the commission appeared in the Soviet Government publication, Soviet Government Statement on Nazi Atrocities. London: Hutchinson 1946. At the Nuremberg Trial, reports of the Commission were given into evidence as Exhibits of the Soviet Prosecution.

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population. Report of the Extraordinary State Commission investigating the German-Fascist Atrocities in the Region of Lvov, the commission claimed that “the composers of the orchestra were ordered to write a special execution melody which, on order of the Hitler sadists, was called the ‘Tango of Death.’”14 This was reiterated at the Nuremberg trial by the Soviet Prosecutor Colonel Smirnov.15 But, Leon Weliczer Wells, a survivor of the Janowska camp, told a different story. In his memoir The Janowska Road, he recalled that many, if not all, of the prisoners believed that one day the orchestra would play for them the Tango of Death “as we call it” (Wells 1963, 135). This statement is in line with the ­testimony that it was only after the prisoners in the Janowska camp had already given the Tango of Death its name that the SS men and guards laughed maliciously and jeered: ‘That’s right, the Tango of Death!’ (Tokarev 1973, 155). While there can be no doubt that during executions in the Janowska camp the orchestra was forced to play a tango16 which the prisoners called the Tango of Death, the question remains: who composed this ‘special execution m ­ elody’? According to some reports, the director of the orchestra Yakub Mund was the composer of the tune. Others claim that it was the violinist Zygmunt Schatz, and still others believe that it was the pianist Eduard Steinberger (Pagirya 2019). In his memoir as an investigator for the Soviet Extraordinary State ­Commission, Sergey Trofimovich Kuzmin told how he collected incriminating evidence for the war crimes committed by the Nazis in the region of Lvov.17 It

14 15 16

17

One of them was the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission investigating the ­German-Fascist Atrocities in the Lvov Region. Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, 1949, Volume XXIV, 170–186. Report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Discovery and Investigation of ­German Fascist Crimes in the City of Lemberg, November 1–6, 1944. Bundesarchiv ­Ludwigsburg B162/29309, 1–427, at p. 29. The Trial of German Major War Criminals, Vol. 7, February 14, 1946, 450–451. One survivor remembered that the tango was played for the hanged while during shootings the orchestra played waltzes composed by Johann Strauss. Testimony of prisoner Zygmund Samsonovich Leiner in: Leonid Leshchinsky, Tango of Death, Proza.ru, 2009 at https://www.proza.ru/2009/10/24/1084. The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission investigating the Nazi war crimes committed in the region of Lvov included the Chairman of the Lviv City Council Executive Committee V. Boyko, the Chief Forensic Medical Expert of the Red Army, Dr. M.I. Avdeeva, ­assistant Chief Forensic Medical Expert of the Red Army V.I. Pukhnarevich, Forensic Medical Expert D.A. Golaev, Forensic Expert N.I. Gerasimov, the Prosecutor of the Lviv Region I. Kornetov and the Head of the Investigation Department of the Lviv Regional Prosecutor’s Office Z. Kryzhanovsky.

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was in the summer of 1944, when he heard – for the first time18 – about tango music being played to accompany the shooting of prisoners in the Janowska camp. After one witness had told him that: “The blood was stiff in my veins and my heart was pounding when the orchestra performed the Tango of Death,” Kuzmin took a personal interest in the story and made an, as he put it, special effort to document ‘the cruel truth in all its details’ (Kuzmin 1985, 16). This is how he proceeded: We tried to find notes or at least people able to restore from memory this tragic melody. (-) But when we asked former prisoners to reproduce, even approximately, the theme of the composition, they did not have the strength to force themselves to indulge in terrible memories. We understood these people well and felt how in their minds the sounds of tango were tangled with the cracking of machine-gun bursts, the dying cries of the doomed and the mountains of corpses that ended this terrible picture. Our attempts to reproduce the notes as an accusatory document had to be abandoned. The Tango of Death, born in the camp, was buried there, along with the orchestrators whom the Nazis destroyed ... (­Kuzmin 1985, 16) While he failed to restore the notes, Kuzmin imagined that all the agonizing hopelessness of the existence of the prisoners of the Janowska camp was expressed by the composer in a mourning melody full of deep tragedy, literally a cry of a desperate human soul (Kuzmin 1985, 16). Ultimately, Kuzmin was forced to conclude that the name of the composer remains unknown, just like the precise melody of the Tango of Death. This remains to be the case even after another effort to retrieve the melody was later made by Bohdan Kokh, a survivor of the camp who recalled ‘the famous Tango of Death’ as the ‘highlight’ of his stay in Janowska. In his memoir The Meaning of Life (Kokh 2003, 18–19), he wrote down the notes he remembered. Tango friends have played the notes on the piano and the bandoneon but, while the melody sounds vaguely familiar, no-one (not even Shazam, an app that can recognize music by ‘listening’ to a short audio sample) has been able to identify the tango. Ultimately it was the Ukrainian historian Oleksandr Pahiria (Alexander Pagirya) who concluded

18

At the Nuremberg trial, which he attended as a special representative of the E ­ xtraordinary State Commission. Kuzmin “heard numerous testimonies about the shooting of prisoners to music in many fascist death camps, but this was later” (Kuzmin 1985, 16).

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Figure 2 Eduardo Bianco Courtesy of Todo Tango

that like their composer, the “tango notes of death, unfortunately, have not survived.”19 The second version of the story is based on the document in the Kulisiewicz collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum showing the words of the song Janowska camp survivor Anna Muzyczka remembered. She had sung it, in May 1964, to the Polish ethnographer and collector of folklore, Jan Tacina who had worked with Aleksander Kulisiewicz on the project to collect written testimonies and record interviews with survivors on the subject of music in the camps. The document, which carries Tacina’s name at the top, is a typescript of the field notes he took. Below the words of the song, in Polish, is the melody annotated as g, fis, e, dis, e, fis, g, e, g, fis, e, dis, fis, e, dis, e, h, e, h, e, d, e, c, e, g, h, g, g, fis, e …… i t.d, followed by the words in German.20 Kulisiewicz identified the melody of the song as Plegaria, a tango written and composed by the Argentinian Eduardo Bianco (1892–1959) (Figure 2) who had moved from Buenos Aires to Paris where the tango was recorded by Odeon21 in 1927.

19 20 21

https://zbruc.eu/node/85555 posted on 21.12.2018. Kulisiewicz Collection. USHMM, RG-55.003.0. Odéon 165.098 mx: KI 1187.

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When Bianco toured Europe with his Orquesta Típica Bianco-Bachicha and Plegaria was also released in Germany, he became Der Tango-König (The King of Tango) and his tango a Schlager (top hit). Kulisiewicz sang the melody of this tango together with the words Anna Muzyczka remembered a capella for a recording of Das Todestango (The Tango of Death) which was released on an LP with Songs from the Depths of Hell (Kulisiewicz 1979). The song was a so-called contrafact created by adding new lyrics to an existing melody, in this case the melody of Plegaria.22 According to another document23 in the Kulisiewicz collection in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this popular tango was heard in the Janowska camp during selections and played by the well-known fiddler and composer Zygmunt Schatz.24 It has even been claimed that Schatz had composed the Tango of Death (Redzik 2014a, 217)25 but, in all probability, he merely played an arrangement26 of his ‘trademark tango’ (Czackis 2009, 116).27 But this, I will argue, was not, in fact, the Argentinian tango Plegaria. The belief that Plegaria was the Tango of Death is reinforced by the claim that this tango fascinated high ranking Nazis. If this were true, it must have been the music that captivated them because it is hard to believe that their fascination could have been caused by the lyrics of Plegaria. The title of the song ‘Prayer’ refers to the devotion of a dying woman, quite probably a prostitute, asking the Lord forgiveness for her sins. It seems more likely that the Nazis were intrigued by the solemnity of the music and the sound of church bells ringing at the beginning of the song, which is why in Germany Plegaria is sometimes called Der Glocken Ruf (The Bells Call).28 It has also been speculated that Plegaria fascinated the high ranking Nazis because the music of this tango resonated with the melody of the Schubert song Der Tod und das 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

It was not a ‘Nazi version’ of Plegaria with new words and with the title changed to Tango of Death (Naliwajek-Mazurek 2012, 220). Kulisiewicz Collection. USHMM, RG-55.003.0. Zygmunt Schatz was born 16.02.1899 in Kamionka Strumiłowa in the Lviv region, studied violin at the conservatory of the Galician Music Society in Lviv and the Academy of Music in Vienna, gave concerts in Austria, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia, conducted the orchestra in the Hotel George café in Lviv and led instrumental groups in entertainment venues in Katowice. He died in the Janowska camp in 1942. Referring to Jones (1999, 170), Honigsman (2003, 55) and Wiesenthal (2000, 22). The arrangement could have been the work of another musician of the orchestra, e.g. Mund (Friedman 1945) but was probably composed by Schatz himself (Beyssade 2018, 86). Lloica Czackis refers to Mieczyslaw R. Frenkiel who, in his book This is a Murder (1956), mentions Plegaria as the possible origin of the Tango of Death. See, for example, Neues Tango-Album. 12 berühmte Tangos für Accordeon. Schott 1985.

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Mädchen (Death and the Maiden) which begins and ends with a slow, solemn, funeral march-like passage in D minor.29 It has been claimed that Bianco and his Orquesta Típica Bianco-Bachicha had played Plegaria in Berlin at a luncheon organized in honor of the Führer by the Argentinian ambassador in 1939.30 It is believed that Hitler was so fond of Plegaria that he asked Bianco to play the tango again and ordered that camp orchestras would play the music to accompany prisoners to their final destination in the gas chambers (Czackis 2009, 116).31 This story32 is probably apocryphal. There is no testimony that Bianco and consorts actually played Plegaria in the presence of Adolf Hitler. It is likewise a myth that Hitler would have asked Juan Pecci, the bandoneon player of the orchestra who, at the luncheon, was also in charge of the assado (Argentinian barbecue) to explain how to roast lamb. And, that when the meat was done, the Führer took the first bite for the luncheon to begin. It is known for a fact the fact that Adolf Hitler by 1939 had already given up eating meat and become a vegetarian, if not in private than certainly in public.33 A third version of the story attributes the Tango of Death to a Polish ­composer. This story comes from the Ukrainian journalist Igor Malishevsky (1936–2015). In the early 1980s, he collected information about the Janowska camp, wrote a screenplay about the Tango of Death and, together with the Spanish film director Arnaldo Fernandez, created the documentary Восемь Тактов Забытой Музыки (Eight bars of forgotten music) (1982).34 In the film, survivors of the Janowska camp and senior musicians from the city of Lviv are interviewed and asked if they remember the melody of the ‘Tango of Death’ that the camp orchestra played. One Janowska camp survivor35 had claimed to have heard the camp orchestra play the tango. However, when asked about this on camera, he pulls back and says:

29 30 31 32

33 34 35

https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/music-history-monday-death-and-the-maiden/. Isodoro Gilbert, El tango de la muerte. Clarin, November 17, 2010. Gilbert admits that, in fact, it is not known if Bianco actually played his tango there. The story that Eduardo Bianco is El argentino que tocaba tangos para Hitler mientras su música sonaba en los campos de concentración (The Argentinian who played tangos for ­Hitler while his music was played in concentration camps) continues to circulate. See, e.g. the Asociación Israelita para el interior (aipi) (Israelian Association for the Interior), ­ Buenos Aires, November 4, 2021. See also http://www.musiques-regenerees.fr /­GhettosCamps/Camps/BiancoEduardo_Plegaria.html. According to Ilse Hess, Hitler ceased eating meat in 1937 (Toland 1976, 256). https://ihffilm.com/44017.html. Testimony of Zygmund Samsonovich Leiner. In: Leonid Leshchinsky, Tango of Death, Proza.ru, 2009 at https://www.proza.ru/2009/10/24/1084.

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Yes, I saw, and heard them. Twice. But from afar since our part of the camp was separated by barbed wire. They played different tunes. Tango was also played. I remember that. I remember the songs of our barrack (sings) and then there was the tango ... If I only would have known that the tune of that tango must be remembered! In the documentary, Malishevsky continues his search by pulling out a snippet of paper showing eight bars of a musical score which he claims to have found in the records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission.36 On camera, he shows the notes to an elderly man who taught music at the conservatory in Lviv. After just a quick look, this man cries out: Who does not know this? This is the macabre tango which, actually, had another name: To ostatnia niedziela. The composer of this music? ­Petersburski! In this way, a little piece of musical score recovered from an archive, finally enabled the Tango of Death to be identified as To ostatnia niedziela (The Last Sunday) one of the long-time hits composed in 1935 by the Jewish pianist and band leader Jerzy Petersburski (1895–1979).37 (Figure 3) It is not known how the snippet of paper with the eight bars of forgotten music came to be included in the records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission as it remains unclear why Kuzmin who, as a member of the ­commission, had a special interest in the story of the Tango of Death and made an effort to reproduce the notes as an accusatory document, was not aware of the existence of this piece of evidence. Regardless of this gap in the chain of proof, further testimony for this version of the story is given by other Holocaust survivors. In the documentary film The last klezmer: Leopold Kozlowski, his life and music (1994), the protagonist identifies To ostatnia niedziela as the tango he was forced to play on his violin during executions in the 36 37

On file in the State Archive of the Region of Lviv. Jerzy Petersburski grew up in a musical family. He received his first piano lessons from his mother. She belonged to the Melodysta family, famously known as klezmer musicians. With his cousins Henryk and Artur Gold he formed the Petersburski and Gold Orchestra. They became very successful by playing jazz, tangos and foxtrots in establishments in Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and Paris and recording numerous songs for Syrena Records with star singers like Adam Aston and Mieczysław Fogg. When the Nazis invaded Poland, Petersburski fled, first to Lviv and then to Cairo where he conducted radio programmes. After the war, he immigrated to Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela before returning to Warsaw in 1968. http://www.jerzypetersburski.pl/uk_otacie.html.

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Figure 3 Jerzy Petersburski, 1926 Courtesy of the Polish National Archive

Kurowice (Kurovychi) and Jáktorow (Yaktoriv) satellite camps of Janowska.38 When, SS officers ordered him to compose a tango, he played an arrangement of To ostatnia niedziela.39 Another Holocaust survivor, the musician and historian Moshe Hokh, came to the conclusion that the melody of the Tango of Death was, indeed, an adaptation of To ostatnia niedziela (Hokh 2002, 127).40 Hoch was not a survivor of the Janowska camp but had spent most of the time during the Nazi occupation wandering and hiding which means that he must have heard from others about the story of the Tango of Death. Much like the Ukrainian writer Jurij Vynnyčuk who, in his novel Танґо смерті (Tango of Death) (Vynnyčuk 2012; Wynnyczuk 2018; Vinnychuk 2019), talked to survivors of the Janowska camp and found that they recalled that melody precisely:

38

39 40

This is why Kurovychi has been called the ‘Lemberg concentration camp.’ See Michael Bischoff, Mit Akkordeon und Kalaschnikow. Polens Klezmer: Ein Filmdokument über die Lebensstationen des jüdischen Musikers Leopold Kozlowski. Nürnberger Nachrichten 16 Mai 1994, 30. Interview with Leopold Kozlowski. Jordan Kutzik, The Extraordinary Life of Leopold Kozlowski, The Last Klezmer of Galicia. The Jewish Forward, May 10, 2019. The article ­originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts of March 22, 2019. See also Strom 2002, 139. Musicologist Hanna Palmon of the Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew ­University in Jerusalem has claimed that the Jewish composer and violinist Schatz had been forced to arrange To ostatnia niedziela for the orchestra in order to be played on “the most bloodcurdling occasions” (Palmon 2019, 14). However, Palmon basis this claim on a speculation that a special melody called ‘Tango of Death’ was ‘most probably’ composed by Schatz (Torien 1993, 106).

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It was the nostalgic tango To ostatnia niedziela which was popular in the 1930s. In the Janowska camp, this tango was played by the orchestra at the request of the concentration camp authorities, like other popular ­compositions: “Without words, only music.”41 3

Which One Is It?

These are the three versions of the story of the Tango of Death. Each has a ­different answer to the question of who composed the tango which the orchestra in the Janowska camp was ordered to play when Jews were selected for execution. In the first version of the story, it is an unknown tango written by an unknown Jewish composer – probably one of the musicians – who, along with all the other musicians of the Janowska camp orchestra, was murdered. In the second version, it is Plegaria composed in 1927 by the Argentinian Eduardo Bianco and, in the third version, To ostatnia niedziela composed in 1935 by the Pole Jerzy Petersburski. At first sight, the belief that Plegaria was the Tango of Death seems to make sense. To a world in which the Argentinian tango is a global phenomenon (Davis 2015), the tango Plegaria is far much better-known than To ostatnia niedziela which has largely disappeared into the mist of time. A much different ­situation existed in the 1930s in Poland, however, where To ostatnia niedziela was more popular than Plegaria. The Argentinian tango had been recorded in 1929 by pianist, composer and singer Władysław Daniłowski (1902–2000). Upon his return to Warsaw, after spending two years working for the Polish embassy in Paris, falling in love with tango and probably hearing Eduardo Bianco’s tango during his sojourn in the City of Light, Daniłowski, who was also known by his pseudonyms Władysław Dan and Walter Dana, organized a ­concert with tangos sung in Spanish by a vocal group that he named Coro Argentino V. Dano (Chór Dana).42 They opened with Plegaria and they recorded it later that year with the Syrena Record Society Orchestra directed by ­Henryk Gold.43 ­Plegaria’s popularity in Poland explains why surviving prisoners of the Janowska camp remembered and recognized the melody. However, the fact that they sang that melody using their own words does not prove that Plegaria 41 42 43

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ukrainian/entertainment/2012/11/121116_book_2012_interview _vynnychuk_ek.shtml. Jerzy Placzkiewicz, Tango in Poland, 1913–1939. https://www.todotango.com/english /­history/chronicle/165/Tango-in-Poland-1913-1939/. Syrena-Electro 6399 mx: 20387.

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was the notorious Tango of Death which was “heard by Jews in the Nazi extermination camp in Lviv (Janowska Street, 1942–1943) during the selection for death.” (Kulisiewicz)44 This claim can be based neither on the title nor on the lyrics of the song prisoners in the Janowka camp sang to the melody of ­Plegaria. A more plausible interpretation, in my view, is that the words “das Todestango spielt” (the Tango of Death plays) only mean that the song was about the tango the camp orchestra was ordered to play (‘without words’) at selections of prisoners for deportation or execution, and they therefore called the Tango of Death. As we have seen, the German words Das Todestango (The Tango of Death) were added in pencil and underlined as if they were the title of the song. Possibly this was done because the lyrics contain the words “das Todestango spielt” (the Tango of Death plays). Certainly, given the heartbreaking lyrics of this song, the title Das Todestango (The Tango of Death) would have been justified. However, the lyrics themselves do not prove that the melody of this song was, indeed, the Tango of Death. While this attribution is probably erroneous, it is fully understandable why it is so widespread. The belief is based on the alleged fascist sympathies of its composer Eduardo Bianco and reinforced by the myth that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were so fond of this tango that they adopted it as a hymn to be played by the orchestras in the death camps during executions. However, no survivor of the Janowska camp has testified that the camp orchestra actually played Plegaria on these occasions. One could perhaps argue that Eduardo Bianco’s fascist sympathies cast a pall over his tangos much like Richard Wagner’s antisemitic remarks cast a pall over his operas. Rather than Plegaria, I would argue that To ostatnia niedziela was the Tango of Death. In the late 1930s, this tango was extremely popular in Poland and had already been recorded by numerous artists.45 It was arguably one of the most famous46 tango in Poland during the entire interwar era and also the one which, in hindsight, can be “seen as emblematic of the entire heyday of Polish tango.”47 This is why this is the tango that has been used in a number of films, including Schindler’s List (See Chapter 7).48 44 45 46 47 48

Kulisiewicz Collection. USHMM RG-55.003.0. The best known recording is by Mieczysław Fog (Syrena-Electro 1936). Under the title Утомлённое солнце (Burnt by the Sun) To ostatnia niedziela was arranged and recorded in 1937 by the State Radio Committee Jazz Band led by pianist Aleksandr Tsfasman. Probably after Oh Donna Clara composed by Jerzy Petersburski in 1928. Juliette Bretan, From ‘Last Sunday’ to ‘Last Shabbos’: Poland’s Legendary Jewish Tangos. June 30, 2020 https://culture.pl/en/article/from-last-sunday-to-last-shabbos-polands -­legendary-jewish-tangos. The Russian version of To ostatnia niedziela was also used in a number of films, including the award-winning films Trois couleurs: Blanc (Three Colors: White) by Krzysztof

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Most of the Polish tangos were created and performed by poets, composers and musicians of Jewish origin who were familiar with Jewish culture and music. To ostatnia niedziela – also known as Ostatni Szabas’ (The Last ­Sabbath) – is no exception. Its lyrics, written by the Jewish poet Zenon Friedwald, describe the final meeting of two lovers before they break up. Its music, created by the Jewish composer Jerzy Petersburski, evokes their feelings of desolation and desperation. The song was recorded by the greatest singers and orchestras of the day, including Mieczysław Fogg,49 Tadeusz Faliszewski,50 Chór Juranda (Jerzy Jurand),51 Zygmunt Piotrowski,52 Marian Demar53 and Władysław Daniłowski (alias Walter Dana).54 The Jewish character of the song comes across most clearly in Hashabat Haahrona (Last Saturday), the Hebrew version of To ostatnia niedziela which was recorded by Adam Aston under his stage name Ben Lewi.55 It was the first of fifteen Polish tangos in Hebrew produced in Poland between 1936 and 1939 by Syrena Electro, the record company of Juliusz Fejgenbaum established in 1904.56 When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, composer Jerzy Petersburski – like many Polish artists and musicians – fled to Lviv where he joined Henryk Wars’s Tea-Jazz Orchestra. Since their repertoire consisted of prewar Polish hits and included tangos,57 they will certainly have played the most popular one which was To ostatnia niedziela. It is, of course, a matter of speculation whether the musicians of the Janowska camp orchestra actually heard them play this tango. It is, however, the tango which Holocaust survivor Leopold Kozlowski remembered as the Tango of Death that he and others were forced to play. It is also the tango of which a snippet of musical score was found in the archive of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission investigating the Nazi war crimes

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Kieślowski (1994) and Утомлённые солнцем (Burnt by the Sun) by Nikita Mikhalkov (1994). Syrena-Electro 9581 mx: 26693. Syrena-Electro 9583 mx: 26695. Syrena-Electro 9588 mx: 26700. Melodja-Electro 445 mx: 26717. Odeon 271202 mx: 1796. Odeon 271216 mx: 1836. Syrena-Electro 8708. It has, perhaps surprisingly, been re-released in 2022 by Jacques de Lousse on the CD Retro Dance Hits of Eastern Europe Vol. 07. Juliette Bretan, The Irresistible Siren of Warsaw: The Prewar Story of Syrena Record. September 13, 2019. https://culture.pl/en/article/the-irresistible-siren-of-warsaw-the -prewar-story-of-syrena-record. A good example is Henryk Wars’ prewar tango Zapomnienie: Pytasz mnie czemu nie płaczę (Having to forget: You’re asking me, why I’m not crying). In 1940, this tango was translated into Russian and interpreted as a song about parting with the homeland and the beloved city of Warsaw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=RwsCuLmZWKA.

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committed in the region of Lvov. And, finally, it is the tango which Holocaust ­survivors and former prisoners of the Janowska camp identified in conversations with the Ukrainian journalist Igor Malishevsky and the Ukrainian writer Yuri ­Vinnychuk as the Tango of Death. There is no reason to believe that the Janowska camp orchestra was forced to play an especially composed ‘execution melody’ which the Nazis called ‘Todestango.’ Much less is there any evidence that it was a ‘Nazi version’ of ­Plegaria with new words (Naliwajek-Mazurek 2012, 220) or, for that matter, that “Der Todesfuge” [sic] would have been “written by the Nazis on the melody of ­Plegaria and with verses that bore some relation to the originals.” (Czackis 2004, 38) Presumably, these speculations are because the lyrics of the camp song which survivor Anna Muzyczka remembered were written in German. In earlier concentration camps, prisoners were forced to sing especially composed camp songs in German and later, in the death camps, prisoners were humiliated by forcing them to sing German songs with sarcastic new lyrics invented by the SS. However, there is no reason to believe that an especially composed ‘execution melody’ called the Tango of Death ever existed. While there are Polish recordings of both Plegaria and To Ostatnia Niedziela, it is a myth that the camp orchestra recorded the Tango of Death, “that the record still exists somewhere, and we could hear it” (Clendinnen 1999, 167). In this chapter, I have shown that, taken together, it seems most probable that the Janowska camp orchestra played an arrangement of To ostatnia niedziela and that the prisoners called this Jewish tango the Tango of Death. In the next chapter, I continue this journey of discovery by looking at the provenance of an iconic photograph of the orchestra of the Janowska camp, supposedly playing the Tango of Death.

CHAPTER 4

The Orchestra of Death No graphic depiction of the Holocaust (Magilow and Silverman 2020, 1) has represented the legend of the Tango of Death more prominently than a ­photograph of the orchestra of prisoners in the Janowska camp. The photograph (Figure 4) is taken from a bird’s eye view and shows ­musicians standing in a circle dressed in military style jackets, breeches and boots. Less than half of the circle is visible with fifteen musicians and their instruments: seven violins, four clarinets and four saxophones. In the center of the circle, the conductor dressed in a white lab coat together with three accordion players. In the lower right-hand corner of the picture, standing beside the orchestra, are six military men in different uniforms. Five of them are in a conversation. One, standing apart, is looking at the conductor. The photograph can be seen ‘everywhere,’ in print, on the internet and social media. As a visual representation of the Holocaust this photograph has been turned into an object widely depicted in popular and artistic processing (Keilbach and Wächter 2009, 69). An example of popular processing is how this photograph has been featured in a Wikipedia lemma for the song “Dance Me to the End of Love” (1984) which, according to singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, was inspired by the Holocaust (See Chapter 7). An example of a­ rtistic processing is how the same photograph is used in modern art by the artist Marek Chlanda in his triptych ‘Study of Soundlessness” (2005).1 These are just two examples of how there is “a striking repetition of the same very few images, used over and over again iconically” in the representation and memorialization of the Holocaust (Hirsch 2001, 7). In addition to being duplicated, enlarged, and supplied with more or less detailed captions and comments, the photograph has been “the object of reflection, attempts at interpretation, ­emotions, anxiety, and thought” (Jedlińska 2014, 265). Nevertheless, given what a potent symbol of the Holocaust (Stier 2015) the image has become, remarkably little is actually known about the photograph itself. It could even be said that the photograph is shrouded in mystery. It is precisely because the photograph is so mysterious that its mere existence reinforces the legend of the Tango of Death. In order to better understand the significance of this photograph for that legend, I will in this chapter try to determine the provenance of this picture. Who was the photographer? Why 1 See Jedlińska (2014, 270). © Willem de Haan, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525078_005

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Figure 4 Janowska camp orchestra Courtesy of the International Court of Justice

and under which circumstances was the picture taken? And what happened to it? How was it preserved? And, finally, why did it become iconic? 1 Nuremberg At the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International ­Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945–1946, a photograph of the orchestra of ­ ­prisoners in the Janowska camp was shown to the Western world.2 It was one of the n ­ ineteen photographs that Colonel Smirnov projected onto a screen in the courtroom on February 18, 1946.3 The selection of these photographs, he explained to the court, had “not been guided, so to speak, by the horror of their contents, but simply by the fact that they demonstrate typical procedures of the German fascist crimes.’4 Most of the photographs were snapshots of executions of men, women and children. Some of the pictures had been taken by 2 The photograph had already been published in the Soviet newspaper Red Star, December 23, 1944. https://albumwar2.com/janowska-concentration-camp-prisoner-orchestra-­performs -tango-of-death/. 3 They were identified as Exhibit USSR-100, 101, 102, 212, 385, 388, 389, 390, and 391. 4 The Trial of German Major War Criminals, Vol. 7, February 18, 1946, 550.

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an amateur, others by a Gestapo officer and still others were retrieved from the body of a dead Gestapo soldier. One of the pictures shown to the court was a photograph of the orchestra of prisoners in the Janowska (Yanov) camp or as the prosecutor called it a photograph of the ‘orchestra of death.’5 It was presented in order to prove that: “In Yanov Camp the executions are carried out to the strains of the ‘Death Tango’ played by an orchestra conducted by Professor Stricks, an internee in the camp, together with his bandmaster, Mund.”6 Other sources, however, refer to Leon Schtriks as the conductor of the orchestra (Friedman 1945) or claim that the orchestra was led by the conductor of the Lviv opera, Mund (Naliwajek-Mazurek 2012, 220). SS men were also seen conducting the orchestra. Simon Wiesenthal, for example, remembered that SS-Untersturmführer Rokita “conducted evening concerts … for the SS cadre” (Wiesenthal quoted in Levy 1993, 45). Survivor Wilhelm “Willi” Ochs wrote on one of his camp drawings: ‘The orchestra, under the baton of the SS-man Biermann.’7 In the iconic photograph (Figure 4) the conductor is not wearing a uniform but a lab coat. Therefore, he must be a civilian, either Stricks or Mund. However, when a photocopy of the photograph was shown to senior musicians in Lviv, the old choirmaster was positive that: ‘This is Mund! Exactly, Yakub Mund!’8 Apart from the conductors Leonid Stricks and Yakub Mund, the names of only a small number of other musicians have been handed down, in whole or in part. These are the names of a ‘fiddler’ (violinist) named ­Zygmunt Schatz (Reznik 2014a, 216), a cellist named Leon Eber, an oboist named Vogel (whose first name remains unknown like those of the musicians Breier, Hildebrand, Pollak, Priwes, and Skolka) and Aron Dobszyk (Friedman 1945, 293–294). Other musicians who have been mentioned by name are: Henryk Apter, Marek Bauer, Amelia Deicz (Deutsch?), Jozef Frenkel, Adolf Gimpel, Józef Hand, Yuzef H ­ erman, Artur Hermelin, Marceli Horowitz, Willem Kristel, Tatiana Modlinger, Alfred Stadler, Eduard Steinberger, Maks Striks, and Leon Zak (Friedman 1945, 293–294; Honigsman 2003, 29; Redzik 2014a, 224).9 5 6 7 8 9

Previously, Colonel Smirnov had announced the presentation of photographs (plural) but, on this day only one photograph of the orchestra was projected on the screen. The Trial of German Major War Criminals, Vol. 7, February 14, 1946, 451. Ibid., 549. Ghetto Fighters’ House Archives. Art Collection. Catalogue, No. 4239. At the end of the film, the violinist Leonid Stricks and conductor Yacub (‘Cuba’) are ­mistakenly named Yakub Strix and Cuba Mund https://ihffilm.com/44017.html. Reznik (2014a, 216) also mentions the name of Artur Gold. However, this famous ­orchestra leader was deported to Treblinka. Upon his arrival in the winter of 1942 he created a Lagerkappelle (camp orchestra) in which he played until he was murdered at the end of 1943.

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Some of the musicians, like Amelia Deicz, Tatiana Modlinger, opera singers Feller, Fiszer, Scronge and Buxbaum, as well as the pianists Marek Bauer, Artur ­Hermelin, Leopold M ­ unzer, and Eduard Steinberger, were clearly not members of the camp orchestra. Moreover, it is not always clear whether they perished in the ghetto or died as prisoners in the Janowska camp. Taken together, ­however, it must be concluded that the names of many, if not most, of the members of the camp orchestra are lost, like those of so many Holocaust victims in Eastern Galicia (Lower 2021, 141). Colonel Smirnov did not disclose the provenance of the photograph of the ‘orchestra of death.’ While it has been claimed10 that this picture was brought to the trial by journalist Yaroslav Galan, special correspondent of the newspaper Radianska Ukraina, the photograph was included in the report of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission which had been given into evidence as Exhibit USSR-6. In this report, the photograph (Figure 4) was provided with the caption: “An orchestra of musicians imprisoned in the Yanovsky camp plays the ‘Tango of Death’ at the execution of Soviet citizens.”11 The photograph was accompanied by an explanatory note that: “By order of the Nazis, the orchestra played an especially composed melody called the ’Tango of Death.’ The Nazis ­carried out torture, ill-treatment, and execution under this music.”12 While the photograph of the orchestra was projected on the screen in the courtroom, Colonel Smirnov invited the court to observe two points of interest: To the right we see the camp commandant, Obergruppenführer Gebauer, in white uniform, and behind him his dog, Rex, known to us through many interrogations as having been trained to harass living persons and to tear them to pieces. It is evident that Gebauer is leading the orchestra to the execution grounds.13

10

See Leonid Leshchinsky, Tango of Death, Proza.ru, 2009 at https://www.proza .ru/2009/10/24/1084 and Boris Dorfman, Tango of Death, Jewish Ukraine 9, 124, May 2006 at http://www.jewukr.org/observer/eo2003/page_show_ru.php?id=1525. 11 Report on crimes in the Lvov region USSR-6, 521. http://nurnbergprozes.narod.ru/011/6 .htm. 12 Ibid. 13 Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, 1949, Vol. 7, February 14, 1946, 549. In the report of the Extraordinary State Commission, the name of the camp commandant in the photograph is not Gebauer but ‘Vartzok Franz.’ This person is, actually, SS-Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Warzok who was the Janowska camp commandant from July, 1, 1943 until the camp was dissolved in November 1943. Thus, based on the information included in the report, the photograph must have been taken between July and November 1943.

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This sounds chillingly ominous and yet neither of Smirnov’s points corresponds to the photograph itself (Figure 4). While the commandant in the white uniform is involved in a conversation rather than leading the orchestra to the execution ground, the dog is not behind him but accompanying the tall figure standing aside. This is SS-Obersturmführer Gustav ­Willhaus with his dachshund ‘Fritz.’14 A small dog like a dachshund would hardly be named Rex15 nor would it be capable of tearing living persons to pieces. Unlike the big ­German shepherd dog with which two SS officers are posing in another photograph taken in the Janowska camp.16 How are these discrepancies to be explained? Was there, perhaps, a different photograph on the screen? This possibility cannot be ruled out since the photograph (Figure 4) was given into evidence as Exhibit USSR-388 together with a second photograph of the orchestra.17 This photograph (Figure 5) shows eight members of the orchestra playing next to the entrance of a barracks from which two SS officers are leaving, ­followed by a dog. The officers are SS-Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Warzok (left) and SS-Obersturmführer Gustav Willhaus (right). Willhaus was the commandant of the Janowska camp from May 1, 1942 until July 1, 1943 when he was succeeded by Warzok. In the report of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, the photograph (Figure 5) is provided with the caption: “The executioners of the Janowska camp Warzok and Willhaus are leaving the premises to watch another execution of detainees.” While in this photograph (Figure 5), it seems easier to imagine that the two SS officers are, indeed, leaving the building in order to attend an execution, it has also been suggested that the photograph (Figure 5) was taken on July 1, 1943 to mark the handover of command from Willhaus to Warzok.18 The dog behind them seems a much more suitable candidate to be the bloodthirsty dog named Rex.19 However, this photograph (Figure 5) has also details that clearly do not correspond with the two points of 14 15 16 17 18 19

The dog was named ‘Fritz’ after Gebauer with whom Willhaus did not get along (Beorn 2018, 452). A cursory search for images on the internet shows that almost all dogs with the name of Rex are German shepherds. See: “Two SS officers pose with a guard dog in the Janowska concentration camp.” USHMM Photo Archive. Photograph Number: 69984 https://collections.ushmm.org/search /­catalog/pa1041914. USSR A083819 H5142-0002. The reason for this interpretation is that Warzok, who had been deputy to commander Willhaus, is in this photograph at his right side. Possibly the name Rex has been mentioned simply because it is a generic name for ­German shepherd dogs. Janowska survivor Irena Shaevich remembered, specifically, “that a camp guard named Zernitsa was usually seen with his shepherd Aza, specifically trained

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Figure 5 S S officers Warzok and Willhaus leaving a barracks Courtesy of the International Court of Justice

interest to which Colonel Smirnov invited the judges to pay attention. Neither one of the two men is Gebauer, nor is anyone dressed in a white uniform and positioned to the right of the orchestra. Given these discrepancies, it remains unclear what the court was actually looking at: the iconic photograph (Figure 4) or the other photograph (Figure 5). Several of the sessions of the tribunal were filmed and this footage has recently been transferred to video.20 In one of the sessions Colonel Smirnov is giving his closing presentation of crimes committed against the peoples of Eastern and Southern European countries on Feb. 19, 1946.21 Unfortunately, no such video is available of the previous session, on February 18, 1946 in which the photographs were presented to the court. It is, therefore, impossible to verify which one of the photographs of the ‘orchestra of death’ appeared projected on the screen.

20 21

to attack people.” Quoted from her diary in Friedman (1946) at https://www.jewishgen .org/yizkor/lviv/lvi593.html. See: The Nuremberg Trial, Court TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHR5rHE7wDg. Available at the Robert H. Jackson Center https://www.youtube.com/watch?time _­continue=7andv=vuqf7IFi-R0.

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2 Provenance The iconic photograph of the orchestra (Figure 4) was identified as “a German photograph captured by the Red Army in the headquarters of the Gestapo in Lvov. The original German negative is stored in the archives of the Extraordinary State Commission in Moscow.”22 The provenance of the other photograph (Figure 5) remained unknown until Sergey Trofimovich Kuzmin, in his memoir as an investigator for the Commission (Kuzmin 1985) told how, after hours of conversation, he received a large number of photo documents from the life of the Yanovsky camp from a man named Lewinter, in the summer of 1944.23 Herman Lewinter was a professional photographer who had survived the Janowska camp. In an oral history interview, on July, 3, 1989, he told that: The Nazis ordered me to go around the camp and snap anything what I see. (-) You had to be very careful. You see, I was the last photographer in this camp. I snapped pictures so there should be a memory of what happened. (-) I felt if I would survive it would be a good testimony. (-) Altogether I had maybe 530 pictures. (-) When I escaped from the camp I took the pictures with me. (-) They were sent to Nuremberg for the trials. Later the Germans sent a team to talk to me and I gave them pictures of the Gestapo.24 In the interview, Lewinter refers to a photograph of ‘the last Jewish band playing at a selection’ but since the interview was audio-only, it is impossible to know whether he was referring to the iconic photograph of the orchestra arranged in a circle (Figure 4), to the photograph of the orchestra next to the entrance of a barrack (Figure 5), or to yet another picture of the orchestra.25 On June 6, 1990, one year after the interview, Lewinter donated a photo album to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum which included two pictures of the 22 Exhibit USSR-6,521. http://nurnbergprozes.narod.ru/011/6.htm. 23 Kuzmin visited Lewinter together with forensic expert Nikolai Ivanovich. 24 Interview with Herman Lewinter for the Shoah Foundation on July 3, 1989. https: //collections.ushmm.org/oh_findingaids/RG-50.165.0066_trs_en.pdf. When Lewinter said that the photographs were sent to Nuremberg, he must have meant by the Extraordinary State Commission. Kuzmin, who claimed to have received the photographs from Lewinter, attended the Nuremberg trial in his quality of senior investigative member of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission. 25 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. USHMM 78710. Curator Bret Werb checked Lewinter’s videotaped interview and found that there is no reference made to a photo of the orchestra.

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Figure 6 Janowska camp orchestra in front of a barracks United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Courtesy of Herman Lewinter

Janowska camp orchestra: the iconic photograph (Figure 4) and, interestingly, yet another photograph (Figure 6).26 This picture looks more like a photograph that a professional photographer like Lewinter would take. It shows an orchestra with a conductor who is clearly not conducting but rather posing with the intention of being photographed. It is also clear that this photograph must have been taken just a few moments before the second photograph (Figure 5). In the third photograph (Figure 6), only one musician (the third from the left) is looking to his right, while in the other photograph (Figure 5), two additional musicians (fourth and fifth from the left) are looking in that direction. In this photograph (Figure 5) is also ­visible that they are looking at SS officers Warzok and Willhaus who are leaving the barracks.27 It looks as if Lewinter were busy taking a clandestine photograph of the orchestra (Figure 6), when the SS men appeared in the d­ oorway, 26 27

Photograph Number: 78710. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Courtesy of Herman Lewinter. The exact location of the building is indicated on a 1944 aerial photograph. In this photograph – which has been overlaid with composite labels from multiple historical sources –

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he had to quickly return to his job and take an ‘official’ photograph (Figure 5) to cover his tracks.28 3

The Photographer

Having identified the second and third photograph of the orchestra (Figure 5) as having both been taken by Herman Lewinter, the question remains who took the iconic photograph (Figure 4). Was this picture also taken by Lewinter or, perhaps, by someone else? A possible answer to this question has been given by a woman named Anna Korelovna Pojtser who claimed that she had been forced to work as a dishwasher in the soldiers’ kitchen of the Janowska camp during the Nazi German occupation. On September 12, 1944, a few months after the end of the war, she was interrogated, possibly on suspicion of having collaborated with the enemy, under the auspices of the Extraordinary State Commission by a senior assistant to the prosecutor of the city of Lvov.29 On this occasion, she handed the interrogator a photograph of the camp orchestra which also showed a man she called ‘the murderer, camp commandant Obersturmführer Franz Warzog.’ She claimed that this photograph had been taken by a prisoner named Streissberg, a man who worked at the camp office and whom she knew already before the Nazi occupation. She said that he had a camera and secretly took photographs because, he told her, it would be important to take pictures showing the atrocities of the Nazis and save them until the arrival of ‘our troops.’ However, before that happened, he was caught and executed by hanging. In 1965, more than twenty years later, the same woman, Anna Pojtser, ­testified at a trial before a military tribunal in Krasnodar (Russia) against a group of ‘traitors to the Motherland’ charged with collaboration for their participation in the mass extermination of ‘Russian citizens’ in ‘fascist death

28

29

it is building number 14: Old building (Two storey, living area). See Waitman Wade Beorn https://waitmanbeorn.wixsite.com/waitmanwadebeorn/janowska-project. In terms of composition and technique the ‘clandestine’ photograph (Figure 6) has a much higher quality than the official one. This photograph (Figure 5) seems to be hastily taken, slightly overexposed and/or overdeveloped. Could this lack of quality subtly reveal that Lewinter was stealthily resisting the job he was ordered to do? Or is there another reason why these two photographs were developed in such strikingly different ways? USHMM Archives RG-22-002M.

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camps.’30 Three of these defendants31 were accused of participation in mass shootings of prisoners of the Janowska camp in 1942–1943. There is no verbatim transcript of Anna Pojtser’s testimony, but I found two reports of the trial. Major-­General of Justice Mikhail Tokarev wrote about the trial in a collection of essays ‘based on historical documents of trials against traitors of the Motherland’ (Tokarev 1973). Sergey Trofimovich Kuzmin also wrote about it in his memoir as an investigator for the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission in the region of Lvov (Kuzmin 1985). According to Tokarev, Anna Pojtser stated at the trial that she had given the camera to Streissberg and that she had smuggled the photograph of the orchestra out of the camp. This case would been closed long ago were it not for Sergey Kuzmin’s report of the trial in which Pojtser’s claim that the picture of the orchestra had been taken by prisoner Streissberg is completely ignored. Instead, Kuzim claims that among the photographs he had received in 1944 from Lewinter was: this one-of-a-kind photo document, which confirmed that the stories of the survivors of the Yanov camp about shootings to music are not a figment of a sick imagination, upset by Hitler’s fanaticism. In the photo there was a closed circle of musicians, in the center of it – the c­ onductor, and on the side there were officers and SS soldiers led by the camp ­commandants.32 This description clearly resembles the iconic photograph (Figure 4). But the question is: Does it prove that Lewinter took the photograph? There are reasons for doubt. As a member of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, Kuzmin must have known that the photograph was identified as ‘a German photograph captured by the Red Army at the headquarters of the Gestapo in Lvov.’33 As a representative of that commission at the Nuremberg trial, he 30

31 32 33

The defendents were N. Matvienko, V. Belyakov, I. Nikiforov, I. Zaitsev, V. Pidenok, and F. Tikhonovsky. The military tribunal was chaired by Major-General G.G. Nafikov. The prosecutor was Major-General N. Afanasyev. Trial of Matvienko, et al. 1964–1965, Criminal case No. 4, File No. 100366, Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (AFSB), Krasnodar, Russia. These defendants were N. Matvienko, V. Belyakov and I. Nikiforov. The other d­ efendants were tried for their part in the extermination in the Bełżec (V. Podenok and F. ­Tikhonovsky) and Sobibór (I. Zaitsev) camp. The plural in this sentence suggests that both commandant SS-Obersturmführer Gustav Willhaus and his deputy SS-Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Warzok are in this picture. ‘The original German negative is stored in the Archive of the Extraordinary State ­Commission in Moscow.’ Report of the Extraordinary State Commission investigating the German-Fascist Atrocities in the Lvov Region (USSR-6, 521). http://nurnbergprozes.narod .ru/011/6.htm.

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also must have known that the same photograph was given into evidence as a ­picture discovered by the Red Army in the Gestapo headquarters in Lvov. What is more, this is what in his memoir he claims to be the provenance of the iconic picture (Kuzmin 1985, 47). Could Kuzmin be mistaken? Could he be assuming retrospectively that the iconic photograph (Figure 4) must have been among the large number of documents he received from Lewinter in the summer of 1944? Could he therefore, also have been assuming that it must have been ­Lewinter who took the iconic photograph even though he knew that according to Anna Pojtser the picture had been taken by Streissberg? 4

The Photograph

In order to identify which of the two photographers – Lewinter or Streissberg – took the iconic picture of the ‘orchestra of death’ it is useful to take a closer look at the photograph itself. Striking about the photograph (Figure 4) are the unusual bird’s eye perspective and the unconventional diagonal composition showing only part of the musicians in a semi-circle. The first impression is that the picture is amateurish and was taken hastily while the photographer was peeking out of the window on the third floor of a building.34 This must have been the camp offices building where Streissberg was working, since this was the only building with a third floor in the entire Janowska camp (Figure 7). If this photograph (Figure 7) confirms Anna Pojtser’s statement that prisoner Streissberg, who worked in the camp office, secretly took the photograph as an incriminating document to be used for posterity, the question remains if this photograph (Figure 4) was indeed the picture that Pojtser smuggled out of the camp and gave to the prosecutor. Or could this picture have been the ‘­photograph captured by the forward units of the Red Army in the headquarters of the Gestapo in Lvov’? The picture which was believed to have been ‘German’ could have been taken by Streissberg and confiscated by the Gestapo after he was caught and killed by the SS. There is, however, a different interpretation of how the iconic photograph (Figure 4) might have been taken. It is an interpretation which leads to Lewinter as the probable photographer. According to art historian Eleonora Jedlińska the picture which is ‘very dynamic’ and may seem ‘hasty’ is, in fact, not accidental. In her view, it has been “taken by a ‘confident’ hand – with no hiding, 34

See, however, the photograph (Figure 5) which has been taken in front of an old barrack building. This photograph shows that there are dormers in the roof of the third floor attic. Given the perspective, it seems impossible that the iconic photograph (Figure 4) could have been taken from there.

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Figure 7 Janowska camp offices Archive Soviet Extraordinary State Commission. State Archive of the Russian Federation

no fear” (Jedlińska 2014, 260). The diagonal composition of the photograph, which “seems ‘aesthetically’ arranged according to the perspective rules of a bird’s eye view” (Jedlińska 2014, 260), suggests that the photograph (Figure 4) is the work of a professional rather than an amateur photographer. In this view, the picture was taken openly by Lewinter rather than secretly by Streissberg. If Jedlińska is right in attributing a professional quality to the photograph (Figure 4) this photo as well as Pictures 2 and 3 may, indeed, all have been taken by Lewinter. From a technical point of view, it is possible that all three photos were taken with one and the same camera. This could have been a Leica which is a camera that has interchangeable lenses. It is the kind of camera a professional photographer would have been likely to use. If Streissberg had taken the iconic photograph, he would have used a simpler camera like, for example, a Rolleiflex with a fixed lens. This camera, however, would have produced ­pictures with a square format that, in fact, not fit the photograph (Figure 4).35 Of course, it is possible that the photograph was cropped. There is no proof of this, however. In fact, on the back of the photograph (Figure 4) one can find a 35

Assessment made by photo ‘detective’ Hans Aarsman (personal communication).

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handwritten statement (in Russian) confirming that the picture is authentic, i.e. identical to the original and reproduced without modification. The declaration was signed by Commissioner E. Smirnov, dated, and stamped with the seal of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission.36 In the end, there is no way to know for certain who took the iconic picture of the orchestra of death. What we do know is that the iconic photograph (Figure 4) must have been taken between July 1942 and July 1943.37 Whether it was Lewinter or S­ treissberg who took the photograph remains a mystery, however. 5 Location The camp offices building from which the iconic photograph (Figure 4) was taken can also be seen in a drawing of the orchestra playing in front of the camp offices (Figure 8). It was made by Holocaust survivor Wilhelm “Willi” Ochs, later known as Zeev Porath.38 The drawing is part of a series of testimony drawings Ochs made during his time in the Janowska camp where he was he was put to work as a draftsman and, therefore, allowed to enter and exit.39 This work enabled him to smuggle the drawing he made out of the camp. In the drawing – which carries an inscription (in Polish): ‘Willhaus inspects a brigade of prisoners accompanied by an orchestra’ – we see the figure of the camp commandant, seventeen members of the camp orchestra in a circle around the conductor, and a column of sixty prisoners in rows of five. The rows are preceded by one figure and followed by another two figures. Clearly, the camp orchestra is not playing in the Appellplatz (roll call area), but rather in front of the camp offices where the iconic photograph (Figure 4) must have been taken. In this photograph, the musicians have music stands and sheet music in front of them, suggesting that they were giving a concert in front of the villa where camp commandant Gustav Willhaus and his family lived. We know that commandant Willhaus liked to listen to the camp orchestra and, while there is no mention of concerts like those in Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen (Fackler 36 Exhibit USSR-388, A08321. 37 This can be concluded from the fact that Richard Rokita, who assembled the orchestra, arrived in Janowska in July 1942 and commandant Gustav Willhaus left in July 1943. 38 Zeev Porath, “Review with orchestra” – a testimony drawing from the Janowska camp. Ghetto Fighters’ House Archives. Art Collection. Catalogue, No. 4251. 39 Collection of Zeev Porath: drawings, sketches, and memoirs from the Janowska camp; letters, diaries, and newspaper clippings. Donated by his daughter Rachel Popper, on June 25, 2013. Ghetto Fighters’ House Archives. Art Collection. Catalogue, No. 33363.

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Figure 8 “Review with orchestra” by Zeev Porath Courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum

2007, 9; Gilbert 2005, 188), there is testimony that in the evenings the orchestra did play classical music (Bach, Grieg, Wagner) (Wiesenthal 1998, 18) at his villa ‘under his windows.’40 However, this villa was outside the camp grounds41 and definitely not like the camp offices (Figure 7) near the gate.42 Unlike the iconic photograph (Figure 4), the drawing not only depicts the orchestra, but also a column of prisoners marching toward the gate. It is possible that they were being subjected to a so-called trial run. These runs were carried out to select the weakest prisoners for execution possibly represented in the drawing by the two figures lagging behind.43 Looking at the body posture of the ­prisoners, however, they seem to be marching rather than running. It is, therefore, more likely that they are leaving the camp on their way to work (forced or 40 41

42 43

Testimony of Zygmund Samsonovich Leiner. In: Leonid Leshchinsky, Tango of Death, Proza.ru, 2009 at https://www.proza.ru/2009/10/24/1084. The exact location of the villa is visible on a 1944 aerial photograph. In this photograph – which has been overlaid with composite labels from multiple historical sources – it is building number 23: ‘Kommandant House.’ See Waitman Wade Beorn https://­ waitmanbeorn.wixsite.com/waitmanwadebeorn/janowska-project. Pahiria 2020. These practices took place after the Lwów Ghetto was dissolved in June 1943 and Janowska became an extermination camp for increasing numbers of Jewish prisoners (Sandkühler 1996, 187).

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slave labor) in the adjacent Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (German Armament Works). This interpretation is found on a Polish reproduction of the same photograph (Figure 4) which was given the caption: ‘Inmates orchestra of Janowska Nazi concentration camp in Lviv, West Ukraine, 1941–1943. The orchestra played when the inmates departed for work and on their return.’44 Playing while prisoners were marching in columns to or from their forced or slave labor is known to have been the most common daily activity of the orchestras in the death camps (Fackler 2007, 9). It is unlikely that the Janowska camp orchestra, in fulfilling this routine task, would have been playing a tango. What they would have been playing is probably German march music (Drix 1994, 121). Apart from the fact that the photograph itself does not show what kind of music of the camp orchestra was actually playing, at the very least it seems safe to conclude that the iconic photograph of the orchestra (Figure 4) can hardly be considered as evidence that in the Janowska camp executions were carried out to the strains of the Tango of Death. This raises the question why the court did not object to the apparent discrepancies between what was being claimed by the Soviet prosecution and what was shown to them on the screen. 6

The Court

It is remarkable that the court does not seem to have been bothered by the fact that the points of interest which Colonel Smirnov invited the judges to pay attention to did not correspond with the photograph shown to them on the screen, regardless of whether this was the first (Figure 4) or the second (Figure 5) photograph showing the perpetrators (SS officers) and, therefore, included as evidence in Exhibit USSR-388. It thus will remain unclear, which one was actually shown: the iconic photograph (Figure 4) taken by Streissberg or Lewinter’s ‘official’ photograph (Figure 5). This is not to mention the obvious fact that no photograph of an orchestra can show what music was played, unless the score is visible and readable which is clearly not the case, not even from the music stands in the iconic photograph (Figure 4). Nor does the other photograph (Figure 5) show where the SS officers were going. One possibility is that the judges were used to such discrepancies. If for a moment one allows the magnitude of this trial, in which 236 witnesses were questioned and 200,000 statements were submitted, to sink in, it can hardly 44

Photo No. 318. In: Męczeństwo, walka, zagłada Żydów w Polsce 1939–1945. (Martyrdom, fight, extermination of Jews in Poland 1939–1945). Warsaw: Ministry of National Defense Publishers 1960.

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come as a surprise that the transcript of 25,000 pages, documenting this trial, is not flawless.45 Although stenographic notes were taken and sound recordings were made of all oral proceedings, it was inevitable that due to time ­limitations, errors of one sort or another have crept into the translations. As a result, the official transcript of the trial is not a completely accurate verbatim record and translation of the actual trial proceedings. This seems also to apply to the photographs of the so-called Tango of Death being played at executions in the Janowska camp. In the English translation of the trial proceedings, the prosecutor is recorded as saying that that in the photograph of the orchestra we see the camp commandant Gebauer to the right while in the German translation, the prosecutor is recorded as saying: “Das gleiche Orchester steht rechts daneben.” (The same orchestra is standing right next to him). In addition, Fritz Gebauer was not an SS-Obergruppenführer (­General), the highest SS officer rank at the time, but an SS-Obersturmführer (First Lieutenant).46 However, the discrepancies in question are clearly more serious than these minor inaccuracies. A more convincing explanation of the apparent indifference of the judges (Figure 7) to the discrepancies may perhaps be found in their liberal approach to evidence. The prosecution preferred documentary evidence which was considered more reliable than eyewitness testimony. Much of the trial was devoted to the recitation of thousands of documents like, for example, the Report of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission investigating the G ­ erman-Fascist Atrocities in the Lvov Region which included the two photographs of ‘the orchestra of death.’ By showing a photograph of the orchestra and reading the story of the Tango of Death from the report into the record, the Soviet ­prosecution may have hoped to convince if not the court than at least the outside world of the viciousness of the Nazis and the evil of their crimes. Lawrence Douglas (1995) has noted that, within the context of the trial and under the novel concept of crimes against humanity, a photograph47 “­materialized a very particular representation of Nazi atrocities” (41–42). The photograph of the camp orchestra was presented to the court as a ‘mute signifier’ of how crimes against humanity differ from conventional crimes not so much in terms of the numbers killed or the logic of extermination, but rather in connection to the practice of executing tortures, ill-treatments, and shooting 45 See https://www.dw.com/en/nuremberg-trials-left-a-lasting-legacy/a-6237501. 46 The Trial against the Major Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem ­Internationalen Gerichtshof. Nürnberg 1947, Vol. 7, 603. 47 Douglas made the argument with regard to a photograph that had already been presented at the Nuremberg trial, on 13 December 1945 (Douglas 2001, 39).

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to the accompaniment of music. The judges understood that existing modes of representation could not provide sufficient evidence to prove crimes (against humanity) that were literally unprecedented. While photographs were admitted as evidence,48 it was left to the prosecutors “to translate images of atrocity into a discourse of illegality” (Douglas 1995, 457). By showing a photograph of the Janowska camp orchestra in the courtroom, the image was given the status of legal evidence even though, strictly speaking, it did not prove the charges or the legal guilt on the part of the defendants. The photograph “functioned largely as spectacle” (Douglas 2001, 294), a symbolic representation of the barbarity of the Nazis and the savagery of the crimes that they committed. In conclusion, it seems most likely that the judges took the discrepancies in the presentation for granted because they understood that Colonel Smirnov was using the photograph as an example of the vicious methods the German fascists used, not only in the Janowska camp, but as he put it: “In exactly the same manner … in all concentration camps in the occupied area of the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, and other Eastern European countries.”49 As evidence of Nazi inhumanity, the photograph, and along with it the story of the Tango of Death, served the propaganda the Soviets were spreading in the context of the Cold War. In this respect, the Soviets, like the Allies, were intent on using the Nuremberg trial to put forward their own history of the war and to shape the postwar future of the Western world (Hirsch 2021). 7

Returning to the Iconic Image

The photograph of the orchestra (Figure 4) has become a ‘secular icon’ over time (Maynard 1983; Brink 2000), famously serving as a much-used vehicle for carrying the legend of the Tango of Death. There are several reasons for its iconic status. Initially, there were just a few existing photographs of camp orchestras and this one was not only the first to become known to a wider audience, but it also came with a fascinating story. The image derives its visual appeal from seeming to capture the moment that an orchestra played the Tango of Death, thereby positioning the viewer as a witness of a historic event. In the process of being reproduced, the image became a symbol of a much larger event. In other words, the photograph has become iconic not because 48 49

Admission of visual evidence was based on Article 19 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal allowing the tribunal to “admit any evidence which it deems to be of probative value” (Wilson 2011, 56). Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, Vol. 7, February 14, 1946, 451.

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the image documents what happened historically in the Janowska camp, but because the image has come to stand for the very idea of ‘evil’ (Keilbach 2009, 54). And, yet, something about this photograph touches viewers even more directly. The scene evokes emotions through the striking composition of the photograph which makes use of esthetic standards and rules of composition often found in classical paintings (Vos 2005, 167). This aesthetic quality may explain why, for example, the Polish artist Marek Chlanda used this photograph for a pencil drawing Cosmos – Tango of Death – in Relation to William Blake (2004).50 Its composition – the diagonally taken bird’s eye view of about a quarter of the circle of musicians in the upper left hand corner juxtaposed with the small group of commanding officers – evokes associations with Christian mythology: “The uniformed men in the bottom right-hand corner, “alarmingly resemble the inscrutable group of three people from the painting Flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesca (ca. 1415–1492), placed ‘outside’ the scene of the ­Torment, away from the pain and suffering of the flagellated Man, and away from the torturers” (Jedlińska 2014, 260). Such religious evocations inspired Chlanda in his Study of Soundlessness (2005), a work in the form of a triptych – a set of three associated canvasses – presented as if it were an altar piece on the theme of the Holocaust (Ibid.). It is, of course, intriguing that a photograph with such a presence as the iconic photograph of the orchestra could have been taken in a concentration camp. It should be no surprise that the extraordinary qualities of this most unlikely picture also attracted the attention of bloggers and vloggers. It has encouraged countless web surfers to click on the link of this photograph and to incorporate the picture and the story in their own postings online. The photograph of the ‘orchestra of death’ has become clickbait and as a Holocaust icon continues to perpetuate the legend of the Tango of Death as it travels around the world. 50

See Jedlińska (2014, 267).

CHAPTER 5

The Death of the Orchestra The death of the orchestra is the apotheosis of the legend of the Tango of Death. It is the story of how the musicians of the Janowska camp orchestra were themselves executed after having played the Tango of Death which they had played again and again during the executions of prisoners, for the very last time. During their last performance of this tango at the end of the war, they were shot, ceremoniously, one by one. The story of this last performance is probably the most elaborate and certainly the most intriguing component of the legend. Not surprisingly, there are different versions of this story, all with notable contradictions, suggesting that, over time, the story of what happened in the Janowska camp has been dramatized and embellished. In one version, for example, the execution of the orchestra is believed to have been deliberately staged as an imitation of Haydn’s Abschieds-Symphonie (Farewell Symphony).1 In this chapter, I will trace the origins of this myth showing how the story of the death of the orchestra evolved and ultimately merged into the legend of the Tango of Death. The roots of this story are not to be found at the Nuremberg trial. While the Soviet prosecutor charged that the German Nazis shot all the members of the orchestra2 he did not claim that the musicians were shot one by one while the orchestra was playing the Tango of Death for the last time. It is remarkable that the story of how the musicians of the camp orchestra died was not even mentioned at the Nuremberg trial given that the gist of what happened was included in the Report of Soviet Extraordinary State Commission investigating the German-Fascist Atrocities in the Lvov Region (Exhibit USSR-6). In this report, it was claimed that ‘while the Tango of Death sounded, the members of the orchestra were singled out and shot in front of the rest. In this manner,

1 Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 45 in F♯ minor is known as the Farewell Symphony because at the premiere, during the final adagio, the musicians stopped playing, snuffed out the candle on their music stand, and left in turn. In this way the musicians intended to send the m ­ essage to their employer Nikolaus I, Prince Esterházy, that it was time for them to say farewell and go home. Originally, there were just two muted violins left: one played by the conductor, Haydn himself, and the other by his concertmaster Luigi Tomasini. In the story of the orchestra’s death, only one musician, conductor Stricks carried on playing until the end. The other ­conductor, concertmaster Mund, had been the first one who was shot. 2 The Trial of German Major War Criminals, Vol. 7, February 14, 1946, 450–451. © Willem de Haan, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525078_006

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the entire orchestra has perished.’3 This account of the orchestra’s death was based on an interrogation of Anna Korelovna Pojtser, the woman who worked as a dishwasher in the soldiers’ kitchen of the Janowska camp. She was interrogated under the auspices of the Soviet Extraordinary State ­Commission by a senior assistant to the prosecutor of the city of Lvov, on ­September 12, 1944. According to the protocol of the interrogation, she stated that: At the end, in November 1943, the orchestra, which consisted mainly of music professors, was shot. At the time of the shooting they were ordered to sing songs and play their instruments. One by one, until the last musician, they had to come forward from the circle, undress and stand before the firing squad with a song. The last musician, before he was shot, began to sing a song. This was a Polish song but he sang the words ‘What ­happens to us today may be worse for you tomorrow’ in German. With these words, the last musician was killed by the German soldiers of the Sonderkommando No. 1005.4 Sonderkommandos 1005 (Special command units 1005), also called Leichenkommandos (Corpse units), consisted mainly of prisoners, most of them Jews, who were forced exhume and burn the bodies to hide or destroy evidence of what, in this case, has been called the Holocaust by bullets (Desbois 2008). Apart from the prisoners, however, the unit included German Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) and a few members of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Police) who supervised the operation which started outside the Janowska camp in the area called ‘Piaski Sands’ (Spector 1990, 161). The work of this Sonderkommando took a relatively long time and was not yet finished when the Soviet troops reached the site. The mass graves around the Janowka camp were the first to be opened by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (Figure 9). Surprisingly, the Soviet prosecutor in the Nuremberg trial did not refer to Anna Pojtser’s statement. Nor was the protocol of her interrogation added as one of the appendices to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission report. Why? The Soviets, who regarded the International Military Tribunal as a show

3 Record of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Discovery and Investigation of G ­ erman Fascist Crimes in the City of Lemberg, 1–6 November 1944. Bundesarchiv L­ udwigsburg B162/29309, 1–427, 29. 4 State Archives of the Russian Federation (GA RF), Fond 7021, Folder/case 75, 22–25. At USHMM Archives RG-22-002M.

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Figure 9 Mass graves at Janowska camp, 1944 Archive of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission. State Archive of the Russian Federation

trial, did not shy away from exaggerating the nature and extent of the Nazi crimes or filing charges based on flawed evidence. Fact-finding missions were carried out by local auxiliary commissions and investigators traveling around the country under the watchful eye of the State Security Service. They sent documents and testimonies to the headquarters in Moscow where the reports of the Extraordinary State Commission were ­compiled under the supervision of Andrei Vyshinskii, the former Stalinist Procurator General and chief prosecutor of the notorious Moscow show-trials in the 1930s. As an unofficial chief editor, Vyshinskii demanded precision and accuracy in those details that could be easily checked while, at the same time, he did not hesitate to forge the facts when it suited political purposes (Sorokina 2005, 825–827). As the Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Vyshinskii was aware of what Jozef Stalin, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, wanted. Stalin needed a spectacular trial not only to make the Western world aware of the staggering price the USSR had paid for defeating Nazi Germany but also to justify the huge reparations he intended to exact from the post-war German state. To keep a close eye on the Nuremberg trial, Stalin had appointed Vyshinskii as chair of a secret commission5 that would micromanage all aspects of the Soviet 5 Many details about this secret commission and its attempts to direct the Nuremberg Trials have been brought to light only recently. See Hirsch (2021).

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participation, from selecting and approving judges and prosecutors6 to hiring stenographers, translators, journalists, and other personnel. The c­ ommission would also be screening all written and visual materials like documents and photographs captured from Nazi German archives as evidence of war crimes (Hirsch 2008, 712).7 By focusing exclusively on Nazi German war crimes and presenting evidence to show the magnitude of suffering inflicted in the Soviet people, the Commission managed to fashion a narrative for the prosecution that fitted seamlessly with the view promoted by the Kremlin. In the Soviet Union alone, 27 million people, two-thirds of them civilians, had lost their lives in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. They suffocated in gas chambers, were shot in mass executions, or left to starve and freeze to death in forced labor or prisoner-of-war camps. Only ten witnesses were dispatched to Nuremberg, including survivors of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Babi Yar. In the end, just four of them would testify in person.8 While the Soviet prosecutor did read into the record a written testimony9 of a survivor of the Janowska camp who, like Anna Pojtser, had been interrogated under the auspices of the Extraordinary State Commission by a senior assistant to the prosecutor of the Lvov region, this witness offered no evidence confirming that the camp orchestra played the Tango of Death at executions and, during their last performance of this tango, were shot one by one.10 Why the secret commission, known for its efforts to find and groom witnesses for the prosecution, did not call on Anna Pojtser to testify or at least read her statement about the death of the orchestra into the record of the trial, remains an open question. As we have seen in Chapter 4, I encountered the name of Anna Pojtser as a witness at the trial in Krasnodar (Russia) in June 1965 where three defendants 6

With the exception of USSR’s chief prosecutor, General Roman Rudenko, who had been the chief prosecutor in a series of show trials in Ukraine, all Soviet judges and prosecutors had made their careers by assisting Vyshinskii during the Moscow show trials between 1936 and 1938 (Hirsch 2008, 710). 7 In order to instruct the Soviet legal team Vyshinskii traveled back and forth between ­Moscow and Nuremberg, formally in his role as Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs but actually as a special envoy of the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vjatsjeslav Michajlovitsj Molotov and the Secretary General of the Communist Party, Jozef Stalin (Hirsch 2008, 710, note 36). 8 Hermitage director Joseph Abgarovitch Orbeli (on the destruction of the monuments of culture and art in Leningrad); Red Army physician Evgeny Alexandrovich Kivelisha (on a special regime for Soviet prisoners of war and their maltreatment in the camps); the peasant Iakov Grigorievitch Grigoriev (on atrocities committed against civilians in his village of Pavlov); and the poet and partisan fighter Abraham Sutzkever (on the murder of almost 80,000 Jews in Vilnius) (Hirsch 2021, 22). 9 Exhibit USSR 6-c(8), 48. 10 The Trial of German Major War Criminals, Vol. 7, February 14, 1946, 450.

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were tried by a military tribunal on charges of collaboration for their participation in the shooting of prisoners at the Janowska death camp in 1942–1943. In two reports of this trial (Tokarev 1973; Kuzmin 1985), it is claimed that Anna Pojtser in her testimony revealed the death of the camp orchestra (Tokarev 1973, 154) and that her statement – of which there is no verbatim ­transcript – confirmed the conclusions of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission that the executions of prisoners in the Janowska camp were carried out by the fascists to the music of the camp orchestra performing the Tango of Death (­Kuzmin 1985, 16). The reports are both written in an unusual, at least for jurists, quasi-literary style. It is a style that raises, to put it mildly, some doubts about the veracity of the reports. For example, this is how the creation of the orchestra was narrated by Mikhail Tokarev: One night, there was a knock on the door at Professor Strick’s apartment. ‘Open up, Professor, do not worry. We want you to follow us. You do not need to take anything with you, you will return soon.’ So the professor of music got to the death camp, never to leave it. The next morning the professor was led to the camp commandant Willhaus. There was also his assistant Richard Rokita. From this ‘lover’ of music came the ‘idea’ of creating an orchestra. The commandant, without honoring the professor with a glance, ordered that he direct the camp orchestra. (Tokarev 1973, 154) And this is how Sergey Kuzim recounts the interaction: The commandant of the Janowska camp, the successful SS Obersturmführer Gustav Willhaus met the professor with a smile. ‘Well, Mr. Schtricks, feel at home here. Imagine, my assistant Richard Rokito,11 a colleague of yours by profession, is a man, I must say, with a lot of imagination. He proposed to make the inhabitants of our economy happy with the music of a good orchestra. We have a lot of tired people here, and you must help us to alleviate their fate. You will play our tunes, you only need to arrange them, and then you will stay in the orchestra, we will provide you with food and shelter, and you will be able to do your favorite thing.’ On this, commandant, Willhaus considered the conversation to be over. The professor rose. Looking at the submachine-gunner with the shepherd at the door of the office it became clear to him that this was really the end. From here you do not leave alive. (Kuzmin 1985, 15–16) 11

The name of the deputy to commandant Gustav Willhaus was not Rokito but Rokita.

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In a similar graphic way, the proceedings of the trial are reported as if the authors were both actually present. Tokarev, for example, recounts “the tense silence in the courtroom packed with local residents, representatives of public organizations and the press,” noticing how defendant “Matvienko scowls at his feet, nervously fingering the button on his jacket” and witness “Edmund Seidel, a short, fragile man with sad, deeply sunken eyes speaks in a low, even voice while one feels the deep excitement that overwhelms him” (Tokarev 1973, 150). Clearly, the atmospheric description is intended to lend credibility to the report. It is, therefore, all the more remarkable that Tokarev fails to give a depiction of Anna Pojtser, the women he describes as the only surviving ­eyewitness, telling the court that she observed how: all the forty musicians stood in a closed circle in the camp yard enclosed by guards armed with carbines and submachine guns. The commandant commanded furiously ‘Music!’ The members of the orchestra raised their instruments and the ‘Death Tango’ sounded over the barracks. By order, the musicians left one by one, undressed, and were shot. (Tokarev 1973, 156) Kuzmin’s report is similarly written as if he were an eyewitness to the proceedings in the courtroom. Unlike Tokarev, however, he is depicting Anna Pojtser as if he had seen her, as “a prematurely gray-haired woman with traces of severe mental anguish and suffering on her gaunt face speaking in a small, broken voice.” In order to lend extra credibility to her testimony, Kuzmin notes that a “lump came up to her throat, when she spoke about what she had seen from the window of the soldier’s kitchen.” This depiction of the witness is followed by an even more elaborate description of how “on this terrible gray, rainy day, 40 people from the orchestra were lined up in a circle, surrounded by a tight ring armed guards.” Tokarev claims that Anna Pojtser made her statement “with a documentary accuracy” and Kuzmin assures the reader that she “with her tenacious memory seems to have photographed every episode of the drama that took place at the campsite, when the Nazis began to liquidate the musicians.” Yet, there are inconsistencies between their reports, some of which are quite remarkable. For example, while in Tokarev’s report, “the survivors tried to play louder so that at this last moment the Nazis would not think that they had managed to break the spirit of the doomed,” in Kuzmin’s report, “the sounds of music became quieter, the cries of the dying were heard more and more.” The most significant difference, however, is in Kuzmin’s additional comment that “the lives of prisoners were extinguished by fascist bullets with the same inevitability as the lights above the music stands in the performance of Haydn’s

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s­ ymphony” (Kuzmin 1985, 16). In his view, this was the deliberate choice of “some SS music connoisseur” to execute the musicians in a manner that “outraged the memory of the great composer who in his works called upon people to fight for the triumph of light over the darkness, the embodiment of which was the fascists and their accomplices” (Kuzmin 1985, 16). In Kuzmin’s interpretation, the death of the orchestra becomes a mythical story in which the darkness of fascism extinguished the light of music. 1

Reasons for Doubt

In her statement, Anna Pojtser suggested that she had actually viewed the death of the orchestra from the window of the soldiers’ kitchen where she worked. Maps and aerial photographs of the camp12 confirm that it was, indeed, possible to see from the window of the (old) kitchen what took place on the Appellplatz. And yet there are some reasons for doubt. Janowska camp survivor Ignacy Misiewicz who also claimed to have viewed the execution of the orchestra from the camp kitchen testified, on January 30, 1960, that the well-known music-professor and conductor of the camp orchestra Leonid Stricks was shot first. According to Anna Pojtser, however, it was Mund who fell first from the bullets of executioners, while Professor Stricks was last. Pojtser stated that the professor was shot by one of the guards, while, according to Misiewicz, Stricks was shot by SS-Untersturmführer Rokita who ordered the orchestra to continue playing and then shot five more musicians until, finally, gunning the rest of the musicians with a machine gun handed to him by an SS officer.13 ­Misiewicz also claims that he witnessed how the bodies of Strick’s orchestra were loaded onto a truck. He remembered that the execution of the orchestra took place after roll call and even sketched a map showing the location at the far end of the Appellplatz in front of the gate.14 However, Misiewicz also believed that what he witnessed “may have taken place in the second half of 1942.”15 In fact, the execution happened a year later and, probably, took 12 13 14 15

It is building number 15 on the 1944 aerial photograph overlaid with composite labels from multiple historical sources by Waitman Wade Beorn https://waitmanbeorn.wixsite .com/waitmanwadebeorn/janowska-project. Misiewicz believed that the shooting occurred because Rokita had gotten angry about something, possibly that the orchestra was not playing to the beat. Ignacy Misiewicz, ­January 30, 1960. StAL: EL 317 III, Bü 1505, 291–305, 301. Ibid., 299. Id., 297. This erroneous claim has been reiterated by Kirstin Ulrich http://www .­kerstinullrich.de/Ukraine-West/Janowska/Janowska1.html.

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place outside the camp where the orchestra was “slaughtered in a huge ditch.”16 Under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Warzok, who took over on July 1, 1943 executions in the camp grounds were no longer permitted (Pohl 1997, 334). Survivors of the Janowska camp who remembered that the Nazis ordered the camp orchestra to play a Tango of Death during executions may have witnessed how a tango was played at the Todesplatz (Death Grounds) where those intended for liquidation were assembled before being deported (Wells 1964, 90) or led to their “execution in the ‘Sands’” (Reznik (2014a, 217).17 Survivor Bohdan Kokh, who recalled the ‘famous’ Tango of Death as the ‘highlight’ of his stay in the Janowska camp (Kokh 2003, 18), describes, for example, how: on November 19 or 20, 1943, groups of men and women were forced to undress and run naked to the ‘valley of death’ in the Piaski Sands, where they were shot. Beside the sand pit, the orchestra played the Tango of Death, non-stop until it got dark. While they continued playing, the musicians were shot one at a time until the last one died and the music stopped. (Ibid., 21) What to make of the irreconcilable contradictions between the memories of Pojtser, Misiewicz and Kokh? What do they say about the reliability of Pojtser’s testimony? It is probable that, over the course of time, Pojtser’s story about the death of the orchestra has slowly flowered and taken shape in her mind, growing out of what she had viewed (or heard). It is noteworthy that, in her statement of 1944, she did not even mention the word ‘tango’ once. Instead, she stated that the musicians were ordered to play ‘German music’ and to sing ‘songs.’ The story she told in 1965 was more than twenty years after it happened. There are many reasons why memories of an eyewitness cannot simply to be taken at face value. Memories of events may be contaminated by erroneous information. It is also possible that a witness remembers details that she had not remembered before. Without any intention to deceive, the wording of a question can lead a witness to incorrectly remember details. All memories are a mixture of facts and fiction and in memories people recount are always details that have been added later. Memorial additions and 16 See The Jewish Telegraph Agency, February 17, 1946, reporting on the charge made by the Soviet prosecution at the Nuremberg trial on February 14, 1946 that the Germans shot all the members of the orchestra. 17 Referring to Jones (1999, 170), Honigsman (2003, 55), and Wiesenthal (2000, 22).

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corrections may, of course, be true even though they were not part of the original memory. More likely, however, is that each time an event is recalled, the memory of it will be dressed up with images and stories the witness has subsequently seen or heard. In general, it can be assumed that the longer ago events took place, the shakier and more fragmented the memories will become and the more likely errors concerning what happened will occur. In this way, it is even possible to remember a building that wasn’t actually there or to recount an event that did not happen (Laney and Loftus 2019). Some of this could apply to the testimonies of Anna Pojtser. It should be considered that her statements in 1945 and 1965 were made under radically different circumstances. In 1945, witnesses to war crimes who were interrogated had to prove their innocence of these crimes. As a result, these witnesses felt compelled to convince suspicious authorities that they had not been collaborating with the occupying forces (Keferman 2003, 592). At the interrogation in 1944, Anna Pojtser was reminded of her duty to testify, according to article 89 of the Penal Code, and cautioned about her criminal responsibility should her testimony prove to be false. This may have been reason enough for her to be cautious and tailor her statement to what she anticipated would be the expectations of the authorities. In 1965, Anna Pojtser was a witness in a staged ‘demonstration trial’ (Hilger 2006, 471). It was an open trial accessible to the public. It was held at the Cultural Center of the Electrical Measuring Instruments Plant in Krasnodar in a room with eight hundred seats, all taken by students and teachers, farmers, and workers. In this context, witness statements were expected to fan the flames of sentiment against the defendants, who were treated as traitors and tried as collaborators in the large-scale massacres carried out by the ‘Hitlerites’ during World War II (Tazhidinova 2017, 114). 2

Fictionalizing Testimony

An unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question is whether Anna Pojtser actually testified in in Krasnodar in 1965. There are reasons to believe that she did not. It has been reported that a total of 44 witnesses were summoned by the court18 but a witness testimony by Anna Korelovna Pojtser was not found in the records of the trial.19 All we could find in the records was the protocol 18 19

Sovetskaja Kuban, June 5, 1965 (Tazhidinova 2017, 113). David Alan Rich went through about 2500 pages of material in 25 volumes of the Case against Matvienko et al., Criminal case No. 4, Archival file No. 100366. Arkhiv federal noi

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of her interrogation for the Extraordinary State Commission on ­September 12, 1944. The name of Anna Pojtser is also missing in a diary of the trial kept by Soviet writer and publicist Lev Vladimirovic Ginzburg (Shrayer 2018). After the success of his book about an earlier trial against Nazi collaborators in Krasnodar in October 1963 (Ginzburg 1966), he wanted to make a docu-drama about the current trial against the former guards of the Janowska camp. After shooting 20,000 feet of film covering 215 minutes of the trial, his producer ­Mosfilm20 pulled the plug21 and the film was shelved. The raw visual and sound footage have disappeared, but the diary was recovered. It has a timetable and the names of the witnesses that were filmed. Anna Pojtser is not one of them. This is remarkable given the prominence of her testimony in both reports of the trial.22 It seems hard to believe but it would seem that Anna Pojtser did not actually testify at the trial in 1965 and that both Tokarev (1973) and Kuzmin (1985) fictionalized her statement on the basis of the protocol of her interrogation in 1944 which was included in the trial documents. But even if Anna Pojtser did testify, a large part of her testimony must have been imagined, either by the witness herself and/or subsequently by Tokarev (1973) and Kuzmin (1985) who were not themselves present at the trial but narrated what Pojtser could, or should, have stated about the events in the Janowska camp in November 1943. In order to better understand why they might have fictionalized her ­testimony, we need to take into account that the trial was part of a policy to educate the people and teach them a lesson. What that lesson was can be inferred from the introduction to the books in which Tokarev (1973) and ­Kuzmin (1985) published their report of the trial. In the introduction to Inevitable Retribution (1973), the publisher claimed that the book – which had a circulation of no less than 50,000 copies in its first and 100,000 in its second edition – was intended

20 21 22

sluzhby bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii (AFSB) Krasnodar, Russia. After selecting all the witness statements for copying, he assured me that “if there were a 1960s witness ­testimony of Anna Pojtser, I would have copied it” (Personal Communication). Mosfilm is among the oldest and largest film studios in in Europe. As secret police agents hosted and guided the Mosfilm team during the trial, it has been speculated that the decision came from the KGB, the Soviet predecessor of the FSB, the Federalnaja Sloezjba Bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service) of the Russian Federation. The conclusive proof that she did not testify would be in the Protocol and the Judgment of the trial. I formally requested these documents from the Archive of the FSB but was informed by the authorities that “it is not possible to provide copies of case files as it is not stipulated by the legislation of the Russian Federation.” Letter of the Embassy of Russia in Netherlands, October 28, 2020.

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to teach Soviet soldiers and ‘all our people’ high revolutionary vigilance and feelings of hatred for the imperialists and to educate them in the spirit of selfless devotion to the Motherland.23 Similarly, No Statute of Limitations (1985) is a book from which the reader learns about the anti-human nature of fascism from examples showing its bestial face (Ivanov 1985, 1–2). Clearly, these books were both “targeted at Soviet people raising their awareness about the different approaches to war criminals, taken in the USSR and in the capitalist West” (Tazhidinova 2017, 115). Taken together, they are examples of how “during the first post-war decades, under the influence of the Cold War events, the ‘stories’ about WWII and the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union became … an important tool in state propaganda” (Baranova 2016, 1). Given this context, the story of the death of the orchestra clearly needed to be constructed as not just tragic, but also heroic. This construction was achieved by contrasting, on the one hand, the perversion of the Nazi perpetrators who forced the Jewish musicians to play the Tango of Death at their own execution with, on the other, the dignity of these victims who challenged them by predicting their downfall. In this way, the death of the orchestra was transformed into a mythical story about ‘German’ viciousness and ‘Russian’ heroism, a story that, ultimately, would be integrated into their version of the legend of the Tango of Death. Of course, it was, if anything, even more perverse that it was precisely a Jewish tango the Nazis forced the musicians to play at executions and prisoners had to listen to in their final moments. While this fact could have strengthened their case, the Soviets were unwilling to bring it in because it would have violated their policy of obfuscating the Jewish identity of the victims by calling them Soviet citizens and prisoners of war. Jews were not recognized as victims of Nazi persecution as identifying different victims and groups went against the idea of the shared struggle of communism against Nazi fascism (Bartov 2015, 31). In this chapter, an effort has been made to uncover the initial story of the death of the orchestra. This has resulted in an examination of the ­inconsistencies and contradictions in survivor statements regarding the ­ location where the execution of the orchestra took place (inside or outside the camp), the way the execution was carried out (with a single shot one by one or gunned down by the score), who was shot first and/or last (Yakub Mund or Leonid Stricks), by whom (SS-Untersturmführer Richard Rokita or a German soldier 23

“At the same time, it will serve as a warning to all those who have not learned the ­lessons of history, who are plotting a new war against the Republic of Soviets, against the c­ ountries of the socialist community.”

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of S­ onderkommando 1005), why (because they had witnessed too much or were playing out of beat), and, finally, whether they were, indeed, forced to sing songs during their own execution or to continue playing the Tango of Death until the last musician was shot. These inconsistencies and contradictions suggest that over time, and because of a process of ‘epic concentration,’ the initial story of what happened in the Janowska camp has become part of the legend of the Tango of Death.

CHAPTER 6

The Fugue of Death In the Argentinian documentary film Tango, una historia con judíos (Tango: A History with Jews) (Judkovski and Pomeraniec 2009, 45.14–45.32), two claims are made: first, that Jewish musicians in Nazi concentration camps were forced to perform a tango while men, women and children were on their way to the gas chambers, and second, that it was the Jewish-German poet Paul Celan (1920–1970) who called this particular tango the ‘Tango of Death’ (Judkovski and Pomeraniec 2009, 45.14–45.32).1 The first claim has already been disproved (See Chapter 3). This chapter challenges the second claim which is based on the influential book Tango Judío: del ghetto a la milonga (Jewish Tango: from the ghetto to the dance hall) (Nudler 1998). In this book, the Spanish Celan scholar and poet José Ángel Valente is referred to as claiming that ‘Tango of Death’ was the ‘lugubrious name’ that Paul Celan gave to Eduardo Bianco’s tango Plegaria (Nudler 1998, 28, 32). Tangoul Mortii (Tango of Death) was, indeed, the title of a poem Paul Celan published in a Romanian translation before it was published in German and became iconic under the title Todesfuge (Fugue of Death). It is, however, a myth that Paul Celan gave the ‘sinister melody’ its name Tango of Death. Actually, prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp Janowska gave that name to the tango which Jewish musicians were forced to play at executions (See Chapter 3). Like myths about the music that was played in Nazi death camps, there are also myths circulating about the poet (Paul Celan) and his famous poem (Todesfuge) (Colin and Silbermann 2010). Celan’s biographer John Felstiner, for example, tells us that Bianco and his orchestra played in Paris while Paul Antschel was there in early 1939 and that, later that year, they entertained Hitler and Goebbels at a reception in Berlin (Felstiner 1995, 30). The suggestion that Celan himself heard Plegaria is a speculation as much as it is a myth that Hitler and Goebbels heard Bianco play this tango in Berlin. Or that, for that matter, the absurd claim that Professor Stricks, the conductor of the Janowska camp orchestra testified in person at the Nuremberg trial in 1946 (Sparr 2020, 61). This was, of course, impossible because, as we have seen in the previous chapter, the conductor had been executed, together with all the musicians of the camp orchestra. The words seemingly quoted from the professor’s mouth: 1 José Judkovski is the author of the book on which the film is based (Judkovski 1998). © Willem de Haan, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525078_007

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“Die Erschießungen wurden dort von einem Todesorchester begleitet; ein Todestango wurde gespielt. Ein Professor Stricks, Insasse des Lagers, leitete zusammen mit dem Dirigenten Mund das Orchester.” (The shootings there were accompanied by a death orchestra; a death tango was played. A professor Stricks, inmate of the camp, together with the conductor Mund, led the orchestra.) are self-referential with professor Stricks talking about himself as ‘a’ professor Stricks in an alienating way. The reason is that these are not his words but – in German translation2 – the words that were spoken by the Soviet Prosecutor Colonel Smirnov, who stated that: “In Yanov Camp the executions were carried out to the strains of the ‘Death Tango’ played by an orchestra of death conducted by Professor Stricks, an internee in the camp, together with his bandmaster, Mund.”3 In this chapter, I will explore the role some of the myths about the poet and the poem are playing in the production and reproduction of the legend of the Tango of Death. In what follows, I will first explore where, when, and why Todesfuge was written and then show how the ­ongoing interest in this poem has played a role in keeping the legend of The Tango of Death alive. This is not an easy task. Given the dizzying quantity of interpretative studies on Celan, it is rather a daunting task, even for the specialist (Emmerich 1999, 7). So much has been published on this poet and his work4 and, particularly, on the poem Todesfuge (Sparr 2020), that one would expect that everything Celan ever wrote and every snippet of unpublished w ­ riting that the poet left behind has already been tracked down and e­ xhaustively interpreted. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this is not the case. The dance elements in the poem, for example, have scarcely been addressed within Celan s­ cholarship (Bianchi 2016). This apparent omission motivated me to enter the world of literature to explore the relationship between Celan’s poem Todesfuge and the legend of the Tango of Death. However, before focusing on the poem a few words are in order about the poet himself. 1

The Poet

Paul Celan (See Figure 10) did not want his poems to be published under his Jewish surname and, therefore, adopted the pseudonym Celan, an anagram of Antschel which is his real surname in Romanian spelling. He was born 2 Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Gerichtshof ­Nürnberg 1947, vol. 7, 603. 3 The Trial of German Major War Criminals, Vol. 7, February 18, 1946, 21–22. 4 In 2020, the 100th anniversary of Celan’s birthday and the 50th anniversary of his death were celebrated with at least a dozen new publications.

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Figure 10 Paul Celan, Paris Photo: Gisèle Freund. Credit: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Dist. RMN-GP

Paul (Pessach) Antschel on November 23, 1920 in Czernowitz, Romania, as the only child of Fritzi Antschel-Schrager (born in 1895 in Sagadoria) and Leo Antschel-Teitler (born in 1890 in Schipenitz). His parents were German-speaking Jews who gave their son an education in Romanian, Ukrainian and Hebrew as well as High German. In secondary school, he also learned French. After a trip to Berlin and Paris in November 1938, he studied a semester at the medical school in Tours (France). After his return, he began his study of Romanian and Russian literature at the University of Czernowitz. In the summer of 1941, Czernowitz was occupied by the Nazi German army and more than 3000 Jews were murdered. The remaining Jews were driven into a ghetto and from there deported for resettlement in Transnistria (Moldavia). After his parents

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were deported to a concentration camp in Michailowka (Volgograd, Russia) in 1942, Paul Antschel was sent to a labor camp in Tăbărăști (Romania) where he was forced to do roadwork. When exactly this period of forced labor came to an end, whether he escaped or was liberated by the Red Army, and how he returned to Czernowitz has remained obscure (Felstiner 1995, 22–23). Upon his return in early 1944, he learned from friends that his parents had not survived the camps.5 In order to avoid ­Russian military service, he volunteered as an aide in a psychiatric hospital and worked as a translator for a local paper. He started to study English and began to ­compile two collections of his poems.6 Presumably in late 1944, he made the first sketches for Todesfuge which, after moving to Bucharest in April 1945, he completed in May. In Bucharest he worked as an editor and translator for the Cartea Rusa (­Russian Book) publisher until December 1947. After a short stay in a refugee camp in Vienna, he moved to Paris to study German and Linguistics at the Sorbonne (1948–1950). He became a French citizen in 1955 and spent the rest of his life in the so-called City of Lights. He married Gisèle de Lestrange on December 23, 1952. Their son Claude François Eric was born in 1955. After having been repeatedly7 hospitalized in psychiatric clinics, Paul Celan took his own life by drowning himself in the river Seine. His body was found on April 20, 1970. At the time of his death, he was a celebrated poet who had published seven poetry collections8 for which he received important literary awards, especially in West-Germany.9 2

The Poem

Of all the poems Celan wrote, Todesfuge (Fugue of Death) was the most famous one by far. It was his first major effort to find words for the horrors of 5 His father had perished and his mother, unable to work, was shot in the Fall/Winter of 1942. 6 He rearranged and donated them to his friend Ruth Kraft before she left for Bucharest at the beginning of 1945. 7 December 1962–January 1963, May 1965, December 1965–June 1966. 8 Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory, 1952); Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold, 1955); Sprachgitter (Speechwicket/Speech Grille, 1959); Die Niemandsrose (The No-One’s-Rose, 1963); Atemwende (Breathturn, 1967); Fadensonnen (Threadsuns/Twinesuns/ Fathomsuns, 1968); Lichtzwang (Lightduress/Light-Compulsion, 1970); and, the posthumously published Schneepart (Snow Part, 1971) and Zeitgehöft (Timestead/Homestead of Time, 1976). 9 The 1956 Literaturpreis des Kulturkreises im Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie, the 1958 Literaturpreis der Freien Hansestadt Bremen, the 1960 Georg-Büchner Preis in Darmstadt and the 1964 Großer Kunstpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

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the Holocaust10 which, at the time of writing, were only beginning to become known to the outside world. It was not until the 1990s, after it became more widely known that prisoners had been forced to play music as a background to the killings (Eckhard 2001), that it began to be acknowledged that Celan’s poem Todesfuge referred to the forced music-making in Nazi concentration and extermination camps (Orlick 2020). However, the more became known about the unimaginable crimes that had been committed against the Jewish people, the more it became clear that Celan’s poem was “feeding the victim’s words through his own fresh memories so as to find a voice for what happened” (Felstiner 1995, 32). Todesfuge impressed audiences because it bore witness of a disrupted world (Felstiner 1995, 26–27). The poem startled readers with its dramatic metaphors: ashen hair, rising as smoke to the sky, to have a grave in the clouds and, last but not least, Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland (a Master from Germany). However, the most famous and shocking metaphor of Todesfuge is the surreal conjunction of ‘black’ with ‘milk’ in the opening line as well as in the refrain of the poem: Black milk of daybreak, we drink it at evening, we drink it at midday and morning, we drink it at night, we drink and we drink. Conventionally, such a metaphor would be a figure of speech used to convey a fact by asserting something contrary to the fact. But, in this case, reality may have overtaken the surreal since camp inmates were given a liquid to drink which they called ‘black milk’ (Felstiner 1995, 33–34). For some critics this ­metaphor embellished the raw reality of Auschwitz, but for the survivors it was not so much a metaphor as a statement of fact. Todesfuge has been called one of or, perhaps, the most important poem of the 20th century (Emmerich 1999, 7).11 No poem has drawn more ­attention to the Holocaust and for many European Jewish survivors it “remains the quintessence of whatever understanding they have after the catastrophe” (Felstiner, 1995: 288). Its prolonged impact stems partly from its wide array of historical and cultural symbols, from Genesis to Bach, from Heinrich Heine to Goethe’s Faust’s heroine Margareta and the maiden Shulamith of the Song 10 11

The word ‘Holocaust’ itself became current much later, beginning in the 1960s when scholars and writers began using this word for referring to what the Nazis called ‘the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.’ Todesfuge has been translated in countless languages, including, most recently, Chinese (Krenz 2019). At least fifteen translations of Todesfuge have been published in English alone (Felstiner 1995, 32). Each translation has given rise to debates about the meaning and reception of the poem.

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of Songs (Felstiner 1995, 26–27). At the same time, Todesfuge had this impact because it has turned out to be “the most direct of Celan’s poems in naming and blaming: naming what went on in the death camps, blaming Germany” (Coetzee 2001, 6). Like no other poem, it confronts Germans with their collective guilt which probably explains why Todesfuge became a national obsession in West-Germany and the poem was recited in a special session of the German Bundestag (Parliament) in 1988 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) pogrom on November 9, 1938 (Emmerich 1999, 7). In terms of its contribution to the world of literature, the poem makes two claims about what poetry in our time is, or should be, capable of. One is that language is always able to capture a subject no matter what it is. In other words, however unspeakable the Holocaust is, there will always be poetry capable of speaking about it. The other claim is that is possible to tell the truth about G ­ ermany’s immediate past even by using the German language after it has been corrupted by the Nazis. As one of the earliest and most prominent examples of Holocaust literature, Todesfuge has been both highly praised and acerbically dismissed. On the one hand, South-African Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee claimed that it should be regarded as “one of the landmark poems of the twentieth century” (Coetzee 2001, 6). On the other hand, dismissals came from literary critics who claimed that the poem was much too aesthetic and, therefore, an unfortunate representation of the horrific practice of the Nazis to order death tangos to be played during executions. In their view, the poem was an example of ‘unwanted beauty’ (Kaplan 2007, 20). In an essay on cultural criticism and society, Theodor W. Adorno, one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II, famously called it ‘barbaric’ to write poetry after Auschwitz.12 Celan scholars believed that this so-called dictum was directed particularly at Celan’s ­Todesfuge and that Celan took Adorno’s verdict personally (Sieber 2007, 188). Moreover, Adorno was thought to have later revised or even withdrawn his dictum under the influence of Celan’s poetry (Ibid.). However Adorno’s dictum could not ­possibly have been aimed at Celan’s poem. Adorno’s essay was published three years before Todesfugue came out in Germany.13 And Celan’s retort that “now … we finally know where the barbarians are to be found” ­(Felstiner 1995, 225) was published seventeen years after Adorno’s dictum14 and not 12

Adorno (1949). Quotation from Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms. Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1981, 34. 13 In Mohn und Gedächtnis. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 1952. 14 In: Robert Neumann, 34 x erste Liebe. Frankfurt am Main: Bärmeier und Nikel, 1966, 32.

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addressed at Adorno but rather at the editors of a German literary journal.15 In fact, Adorno never withdrew his dictum, nor did he try to revise it (Sieber 2007, 190). In other words, the polemic between Adorno and Celan is a mystification. It never took place in the way that has been suggested (Hofmann 2005, 182; Krenz 2019, 289). Nevertheless, the myth made Todesfuge enigmatic and, consequently, scandalously notorious thereby keeping the legend of the Tango of Death alive. 3

The Title

The legend of the Tango of Death is kept alive first by the reference to the Romanian title Tangoul Mortii (Tango of Death). This title, which is believed to have given the poem “the ring of reliable evidence” (Felstiner 1995, 30), has often been referred to suggesting that the poem was purely based on facts. In this way, the poem has played a role in the creation of the legend of the Tango of Death. Whether or not Tangoul Mortii is the original title of the poem has been a bone of contention. According to the Argentinian writer and tango historian Julio Nudler, Tangoul Mortii was not the original title. He believes that the original title of the poem, written in German, was Todesfuge. During the R ­ omanian translation this title was transformed into Tangoul Mortii (Nudler 1998, 27). According to Celan’s biographer John Felstiner, however, the original title of the poem was not Todesfuge but Todestango (Tango of Death). This claim is based on the idea that Celan wanted the poem “to annul the dance that fascinated Europe during his childhood” (Felstiner 1995, 28). What motivated Celan to cancel tango as “the essence of life as urbane, graceful, nonchalant” (Ibid.) is left unclear, however. As a result, we can only speculate why Celan “penciled out” the word ‘tango’ and substituted ‘fugue’ thereby leaving readers “shuttling between the poem’s versification and its veracity, its aesthetic and its historical claims” (Felstiner 1986, 252). While the original title Todestango alluded directly to tango music and dance, the later title Todesfuge clearly does not. Scholarly efforts to relate the interpretation of the poem to the later title have been focused on the rhythm of the poem rather than the words. It is argued that the repetitive risings and fallings of the rhythm are reminiscent of a fugue’s alternating counterpoint of voice, counterpart, image, and counter-image (Buck 1999, 36–38). And the 15

Merkur 202, 1965. They had referred to Adorno’s dictum in order to criticize his Todesfuge.

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use of complex repetition, mirroring, and projection techniques, along with polyphonic word-sound-image sequences subdivided into vocal fragments suggest that the poem was composed in accordance with the art of the fugue. In this interpretation the Meister aus Deutschland (Master from Germany) in the poem is the composer Johann Sebastian Bach (Felstiner 1995, 33). A problem with this interpretation is that Celan unequivocally denied that Todesfuge was composed according to musical principles (Celan 2003, 608). He tried to correct this misconception by claiming “that the musicality of the ‘Death Fugue’ has neither a transcendent, reconciling, transfiguring character, nor is it intellectual playfulness, but: Auschwitz ... the murders, the gassing.”16 In addition, there are direct references in the poem’s text to music and dancing in the death camps that can hardly be overlooked. The sequence strike up and play for the dance, sing up and play, play on for the dancing, for example, refers to the practice of forced dancing with SS men shouting ‘Tanz mal Jude!’ (Dance Jew, do it!).17 In this interpretation Death itself is a Meister aus Deutschland (Master from Germany), represented by a German SS officer depicted as a coldblooded killer: “Sein Auge ist blau, er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel, er trifft dich genau.” (His eye it is blue, he hits you with a leaden bullet, he hits you right on target.) Todesfuge addresses not only the horrific reality of the death camp but refers also to much older cultural and literary connotations of dance and death (Bianchi 2016). The fascination for a rendezvous with Death is timeless and as a topos the Dance of Death has been featured in art, literature, and music, from medieval and early modern times until today (Hammerstein 1980). In this view, the musicality, polyphony and rhythm of Todesfuge are reminiscent of the Totentanz (Felstiner 1995, 37), the dance of death or dance macabre which re­presented a ‘memento mori’ for the faithful in the context of the waves of plague that claimed millions of victims in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries (Link 1993, 11). In Jewish culture, dances of death were performed at weddings and family celebrations (Daxelmüller 1993, 592). And during the Third Reich, the Totentanz was used in Nazi propaganda to warn against the ‘dangerousness’ of the Jews (Wunderlich 2001, 126). Notwithstanding these broader cultural and literary connotations, the references to dancing in Todesfuge clearly ‘jibe’ with the poem’s original title 16 17

Paul Celan, Mikrolithen sinds, Steinchen: Die Prosa aus dem Nachlass. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2005, 110. An example of forced dancing in the Janowska camp is depicted in the drawing ‘Dance of the Rabbis’ (1943) by Ze’ev Porath (Wilhelm ‘Willie’ Ochs). https://www.infocenters.co.il /gfh/notebook_ext.asp?book=140389andlang=engandsite=gfh.

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Todestango (Felstiner 1995, 37) as well as with a host of stories about tango music being played in Nazi death camps. The undeniable allusions to tango explain why the poem continues to be associated with the legend of the Tango of Death. It has even been claimed that without “the lilt of this macabre dance music, the poem loses much of its effect.”18 4 Inspiration Celan never actually explained where and when the poem was written or what inspired him to write it. His silence raised questions, invited speculation, and led to false assumptions about both the poem and the poet himself. It has, for example, been assumed that the poem was written in a Nazi concentration camp.19 It is possible that this assumption was based on the original title ‘Todestango’ which may have given the impression that the poet “knew whereof he spoke, that he was surely there and must have written the poem there” (­Felstiner 1995, 35). It is also possible that the assumption was inspired by a note of Celan’s Romanian editor claiming that Tangoul Mortii was based upon the ‘real fact’ that in Nazi death camps, some of the prisoners were forced to play music while others had to dig graves.20 That the poem was written in a concentration camp is untrue, however. While there is no doubt that Todesfuge is built on factual information about the death camps, it is a myth that the poem is based on the personal experience of the poet as a prisoner in the Janowska camp. When exactly the poem was written has also been a bone of contention. Paul Celan himself dated Todesfuge as ‘Bucharest 45’ but friends from Czernowitz remembered the poem as having been written earlier in 1944. The poet Alfred Kittner, for example, recalled that in the spring of 1944 his friend Paul Antschell read Todesfuge – a poem that had been written shortly before (Kittner 1996, 218).21 This implies that it must have been before he arrived in Bucharest in 1945 (Wiedeman 2010, 25). However, Celan’s translator Petre Solomon remembered that his friend Paul Antschell brought a poem with the title Todestango from Czernowitz to Bucharest (Solomon 1982, 226). The title 18 19 20 21

Gail Holst-Warhaft, Deathfugue. Intruding on Paul Celan. At https://www.celan-projekt .de/materialien-felstiner.html. The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 1988, 49. The article was based on Mark ­Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Art Museum 1987. This exibition catalog included several paintings inspired by Todesfuge. Contemporanul 32, May 2, 1947. Alfred Kittner, Erinnerungen 1906–1991. Aachen: Rimbaud Verlagsgesellschaft 1996, 218.

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Todesfuge appeared in Bucharest where Celan continued to work on the poem even in 1947 (Solomon 2019, 52). In other words, it seems most likely that while the first preliminary stages of writing date back to his time in ­Czernowitz (1944–1945), the poem was definitely created in Bucharest. More important than where and when the poem was written is the question why Celan wrote it. What were his reasons for writing the poem? What inspired him? It seems plausible that Celan got the idea for the poem from listening to survivors or from reading reports about what happened in Nazi death camps. Celan’s biographer (Felstiner 1986, 252) has suggested that the poet may have come across a report on the extermination camp Majdanek (Lublin) written by the Russian journalist Konstantin Simonov.22 In this pamphlet, Simonov recounted testimonies of how, during a death march toward the crematorium, “loudspeakers began to emit the deafening strains of the foxtrot and the tango.” Simonov added that the loudspeakers blared “all morning, all day, all the evening, and all night” – a sentence which clearly resonates with the first stanza of Todesfuge in which the prisoners drink black milk of daybreak, at evening, at midday and morning, at night. This remarkable affinity suggests that Celan may have read the pamphlet although he believed to have been inspired (also) by what he had read about the ghetto of Lemberg in the Izvestia, the official newspaper of the Soviet government.23 At the time, Izvestia published articles with excerpts from reports of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission for the Discovery and Investigation of German Fascist Crimes. An article of December 23, 1944 was titled ‘On the crimes of the Germans in the District of Lvov.’24 It was published at a moment that survivors were desperate for every bit of information they could get hold of about the fate of their relatives. In this situation, Celan would hardly have missed such an article which was the first with information about crimes committed by the Nazis in the area to which his parents had been deported (Wiedemann 2010, 25). Much of what was reported in the Izvestia article concerned the Janowska camp which was closely connected to the ghetto in Lvov (Wiedeman 2010, 25). Here Paul Antschel could have read that the German Nazis conducted their torture, beatings and shootings to the accompaniment of music, and that for this purpose they had orga22 23

24

Konstantine Simonov, The Lublin Extermination Camp. Moscow: Foreign Languages ­ ublishing House, 1944. P “[A]ls ich im [...] Mai 1945 die Todesfuge schrieb, ich hatte damals, in der Izvestia, wie ich mich zu erinnern glaube, die Berichte über das Lemberger Ghetto gelesen.” In preliminary notes for ‘Der Meridian,’ the acceptance speech for the Georg-Büchner Preis on October 22, 1960 in Darmstadt (Gossens 2012, 47). The report was also published in Красная звезда (Red Star). Official Newspaper of the Soviet Ministry of Defense, December 23, 1944.

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nized an orchestra of prisoners who were ordered to compose a special tune which they then dubbed the Todestango. Had he read the article, Celan would also have seen the photographs of the Janowska camp, one of which was the iconic picture of the camp orchestra (Figure 4) presented with the caption: “An orchestra of musicians imprisoned in the Yanovsky camp plays the ‘Tango of Death’ at the execution of Soviet citizens.” Given that Todestango was the original title of Todesfuge it seems most likely that the article in Izvestia and the iconic picture of the Janowska camp orchestra were, indeed, the source of inspiration for Celan’s poem. However, to understand the impact the article in the Izvestia may have had on Celan, one has also to take into account the way in which the facts were ‘painted’ in this article. Since the reports of the Extraordinary State Commission in the Izvestia were first and foremost intended to educate the general public about the crimes of the ‘Hitlerites’ against the peaceful Soviet population, the presentation of the story with photographs, including the iconic photograph of the Janowska camp orchestra supposedly playing the Tango of Death, was at least as important as the facts themselves.25 In this context, the story of the Tango of Death lent itself to serving as a particularly striking example of ‘German viciousness’ (See Chapter 5). 5

The Legend

Having explored where, when, and why Todesfuge was written, I will now focus on how stories about this emblematic and enigmatic poem have been informed by references to the Tango of Death. I will give two examples of how an ongoing interest in Todesfuge, together with a little literary imagination, has enabled the legend of the Tango of Death to travel. In the first example the legend is taken back to the birthplace of tango, Buenos Aires. This will be followed by an example of how the legend is brought back to the Ukrainian city of Lviv, where the story of the Tango of Death originated. The book Tango Judío: del ghetto a la milonga (Jewish Tango: from the ghetto to the dance hall) by the Argentinian writer and tango historian Julio Nudler 25 “Nicht nur die durch den Artikel wiedergegebenen Fakten sind wichtig – Celan hätte sie auch aus anderen Quellen erhalten können – wesentlich ist die Art und Weise, wie diese Fakten am 23. Dezember 1944 den Lesern präsentiert wurden.” (Not only the facts reported by the article are important – Celan could have obtained them from other sources – what is essential is the way these facts were presented to the readers on December 23, 1944.) (Wiedemann 2010, 25).

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(1998), referenced previously, is a collection of histories about the passionate, contradictory, and silenced relationship between Jews and Argentinian tango. One of these histories is about tango in the Holocaust. In a brief chapter of barely six pages Nudler tells the story of the Tango de la Muerte (Tango of Death), and he does this in three remarkably different ways: first, by drawing on the life and work of Paul Celan; second, by recounting a fictional dialogue about the musicians of the Janowska camp orchestra and, finally, by situating the Tango of Death in the context of Argentinian tango history. There is no need to repeat Felstiner’s biographical notes on Celan which Nudler draws upon. More surprising is his recounting of a story written in 1948 by a Polish Holocaust survivor.26 In this story, two fictional characters (a former accountant and a former judge) exchange their ideas about what it must have been like for the musicians in the Janowska camp orchestra to accompany executions with the sinister melody of the Tango of Death. They imagine how ­thousands of human beings brought from all over Europe were ordered to undress, how the SS kept order with their German shepherd dogs, how the automatic weapons began a test ticking and how the tremor that precedes death must have run through the bodies of the masses of prisoners as well as the musicians. During this conversation, suddenly one of them imagines himself to be one of the musicians. He wonders: “How can you play and live in a camp like this? You play music for the death of others and your own.” By recounting this fictional dialogue, Nudler reinforces the connection between Celan’s Todesfuge and the story of the Tango of Death by taking the reader back to the scene of the crime and making the feelings of the musicians almost palpable. In the final part of his chapter, Nudler brings the Tango of Death back to Argentinian tango history as well. It may seem a bit far-fetched to return to the beginning of the 20th century but to Nudler it makes perfect sense. In his view, Tango of Death, the ‘lugubre name’ he believes Celan gave to Plegaria, coincides with the title of three what he calls ‘necrophiliac’ tangos. To understand this, a brief excursion into the history of Argentine tango is necessary. One of these ‘necrophiliac’ tangos is composed by Horacio Mackintosh (1917), another by Alberto Novión (1922) and yet another by Piero Trombetta 26

The story Diálogo sobre músicos (Dialogue on Musicians) is one of a collection of s­ tories about the Jewish tragedy of the Nazi occupation of Lemberg (Lviv) written in 1948 by the Polish Holocaust survivor Mieczysław R. Frenkel (1889–1970). The page proofs of an unpublished work, with additional typewritten matter were produced in 1948. Nudler refers to the Spanish translation La rapsodia de Lwow: esto es un asesinato (The Rhapsody of Lvov: this is an assassination). Buenos Aires: Milá 1986.

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(1960). El Tango de La Muerte composed by Horacio Mackintosh has a North American ragtime flavor. The only recording of this tango was made in Buenos Aires by José Arturo Severino’s instrumental quartet Orquesta Típica Severino on March 5, 1917 for the label Victor (69722-B). The tango was written as a piano accompaniment to a silent movie. The film which premiered in Buenos Aires on April 9, 1917 was directed by José Agustín Ferreyra, a pioneer in the Argentinian film business. His early movies were based on stories developed from the lyrics of popular tangos. The movie El Tango de La Muerte is about a milonguita (female tango dancer) trying to escape from the misery of the slum. She leaves her home to enjoy the night life in Buenos Aires but is seduced by a villain who ruins her life. Her longing for a life of luxury has led her down a path of degradation to an inexorable end. How that end was imagined can be seen on the cover of the sheet music published in 1917 in Buenos Aires by Breyer Bros (Nº 16.569). It shows an elegantly dressed couple with a man, looking like a vampire, stabbing a dagger into a lady’s chest. From a European perspective the image may be reminiscent of the ancient motif of Death and the Maiden which, as we will see in the next chapter, has been developed and exploited in art, literature, and music from the romantic era up until the present time. From an Argentinian perspective, however, the image resonates with a genre in tango that reflects the violence of macho culture and male contempt for women as embodied by the lover who, discovering that he is being cheated on, kills his wife. A prime example of this genre is the song Amablemente (Kindly) by Edmundo Rivero (Buenos Aires: Philips 1963) which tells about a man who comes home to find his wife with someone else. He tells the stranger, who is not to blame, to leave, asks the woman to bring him his slippers and make him a tea, lights a cigarette, chats with her as if nothing had happened, until he finally kisses her forehead and ‘kindly’ kills her with 34 stab wounds. The Tango de la Muerte by Alberto Novión was composed for a one-act farcical theater play (Gallo 1958).27 The song tells us about a lonely man with no friends, no homeland, no faith and only bitterness in his heart who mourns the passing of a loved one and finds only consolation in singing. The theatre production, which premiered in 1922 was rather mediocre and has long been forgotten. Unlike the title song, which has been recorded by the legendary tango 27

The so-called sainete was produced by the Arata-Simari-Franco Company and premiered in Buenos Aires in Teatro San Martín on August 5, 1922. Author: Alberto Novion. Actors: Marcos Caplan, Juan Ciencia, Ángel Clemente, Manuel Díaz, Álvaro Escobar, Eva Franco, Berta Gangloff, Jorge Gangloff, Luis Lagomarsino, Tomás Leiza, Luisa Morotti, María Luisa Notar, Pedro Otegui, Tomás Simari. Conductor Orchestra: Arturo De Bassi, Roberto Firpo. Direction: Alberto Novion Company: Cía. Arata–­Simari-Franco. http://www.alternativate atral.com/obra65992-el-tango-de-la-muerte.

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singer Carlos Gardel, and was released by Odeon 18059, matrix 991/1. The song represents the genre of sentimental tango in which death is a recurrent theme. Death in this genre of tango may also be related to the end of a love evoking the pain of the abandoned lover, the death of his feelings or even his suicidal feelings and longing for death itself. Of course, death may also be referring to the passing of a beloved woman like, for example, in the tango Verdemar composed in 1943 by Carlos Di Sarli with lyrics by José María Contursi.28 The most significant of these ‘tangos tanatóricos’ (thanatotic tangos) is, according to Nudler, the Tango de la Muerte by Piero Trombetta, an Italian ­violinist who was a member of Bianco’s orchestra when Plegaria was recorded in Berlin in 1939. Trombetta’s Tango de la Muerte was considered as undeserving of its name and had little success unlike the German version Kriminaltango (Criminal tango) performed by the orchestra of Hazy Osterwald became a big hit in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Describing scenes from tavern, the song juxtaposes the appearance of shady figures (“dunkle Gestalten”) and their mysterious dealings with dancing tango (“Und sie tanzen einen Tango”). The song culminates with a shot in the dark and the arrival of the police, unable to assemble any evidence.29 While all three these tangos de la muerte were about death, none of them evoked death in ‘so massive, so insane, so atrocious’ a way as Plegaria (Nudler 1986, 32). Clearly uncomfortable with the idea that an Argentinian tango could have been the Tango of Death, Nudler resorted to trying to prove that Plegaria was not really an Argentinian tango. He calls the music mediocre and lacking the spirit and imagination that so characterized the musicians from the Rio de la Plata (River Plate). Moreover, he calls the puerile verse of Plegaria a far cry from the usual high poetic level produced by Argentinian lyricists (Nudler 1986, 31). He then underlines the composer Bianco’s fascist inclinations and his willingness to do anything to promote his tangos in Nazi Germany. As a case in point Nudler refers to the recording of Plegaria in 1939 in Berlin with its ‘special effects’ of lugubrious bells and ghostly chorus of slow-walking penitents, its strange, somewhat esoteric, ritual tone, more sinister than sublime, along with the elemental melody and square martial cadence, seemingly intended to exert a strong attraction on the Nazis (Nudler 1986, 31). Despite or precisely because he situates the Tango of Death outside the tradition of genuine Argentinian tango, and by connecting the biographical story of Celan’s Todesfuge to a fictional dialogue between two Holocaust survivors

28 29

https://www.todotango.com/musica/tema/802/Verdemar/. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriminaltango.

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about the musicians of orchestra in the Janowska camp, Nudler succeeds, paradoxically, in giving the legend another lease of life.30 After Nudler had taken the legend of the Tango of Death to Buenos Aires, the birthplace of tango, the Ukrainian writer Yuri Vynnychuk (2019) brought the story back to the place where it originated. Like in Nudler’s short story, the perverse practice of a camp orchestra playing a tango at executions, so dramatically evoked by Paul Celan in his Todesfuge, is ‘the mysterious heart’31 of Vynnychuk’s award-winning32 Tango smerti (Tango of Death). In this novel, the protagonist, a scholar researching the remains and reminiscences of the old and bygone Lemberg (Lviv), hears about the Tango of Death which is not Plegaria but To ostatnia niedziela. In hopes of discovering the secret of the Tango of Death, the scholar meets with a 90-year old Jew who he believes had played this tango on his violin during executions in the Janowska camp in Lviv. With his literary creativity Vynnychuk imagines how the Jewish victims hearing the Tango of Death in their final moments were able to remember their life in the hereafter. Nudler’s history of tango in the Holocaust and Vynnychuk’s novel are just two examples of how scholarly speculation and literary imagination have worked together to allow the legend of the Tango of Death to travel and remain alive. The ongoing interest in Celan’s Todesfuge continues to draw attention to the legend of the Tango of Death. The allusions to tango in the original title as well as in the poem itself have offered scholars the opportunity to recount stories about a Tango of Death being played in Nazi extermination camps. As these different stories have become conflated into the narrative of the legend, the boundaries between fact and fiction were blurred. Novelists33 draw on these stories using their literary imagination to enable their readers to identify with the musicians and the victims, and to imagine what the musicians must have gone through having to play this music during executions and what it must have been like for the victims to listen to it. In this way, scholarly speculation and literary imagination work together to allow the legend of the Tango of Death to travel and remain alive. 30 31 32 33

See García Blaya, n.d.; Ibarlucía (2004); Saccomanno (2004); Gilbert (2010); Vainer (2012); Abadi (2013); Adet (2013); Cerda (2015); Bauso (2018); Verbitsky (2018). Bernadette Conrad, Nur Steine sind geblieben. Der ukrainische Autor Jurij Wynnytschuk lässt das alte Lemberg wieder aufleben. (Only stones remained. The Ukrainian author Yuri Vinnychuk revised the old Lviv) Die Zeit, October 13, 2014. Tango smerti was awarded the BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year for 2012. Abadi 2013; Sorel 2013.

CHAPTER 7

Preserving History Legends are stories that ring true. They capture the imagination of audiences not because they are true but because the narrative sends a message that the story could be true. This is why the meaning of a legend might be better understood in relation to its narrativity than to “some empiricist notion of truth” (Samuel and Thompson 1990, 10). Interpreting legends requires relating s­ tories not only to ‘reality’ but also to the imagination that structures the narrative. In order to better understand their meaning, we must take into account that ­legendary stories are created in order to make the past both plausible and meaningful. Legendary stories are often told in an effort to come to terms with the past in the present, i.e. “in a quest for an interpretation with some consoling meaning that posterity could use” (Hutton 2016, 107). Legends thrive by fulfilling a need to know about historical events. Yet, here, too, in the way legendary stories are told, the imagination plays a significant role. By adding salient details and claiming that eyewitnesses were present at the scene, audiences are made to believe that the story is about what actually happened. While most legendary stories are neither completely fictional nor entirely factual, it is not the veracity of their narrative but their construction which turns these stories into legends. Legends may be based on historical documentation and testimonies but, ultimately, they result from processes of selecting, ordering, simplifying, dramatizing, and embellishing historical and imagined elements. In these processes, the logic of the narrative draws a story into the realm of the legendary. Memory then begins to take on a life of its own, separate and distinct from the historical context. A recent example of how a compelling story became fictionalized is the screenplay Tango of Death. A true story of Holocaust survivors (Baranovsky 2020).1 In this scenario, the ‘true’ story of the Tango of Death is narrated in the following way. Jacob Mund, the conductor of the prisoners’ orchestra in the Janowska camp, refuses the order of camp commandant Rokita to choose a song to accompany human death. In reaction to his refusal Rokita orders the guards to execute a violinist named Levina. When Mund is ordered to choose a melody for her death, he picks up Levina’s violin and plays the 1 Los Angeles based composer of film music, Dmytro Gordon, has already created the soundtrack to the prospective movie ‘Tango of Death.’ See https://soundcloud.com /­dmytrogordon/sets/tango-of-death. © Willem de Haan, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004525078_008

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Tango of Death, soon to be followed by the members of the orchestra who “timidly start ­playing too, tears in their eyes” (Ibid., 126–127). In this scenario fact and fiction are blurred as suggested above, including new elements like a ­violinist named Levina for whose execution the conductor has to play. Perhaps the most striking addition to this fictionalized version of the legend, is that the tango Mund played was, in fact, composed by two young lovers: Mund’s daughter Shera and her boyfriend Max, the son of camp commandant Rokito.2 The youngsters had p ­ reviously fallen in love when Max used to come to Shera’s home taking violin lessons from her father. Introducing this fictional love story into the story of the Tango of Death, can be interpreted as a way to increase the mythical force of the narrative allowing the audience to be carried away – if only for a moment – from the horrendous reality of the death camp. In the preceding chapters, I have tried to do justice to memories of survivors, while, at the same time, taking a critical look at stories that appear to have been based on “rumors which grew in the postwar years” (Gilbert 2005, 176). In this final chapter, I will explore the ‘mythic potency’ (Clendinnen 1999, 166) of the legend of the Tango of Death which will continue to be told and retold, often in ways that blur the demarcation between the historical and the imaginary. In order to better understand why the legend continues to be reproduced in art, literature, film and social media, I will explore what it is about the story of the Tango of Death that allows it to capture the imagination of audiences around the world. How does the legend inform current representations of the Holocaust? How does the legend enable audiences to acknowledge the horrors of the death camps? And how does the legend get into the way of understanding the role of music in the suffering? I will conclude this chapter with some reflections on how the fascination for the legend of the Tango of Death can, paradoxically, provide an opportunity to preserve and remember the actual history of music in the Holocaust. 1

Imagining Horror

The Holocaust is notoriously difficult to represent. It has even been argued that it is impossible because it transcends history and, therefore, defies all reason and imagination (Wiesel 1997, 88). Survivors like Primo Levi and Paul Celan, however, have shown that nonrepresentation of the Holocaust is not an option. Writing about it is not only possible but also better than the awe 2 In reality, SS-Untersturmführer Richard Rokita was deputy to commandant SS-Obersturmführer Gustav Willhaus.

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of silence. It is important for creating awareness, inviting reflection and stimulating necessary debate. Of course, some representations of the Holocaust are of dubious value. For example, stories about what happened in the death camps may be so horrific that people wish to have never heard or read of them. The same applies to visual representations of those horrors. There are limits to what audiences find acceptable, appropriate, or endurable. People may experience images as offensive. It would be unfair to accuse these people of ­Holocaust denial because there is a difference between being upset by images of horrors and denying that those horrors have taken place. Being upset is, rather, a way to acknowledge them. Individuals have emotional limits to what they can endure and representations of the almost unimaginable horrors in the death camps may well exceed those limits. For any given person at a given time the discomfort of confronting a graphic representation of those horrors may simply be too much to bear. A case in point, taken from my own country, the Netherlands, is a painting by Ronald Ophuis called Birkenau I (2000).3 This painting shows a completely naked woman being raped by two prisoners in striped concentration camp uniforms. The combination of violence with sexuality is difficult to ignore. For many viewers, it is impossible not to look. For other viewers, however, the ­sexual violence in this painting is so explicit and disgusting that they feel compelled to look away. Dutch art critics decried the sensationalism and cheap effects of this painting4 and attacked the painter for violating good taste and unnecessarily if not intentionally, hurting people by confronting them with unsettling horrors of the camps.5 One critic called Birkenau I an “antisemitic rat painting” for showing “not bad men, but Bad Jews.”6 In response, Ophuis admitted that he had painted this gruesome image in order to evoke uncomfortable emotions but he did so with the intention of bringing this history to life. The art critics had a problem with it because they did not want to acknowledge that not all prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were innocent victims. In a scholarly review of this ‘painful painting’ it was argued that Ophuis had tried to inject intense affect into our thinking about the Holocaust, not by representing but rather by imagining the atrocities that could have taken place in the camps (Van Alphen 2008, 97).7

3 At http://www.being-here.net/page/1437/testimonies. 4 Janneke Wesseling, NRC, September 14, 2000. 5 Robbert Roos, Trouw, September 5, 2000. 6 Kees ’t Hart, De Groene October 21, 2000. 7 For a discussion of ‘bad’ Holocaust representations in contemporary art, see Biber (2009).

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Inspired by this example I would argue that the same could be said of the legend of the Tango of Death. There were, in fact, no gas chambers in the Janowska camp. Yet, imagining that a tango was played to accompany J­ ewish men, women and children to the gas chambers, evokes a strong affective response. The poignant image of the gas chambers has an emotional impact that “outrages our feelings in a way which the mass shootings, with all their brutality, do not” (Clendinnen 1999, 15). This is how legends work: by touching our hearts with a story that could be true. 2

Capturing the Imagination

Most people have no idea that there were orchestras of prisoners in Nazi death camps, never mind that tangos were played in these camps. Tango is known as a contemporary retro dance from the first half of the 20th century in Argentina which has gained world-wide popularity in the last few decades. Few people know tango music was much en vogue in the 1930s. Even less well known is that while tango was highly fashionable in France and Germany, no other European country had as much tango-fever as Poland. In fact, during the prewar years, more than three-quarters of all popular songs in Poland were tangos and most of their composers as well as the musicians playing them, were Jews.8 For this reason, it should come as no surprise that some of these popular tangos were played by orchestras and sung by Jewish prisoners in the camps. Some of them may have derived a certain degree of pleasure from these songs. However, in contrast to what is often believed, singing as a form of resistance was probably more an exception than the rule. This may have been the case among political prisoners in the earlier days of the concentration camps in the 1930s, but it is unlikely that Jewish prisoners in extermination camps in the 1940s sung tangos as a form of resistance. It is more likely that in those camps songs of grief and sorrow were sung and that singing about the worst kinds of camp experiences served as “a palliative for pain and a drug for perseverance” (John 2001, 299). The legend of the Tango of Death will make the reality of the Holocaust emotionally more endurable if we can imagine that music was a source of pleasure and hope, resistance, and survival for prisoners under the inhumane of conditions in the death camps. This is a fairly wide-spread belief which has been expressed by the well-known Belgian psychotherapist and author of many books on human relationships, Esther Perel. She is of Polish-Jewish 8 Jerzy Placzkiewicz, Tango in Poland, 1913–1939. https://www.todotango.com/english/history /chronicle/165/Tango-in-Poland-1913-1939/.

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descent and the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her parents raised her on stories of Jewish resilience in the face of extreme adversity. In one of her ‘­Letters to Esther,’9 Perel asserts that in Nazi concentration camps where death was ever-present, the music of the orchestras kept prisoners connected to their sense of humanity. The music worked as the ‘counterforce of deadness,’ giving them hope in the midst of the darkness they had to endure. The idea that music was a source of resilience offering prisoners pleasure, consolation, and hope, makes the remembrance of the Holocaust emotionally more endurable. It is a thought that alleviates guilt feelings and reconfirms the conventional understanding that even in the worst imaginable circumstances there will always be some degree of civilization in the world. The belief in music as a ‘proclaimer of immortal human values’ (Fackler 2007, 4) enables a positive note to be injected into the story of the Tango of Death which, as a legend, invites people to morally condemn ‘the radical horror’ of the camps (Horowitz 2006, 188). On the one hand, the redemptive nature of the narrative serves to lessen the shock caused by the incomprehensible savagery of the Nazis. On the other hand, the combination of tango and death is deeply unsettling in the context of the systematic persecution and annihilation of Jews. Because tango is irrevocably associated with passion and exotic romanticism, the legend of the Tango of Death cannot help but eroticize the ‘radical evil’ of the Holocaust (Arendt 1951, 437). Yet the association between dancing and death is hardly new and has antecedents that precede the Holocaust by many centuries. As a medieval allegory on the inevitability and universality of death, the Dance Macabre (Dance of Death) was a memento mori of the vanity and fragility of earthly life (Oosterwijk and Knoell 2011). Originally, Death was represented as a skeleton summoning people from all walks of life to dance around the grave. This image later took on a more romantic character in the narrative of Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden). In this narrative, a young woman is seized by Death, thereby adding an erotic subtext to the ancient motif of mortality. This theme has been explored and developed in art, literature and music from the romantic era up until the present time (Marin-Barutcieff 2015). Death and the Maiden was, for example, the title of a 1990 play by the Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman (Dorfman 1991), a 1994 drama film directed by Roman Polanski, and a 2008 opera composed by Jonas Forssell (both based on Dorfman’s play). Death and the Maiden was also the title of a lecture by the

9 Esther Perel, Letters from Esther #25: Eroticism in Hard Times. Posted on June 9, 2021 at [email protected].

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Dutch writer Harry Mulisch at the opening of the exhibition ‘Anne Frank in the World: 1929–1945’ (Mulisch 1986, 7).10 Like Death and the Maiden, the legend of the Tango of Death tells a moral tale. The stories that eventually merged into the legend are about good and evil, courage and cowardice, honor and disgrace. Courage and honor, as we saw, featured in the legendary story about the conductor of the Janowska camp orchestra, Jakub Mund who, after all the musicians had been taken out of the orchestra and shot, stepped forward, lowered his violin, raised the bow over his head and sang a traditional Polish folk song in German, m ­ ocking his oppressors and predicting their downfall. This legendary story also bears ­striking s­ imilarities to the legend of another Jewish violinist (Chapter 1) who, as a ­prisoner in Auschwitz, dared to play the sacred song of Kol Nidrei on Yom ­Kippur. By exemplifying the dignity of these violinists and celebrating their moral superiority, courage and resistance in the face of Nazi barbarism, these and similar legendary stories offer audiences a satisfying sense of ‘poetic justice.’ Like so many other Holocaust legends, the legend of the Tango of Death fulfills a need to give meaning to human suffering. This has, of course, always been the purpose of religion. The traditional form of lending meaning to the suffering inflicted on the Jews is the theodicy, i.e. an answer to the question of why God would allow such horrors to happen. For example, since all evil requires atonement, the purpose of the Holocaust could be viewed as a way to cleanse the Jewish people of their sins. While Jewish theologians have suggested a variety of theodicies to answer the profound questions raised by the Holocaust, others have rejected these theological efforts to give meaning to suffering. ­Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, for example, has famously claimed that God died in Auschwitz.11 Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi has argued that all efforts to give meaning to the excess of human suffering during the Holocaust should be regarded as ‘non-acknowledgment’ of this suffering and therefore categorically rejected for ethical reasons. Yet humans find it hard, if not impossible, to accept that human suffering is meaningless in the sense that it has no purpose. Instead, meaningful suffering – suffering having some purpose, – even though we do not really understand what it is – tends to be preferred (Pihlström 2019, 415). It is their ability to reinforce the belief that the human suffering in the Nazi death camps did have some purpose or somehow has been meaningful, explains why legends and myths are so 10 11

Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, April 6 through May 4, 1986. Elie Wiesel, Night. New York: Hill and Wang 1960. Originally Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). Buenos Aires: Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina.

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‘abundant’ in the history of the Holocaust (Dawidowicz 1976, 13). It is also why a Holocaust martyrology (Seidman 2015, 3) evolved in an attempt to come to terms with the horrors of the Holocaust. The legend of the Tango of Death is only one among many stories serving this deeply felt need for meaning. 3

Memorializing and Obfuscating

Remembering and memorializing the Holocaust is a difficult and complicated undertaking but passing on historical experience is notoriously easier if the information is embedded in stories. Legends are essential in how past events are remembered. They are the windows into the making and remaking of collective memory by creating narratives in which both fact and fantasy play a role (Samuel and Thompson 1990, 21). In the creation of legends, the veracity of histories can easily be jeopardized, however. The legend of the Tango of Death, for example, has both helped to remember but also gotten in the way of memorializing the Holocaust. As a narrative that has travelled over time, it has been reproduced in shifting contexts of communication. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the memorialization of the Holocaust was facilitated by the s­ tories of numerous survivors, the activities of memorial organizations and the production of movies like Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List which made the cataclysm into “a human-sized – horrific as it was – experience” (Barkan 1994, 1250). However, in the present global context of information, the memory of the Holocaust has begun to fade. It becomes more and more complicated to memorialize the actual horrors of life and death in the camps as “legends spread even more rapidly and indefinitely – constantly adapting to retain relevance, coherence and significance” (Dagnall and Drinkwater 2017). An example of how even the most rudimentary reference to the historical past may get lost is related to Leonard Cohen’s popular song Dance me to the end of love (1984). The Wikipedia page for the song features the iconic photograph (Figure 4) with the caption: “Inmates orchestra of the Nazi Janowska concentration camp playing during the execution of inmates.”12 Aside from relating the dance to the end of love to the legend of the Tango of Death, the photograph serves as a reminder that the idea for the song arose from a photograph that Cohen saw when he was a child. At a concert in Cologne (Germany), on April 10, 1988, he recalled that it was a photograph of “some people in striped pajamas with violins playing beside a smoke stack and the smoke 12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Me_to_the_End_of_Love.

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was made out of gypsies and children.”13 In an interview in 1995, however, Cohen claimed that he got the idea for the song, much later, “from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt.”14 Upon being asked about the lyrics of the song, Cohen remarked that “it’s not important that anybody knows the genesis of it.”15 However, it seems safe to conclude that the inspiration for the song came from a jumbled assembly of images and stories about music in the death camps. It is just one example of how fact and fiction can easily become blurred as historical and imagined elements are mixed. Yet, one could argue that by reproducing the iconic photograph of the Janowska camp orchestra on the website of the song at least an effort was made to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. After the original recording, the song was covered by at least a dozen artists, none of whom referred to any of the Holocaust memories that inspired this song. An extreme example of how the memory of the Holocaust fades away until it is gone can be found in a video showing a performance of Dance me to the end of love by an elegant couple dancing in (neo)tango16 style on a puddle-covered concrete floor in an empty factory building.17 In this performance even the most rudimentary reference to the historical background of the song is completely lost. In my view, such ignorance is problematic. To explain why, let me turn to another video which will make explicit what remained implicit in the example of Leonard Cohen’s song. Several years ago I saw a video of a dance performance that, quite literally, took my breath away because of its total lack of respect for the history of the Holocaust. The clip showed two professional dancers performing tango at a

13 14

15 16 17

https://allanshowalter.com/2019/03/20/leonard-cohen-dance-me-to-the-end-of-­love -arose-from-photo-of-death-camp-musicians/. Interview on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio on August 26, 1995. It has also been suggested (Martin 2016) that Cohen was inspired by an image of a couple dancing in a concentration camp before being murdered. Lea Martin, Letzter Tango (Last Tango). Berlin 2016. https://www.tango-argentino-online.com/letzter-tango/. https://allanshowalter.com/2019/03/20/leonard-cohen-dance-me-to-the-end-of-love -arose-from-photo-of-death-camp-musicians/. Neo tango involves dancing with more freedom of movement and using other genres of music than traditional tango. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ1P3LjkE28 The same applies to a similar video ­Llévame bailando hasta el final del amor with subtitles of the song in Spanish. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKC5B9g4lu4.

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live concert18 before a small audience to the hauntingly sad theme taken from the film Schindler’s List. The dancers19 demonstrated an elaborate repertoire of tango steps: dramatic turns, sweeping leg swings and much more. But their movements were not always in sync with the music and the music was definitely not a tango. After their performance, they embraced one another before bowing to the applause of the audience. Seeing this video not only horrified me. I was also filled with a vicarious sense of shame. I just could not believe that these dancers did not know the origins of the music they were dancing to. How could they not know about Schindler’s List? After all, it is one of the greatest films ever made, winning no less than four Academy Awards. It has been viewed by millions of spectators across the globe. As such, it has taken on a permanent place in the cultural history of most countries in the Western world, including the Netherlands. It is, therefore, hard to believe that these dancers were completely unaware of the film and its historical background.20 One could, of course, argue that this is a rather ‘innocent’ case of artists performing an arbitrary piece of music without any reference to or acknowledgment of its relations to the historical past. But, in my view, professional musicians and dancers should study the origins of music they are performing and try to understand the composer’s intentions. The theme from Schindler’s List, for which its composer John Williams won the Oscar for Best Original Score, is based on a Hebraic lullaby. The melody, which is appreciated in particular for the violin solo played by the famous violinist Itzak Perlman, was composed for the scene in the film in which thousands of despairing Jews are marching to an uncertain – but as we now all know horrific – future. In the case of the tango performance, the musicians and the dancers should have known that the theme of Schindler’s List was intended to give voice to the suffering and sadness of Jewish people during the Holocaust (Schiff 1994). Why didn’t they choose another tango for their performance? Ironically, even the soundtrack of Schindler’s List contains several Argentinian tangos21 which they could have danced to, albeit in a more traditional style. Yet, instead they performed in a way that evoked the hyper romantic sensuality associated with a tango while dancing to “a lamentation, an aching threnody for those who 18 19 20 21

Duo Amica with violinist Edith Mathot and harpist Lucia Wisse in Tangosalon ­Mystic, H ­ aarlem, The Netherlands on September 15, 2013. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=8QpWSUk5bq4. Charlotte Baines and Laurent Trincal. Of course, I wrote to them asking them this question. But they did not react. The Argentinian tangos Por Una Cabeza and Celos as well as the Polish, or rather Jewish, tango To Ostatnia niedziela which, arguably, was the Tango of Death.

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have been lost.”22 I would argue that these dancers at the very least can be criticized for showing a reprehensible ignorance towards the meaning of the music and the mission of Schindler’s List which is to encourage contemporary viewers to rethink the significance of the Holocaust with an eye to the future. What made this tango performance such a disconcerting spectacle for me personally, however, was that by performing tango to music so closely linked to the Holocaust these dancers unwittingly danced what could be seen as a Tango of Death. 4

Visualizing the Tango of Death

It has been argued that Schindler’s List has made the Holocaust more accessible to audiences around the world “by softening the horrid reality enough to keep it watchable” (Magolick 1994). Theoretically, this effect might also have been achieved by visualizing the legend of the Tango of Death in video clips on the internet. And, indeed, nowhere has the legend travelled more widely than on the web. As a result, there is a wide variety of videos entitled or related to Танго смерти in Russian, Tango de la Muerte in Spanish or, in the global lingua franca, Tango of Death. What will be encountered depends not only on how often and deeply the searches are done, but also on how algorithms operate to produce results. Given that these results are arbitrary if not unpredictable, it is impossible to provide a representative sample of these videos here. However, in order to give the reader at least an impression of what is floating around in the virtual world, I have chosen three examples of video clips visualizing the legend of the Tango of Death, one in English and two in Russian. These clips represent the two extreme ends of a continuum between memory and ignorance of the history of music in the death camps. In what follows, I will be looking at how the legend is visualized, how the story is told, how the actual history is represented (or lost) in the narrative, and to what extent these videos are making an effort to achieve the same historical mission as Schindler’s List. In the first video,23 the tango Plegaria composed in 1929 by the Argentinian Eduardo Bianco is celebrated as a tango which even today is popular and often played in tango salons around the world. The music is played while a still of the iconic photograph of the Janowska camp orchestra is shown as a background to the following text: 22 23

Chris Myers, Three Pieces from ‘Schindler’s List.’ https://www.redlandssymphony.com /pieces/three-pieces-from-schindler-s-list. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGfcYb9R-mA.

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At the camp at Janówska, Ukraine, the Nazis conducted their tortures, beatings and shootings to the accompaniment of music. For this purpose, they organized a special orchestra of prisoners. They forced Professor Stricks and the well-known conductor Mund to lead this orchestra. They told composers to write a special tune, which they called “The Death Tango.” Not long before the camp was liberated, the Germans shot all the members of the orchestra. The musicians of this orchestra (40 people) were forced to play The Death Tango, during which the Nazis called out orchestra players one by one to the middle of the circle, made them take off their clothes and shot them in front of the other musicians. The conductor Mund was killed first. The Death Tango died with these poor musicians. There is also evidence that Plegaria, along with other tangos and classical music, was used for the same purpose in other death camps. With this text, the producer of this video – the webmaster24 of the Facebook Group ‘Today’s Tango’ – clearly tries to memorialize what he calls a legend coming from Ukraine. The first paragraph of the text reproduces what the Soviet prosecution charged at the Nuremberg trial in 1946. The second paragraph further dramatizes and embellishes this historical narrative with elements taken from stories that have merged into the legend of the Tango of Death but remain unspecified in this video. While, as we have seen, Plegaria is not the real Tango of Death, this video draws on this popular Argentinian tango, thereby b­ ecoming instrumental in allowing the legend of the Tango of Death to travel and take on a life of its own in contemporary popular culture.25 Of all the videos I encountred referring to this legend, the second e­ xample, the video clip Танго смерти – оркестр концлагеря ‘Яновский’ (Tango of death – concentration camp orchestra ‘Janowsky’) is probably the most ­popular one, with more than two million views.26 This video starts by showing a memorial stone (Figure 11) engraved with a Star of David and an inscription which speaks of 200,000 victims and a text in Ukrainian, Hebrew and English that states: “Let the memory of all the Nazi genocide victims in Janowska death camp remain forever.”27 The video tells the 24 25 26 27

Paul Bottomer is a leading authority on popular dance styles. He has lectured at major international dance conferences and made numerous television appearances. https:// www.facebook.com/groups/627797383984208. See e.g. https://tampatangoargentino.com/2018/02/15/plegaria/. https://mover.uz/watch/8in9FMUm. The memorial stone, set up in 1993, was funded by Janowska camp survivor Alexander Schwarz.

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Figure 11 Janowska memorial stone Courtesy of Professor Harold Marcuse, U ­ niversity of California, Santa Barbara

story of the Tango of Death in white letters on a black screen. The narrative is occasionally interrupted by images like a drawing28 of the camp site and photographs of prisoners on the ground and behind barbed wire, dead bodies in a mass grave with their hands tied on their back, and the Janowska camp orchestra.29 The text states that: During the tortures and shootings in the concentration camp “Yanivskyy” (Lviv), music always played. The orchestra consisted of prisoners; they played the same melody – “Tango of Death.” The author of this work remained unknown. The orchestra included Professor Shtryks of Lviv State Conservatory, the conductor of the Opera, Mund, and other famous Ukrainian musicians. It continues to describe how, just before the liberation of Lviv by the Soviet Army when the Nazis intended to liquidate the Janowska camp, the members of the orchestra were killed, a tragedy remembered in remarkable detail: 28 29

Zeev Porath: A view of the camp - a testimony drawing from the Janowska camp. https:// www.infocenters.co.il/gfh/multimedia/Art/4253/‫פורת‬.jpg. Photographs (Figure 4 and Figure 6). See Chapter 4.

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On that day, 40 people from the orchestra were placed in a circle. The circle was closely encircled by the armed camp guards. The order was shouted ‘Music!’ and the conductor of the orchestra waved his hand as usual. At that moment a shot banged. Hit by the bullet Mund, the conductor of the Lviv State Opera, fell. But the tango melody continued to sound over the barracks. Following to the commandant’s order, each musician had to stand in the center of the circle, put his musical instrument on the floor, and strip naked. After that, a shot was fired and the person died. The video ends with a poem about the story of the Tango of Death30 before, finally, the picture of the engraved memorial stone (Figure 11) reappears.31 Like the previous clip, this video is also making a serious effort to memorialize the legend of the Tango of Death. The first paragraph of the text is taken from the report of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission investigating the German-Fascist Atrocities in the Lvov Region. The second paragraph, ­similarly, dramatizes and embellishes this historical narrative, using slightly different elements drawn from stories that have merged into the legend. Due to its remarkable popularity, this second video might be regarded as even more instrumental in disseminating and reviving the story of the Tango of Death. The third video, Рихард Вагнер ‘Танго Смерти’ (Richard Wagner ‘Tango of Death’),32 represents the other end of the continuum between memory and ignorance. In this video, the actual history of the Tango of Death is completely lost. The video involves a bizarre hodge-podge of images, beginning with a photograph of a couple dancing tango on top of a grand piano under a dark sky. This is followed by a female flamenco dancer, a stormy sea around a lighthouse, a clip of a couple dancing Tango Escenario (Stage Tango),33 a close up of Scheherazade, a ship breaking the waves on a rough sea, eyes between hands covering a face, a man on a square with set restaurant tables looking into a hole in the ground, close up of a pit filled with naked bodies, tree-like figures dancing ballet, pictures of different tango couples in dramatic poses, a painting of 30 31

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The poem is by Larisa Ivanovna Dmitrieva. http://samlib.ru/d/dmitriewa_l_i/tangos .shtml. A similar – but with over 16 thousand views much less popular – video is Танго смерти» – музыка, как улика и страшный памятник фашистских преступлений (The Tango of Death is music as evidence and a terrible monument to Nazi crimes). In this video, the poem by Dmitrieva is projected over photographs of the Janowska camp orchestra, the campground, the commanders, guards and prisoners of the camp. Like the previous video, this one ends by showing the text engraved in the memorial stone (Figure 11). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lte3ImxmFvE. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYgUQJIvJZg. A choreographic style of tango with elements taken from modern dance and ballet.

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a kiss by Gustav Klimt and, finally, a series of close up pictures of flowers. In addition to being totally confusing and without any apparent connection, most of the pictures are incredibly kitschy. As a representation of the legend of the Tango of Death this video not only shows irritatingly bad taste but, more sadly, it buries actual history under an avalanche of silly and senseless pictures. The story or, rather, what is left of it, is inappropriately eroticized by the implicit association of tango with passion and exotic romanticism thereby obfuscating rather than illuminating the gruesome reality of life and death in the camps.34 It is hard to see how this odd series of pictures could be conducive to a proper understanding of the role of music in the camps. Remarkably, not only are the substance and significance of the legend lost in this video, but even the music has disappeared. The soundtrack of this video is not even a tango. It is the first movement of Palladio35 written in 1995 by Sir Karl Jenkins.36 Why this commercial composition is presented as the Tango of Death – not only in this video, but in several others – remains a mystery.37

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35

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A colleague from Eastern Europe suggested that these videos are showing the kind of images that appeal to the Russian nouveau riche. Appreciating and evaluating this is beyond my expertise, but what I can say is that for me this is a distasteful and incomprehensible reproduction of the legend of the Tango of Death. The title Palladio refers to the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), who designed numerous palaces and country houses making use of Roman classical forms. Two of Palladio’s classical hallmarks, symmetry, and proportion are reflected in this composition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladio_(Jenkins). Karl Jenkins is a former multi-instrumentalist of the jazz-rock band Soft Machine and composer of music for advertisement campaigns. The suite of three movements is written in the form of a concerto grosso for string orchestra and was published in 1996 by Boosey and Hawkes. The composition which takes about 16 minutes to perform includes motifs that Jenkins had used before in television commercials for the Shadows and Light campaign of the world’s leading diamond company DeBeers. Since 1888, the South African company DeBeers Consolidated Mines is unrivalled in the exploration, mining and marketing of diamonds. In 1938, the N.W. Ayer ad agency came up with the slogan “A Diamond is Forever” and started what is considered to be the most successful ad campaign in history. In the commercial we see a couple biking, dancing, dining, holding hands and, finally, him putting a diamond ring on her finger. The scenes are entitled as: Infatuation, Temptation, Adoration, Confirmation, The diamond engagement ring. How else could two months salary last forever? A diamond is forever. Original TV commercial ‘A Diamond Is Forever’ is at https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=uUzmUH55iKo; the 1992 German version at https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=DHm81zB95f8; the 1993 US version at https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=4vXHm8TzLzE and the 1994 Christmas version at https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=mWZAAmNhX0Q. While Palladio has been covered many times – and often been entitled Tango of Death – there is never been any reference to either the legend or the history of tango music in the death camps. Jenkins has, in fact, written a few tangos: the first one as second part of his String Quartet No. 2 (1995). This was followed by African Tango for seven singers and orchestra (1998),

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In conclusion, unlike Spielberg’s thoughtful translation of historical memory onto film in Schindler’s List, the videos representing the legend of the Tango of Death are often problematic representations of the Holocaust.38 In their narrative, actual history is hidden, distorted, or even lost altogether. Unfortunately, these videos travel freely on the internet where some of them are widely disseminated to audiences around the world receiving them haphazardly, often by chance, as they surf on the internet. These videos may go ‘viral’ without any regard given to the factuality of the story, the credibility of the sender, or the actual historical context of the Holocaust. As a result, their dissemination and reception both complicate an adequate understanding of what actually happened in the camps and the role music played there. Actual history easily becomes lost in (cyber) space. 5

Preserving History

In the previous parts of this chapter, I have shown how on the one hand the legend of the Tango of Death captures the imagination of audiences enabling them to acknowledge the horrors of the Holocaust, but, on the other, the legend can also get into the way of understanding the malevolent role of music in the death camps. This raises the question of what would need to happen in order to acknowledge actual history in a way that is both attentive to the facts and establishing its significance for contemporary audiences. Making history relevant requires that the historical record of what happened in the camps be preserved and passed on to the next generation; a generation for which the Holocaust has already slipped into the realm of the legendary past. Our task is to convince them that, in the words of survivor Livia Bitton-Jackson, “the Holocaust was neither a legend nor a Hollywood fiction but a lesson … to help future generations prevent the causes of the twentieth-century catastrophe from being transmitted into the twenty-first” (Bitton-Jackson 2011, 11). This is not an easy task, especially at a time when not only historians but also artists, novelists, filmmakers, bloggers and vloggers are involved in the process of shaping our collective memory. In the digital world of today, audiences are

38

Allegrettango (after Beethoven) for soprano and orchestra (2006), and “It takes two…” composed as third movement of the Euphonium Concerto (2009). An exception is the video version, with more than 2 million views, of the Russian documentary Восемь Тактов Забытой Музыки (Eight bars of forgotten music) (1982) in which survivors of the Janowska camp and senior musicians from the city of Lviv were interviewed about the camp orchestra and the ‘Tango of Death’ https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=-YwN2JWHq7M.

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bombarded with information and targeted with contradicting and confusing messages from all directions. In this context, it is hard to determine which information is pertinent for understanding past events. Historical scholarship is crucial for verification, substantiation, and falsification of events in the past. While historians may have has lost their monopoly over reconstructing and representing the past, when it comes to judging and correcting evidence, probing the truth of representations, discovering new sources and interpreting them in a new light, they are as important as they ever were (Assmann 2008, 53–54). In this book I have attempted to trace the roots of the legend of the Tango of Death and to reconstruct its creation. I have explored a variety of myths about music in Nazi death camps – from the widespread belief that the music of Richard Wagner was played at the gas chambers in Auschwitz to the ludicrous claim that Wagner was, in fact, the composer of the Tango of Death and that it was his music that was played at executions in the Janowska camp in Ukraine. I have also explored how Holocaust icons as, for example, the iconic photograph of the ‘orchestra of death’ and the emblematic poem Todesfuge (Death Fugue) by Paul Celan have served to keep the legend of the Tango of Death alive. I discovered that the legend came from a charge made at the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946. It was based on the report of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission investigating the German-Fascist Atrocities in the Lvov Region. The Soviet prosecution did not present any evidence for this story, however, other than a photograph captured by the Red Army in the headquarters of the Gestapo in Lvov, showing the Janowska camp orchestra supposedly playing the Tango of Death. The apparent discrepancies between this image and the story of the Tango of Death the Soviet prosecutor read into the record of the trial mark the beginnings of a long process of decontextualization. While the image of the ‘orchestra of death’ became an iconic representation of music in Nazi death camps, the documentary value of the photograph all but disappeared in its countless reproductions and cultural recreations in art, literature, film and social media. In this book, I have tried to restore the historical context to both the photograph of the orchestra and the legend of the Tango of Death. The belief that that Jews were led to the gas chambers accompanied by the strains of Wagnerian music is unsupported by historical research and must, therefore, be considered more myth than reality. The idea that Wagner was played in the death camps – something that was manifestly untrue – nevertheless served as a catalyst for the conflation of this myth and the story that a Tango of Death was played by an orchestra of prisoners in the Janowska camp. It is as inconceivable that the camp orchestra was forced to perform an

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especially composed ‘execution melody’ which the Nazis called the ‘Tango of Death’ as it is unlikely that this melody was a ‘Nazi version’ of the Argentinian tango Plegaria. Much more likely is that the camp orchestra played an arrangement of the popular Jewish tango To Ostatnia niedziela which the prisoners then called the ‘Tango of Death.’ There is no doubt that at the end of the war all of the musicians of the Janowska camp orchestra were executed. However, the inconsistencies and contradictions – where the execution took place, how it was carried out and by whom and why, who was shot first and last, and, finally, whether the musicians were forced to sing songs or play the Tango of Death during their own execution – suggest that the initial story of what happened in the Janowska camp has been dramatized and embellished until over time and as a result of epic concentration, the story merged into the legend of the Tango of Death. The version of the legend that an Argentinian tango was played as Jews were driven to the gas chambers can now be seen as an adaptation of the story of the Tango of Death to the view that the majority of Jews from Western European countries were killed in gas chambers. The image of the gas chambers operating 24/7 in the well-known extermination camps of Auschwitz, Sobibór and ­Treblinka has been superimposed onto the more common reality in ­lesser-known death camps in Ukraine where most of the prisoners were not gassed, but shot. This is why it has also been claimed that To ostatnia niedziela was played while Jewish prisoners were led to the gas chambers to be executed.39 These representations are created because of the reluctance of many people to recognize different types of camps, preferring instead “to keep the camps as unified as possible and under the labels of the concentration camps that have become famous” (Klüger 1994, 82). O ­ vercoming this reluctance is, however, “a prerequisite for understanding and coming to terms with the specifics of the concentrationary universe” (Rothberg 2002, 58). In the case of Janowska, this would require a deeper understanding how daily life and routines were shaped by its multipurpose character as “a complex hybrid camp that functioned simultaneously as a slave labor camp, a transit camp, a concentration camp and an extermination site” (Beorn 2019, 250). Although we still do not have a complete picture of how music was used in relation to the modus operandi of the Holocaust in the Janowska camp, this is what we do know. Every morning, the orchestra played during roll call in the central square, often as accompaniment to the torture and killing of prisoners for the slightest offence or even for no reason at all. The orchestra also played at the gate every morning 39

http://www.musiques-regenerees.fr/GhettosCamps/Camps/Gold_Pertersburski _­Orchestra.html.

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and evening when prisoners were marched to and from the places where they were forced to work. Furthermore, the orchestra was present at the so-called trial runs which were carried out in order to select the weakest prisoners for execution. And, last but not least, the orchestra was ordered to play the Tango of Death at each resettlement, i.e. during selections for deportation or execution (Borwicz 2014, 40).40 Over time, the story of how the Janowska camp orchestra was forced to play a tango on these occasions has been transformed into the legend of the Tango of Death. This transformation is an example of how changing representations of the Holocaust can merge, producing memories that transcend national boundaries (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 87). This new form of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ of the Holocaust emerged in Germany, Israel and the USA, but it should be expanded to include memories emerging in the Soviet Union and Ukraine. In the Soviet version of the legend of the Танго смерти (Tango of Death), a tango was played as innocent Soviet citizens were executed by Nazi German firing squads. Among these innocent citizens were one and a half million Orthodox and Yiddish speaking Ukrainian Jews. In the Soviet narrative, however, their Jewishness was erased from the memory of the Holocaust just as the fact that it was a Jewish tango the Nazis forced the musicians to play and prisoners had to listen to during selections. As evidence of Nazi viciousness, the photograph of the orchestra and the story of the Tango of Death fueled the Soviet propaganda in the Cold War. In this context, the story of the death of the orchestra was transformed into a story about ‘German’ brutality and ‘Russian’ heroism, a story that, ultimately, would become the Soviet version of the Tango of Death. By focusing on the perversion of how the Nazis treated Soviet citizens and prisoners of war, the legend served as a convenient warning against what they saw as the perpetual danger of Western capitalist aggression. By contrast, in Western discourse, the perversion of the Nazis was paradoxically reassuring insofar as it allowed the Holocaust to be viewed as a civilizational excess rather than an ever-present possibility in society against which constant vigilance remains necessary (Bauman 1989). It is possible but perhaps too obvious to conclude for the time being that both versions of the legend tell part of the story and together contribute to a more complete understanding of the reality of the mass killing during the Holocaust (Snyder 2009, 14).

40

Leon Weliczer Wells, as a witness at the Trial of Adolf Eichmann. Session 23, May 2, 1961. Boris Dorfman, Tango of Death, Jewish Ukraine 9, 124, May 2006. http://www.jewukr.org /observer/eo2003/page_show_ru.php?id=1525.

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There is still a lot of work to be done. Let me mention just one example that continues to haunt me. Of the members of the Janowska camp orchestra only a dozen are known by their full name. The names of all the other musicians are lost, whole or in part. Yet their faces in the iconic photograph of the orchestra continue to circulate and therefore keep begging for an answer to the question of who they are. This is what the Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben has called the ‘exigency’ of a Holocaust photograph. It is the idea that the subjects shown in the picture demand something from us: “Even if the person photographed is completely forgotten today, even if his or her name has been erased forever from human memory – or, indeed, precisely because of this – that person and that face demand their name; they demand not to be forgotten” (Agamben 2007, 25). Although much of the original context of the iconic photograph of the orchestra is lost, the legend of the Tango of Death continues to trigger the imagination, inviting audiences to envision what playing music must have been like for these musicians and what hearing tango music must have meant to prisoners in Nazi death camps. Possibly as a result of what has been called “the Americanization of musical Holocaust narratives” (Wlodarski 2014, 69), there is a widespread belief that music served as an emotional support for the deported Jews, enabling them to maintain their self-esteem and strengthen their will to survive. As this rose-colored view proliferated, the promulgation of redemptive narratives of the Holocaust became a dominant trait of American Holocaust memory (Ibid., 63). In this interpretation, music in the camps represented “the immortal values of beauty, goodness and universal truth” (Fackler 2007, 5). The idea of music-making as a form of spiritual resistance obscures, however, “the broader multiplicity of survivor experiences” (Gilbert 2005, viii) and leaves little room for understanding the ugly reality of how music in the camps was actually used to deceive, discipline, humiliate, punish, torture and execute prisoners. It obfuscates the fact that music was a constant component of everyday life in the camps and an important element of the hideous modus operandi of the Holocaust. In reality, the music of the orchestras rarely brought strength and courage to the prisoners. On the contrary, music had, if anything, the opposite effect of exacerbating the despair the prisoners must have felt. Survivors of the camps have, more often than not, emphasized their inability to avoid hearing the music, to resist its rhythm, or to physically close their ears to it (Brauer 2016, 23). Forced to hear music against their will, they suffered from a special kind of despair: “despair at the loss of dignity, one’s identity as a person, one’s past, and – in the end – hope for the future” (Brauer 2016, 24). In this way, music demoralized prisoners and deepened their chronic state of physical and psychological debilitation (Laks 1989, 169). They

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suffered from emotions evoked by music that belonged to a world of which they were no longer a part. In the perverse logic of the SS, music served to define belonging, “to determine who counted among the civilized and refined members of humanity and who was excluded, who was not even human at all” (Brauer 2016, 25). In combination with other forms of physical and emotional torture, the music played by the camp orchestras “had the potential to destroy prisoners’ humanity in ways that would not be possible using physical forms of torture” (Brauer 2016, 5). In some of the death camps, the orchestras did offer musicians an opportunity to live and a chance to survive. But not in the Janowska camp where none of the musicians survived and few records of musical activity were recovered.41 In the Auschwitz camps, where hundreds of prisoners passed through the orchestra’s ranks, many musicians ultimately ‘disappeared’ (Gilbert 2005, 180). Some of them perished, others were killed and still others took their own lives after they had already “died a thousand times as they played”(Reder 1946). ­Having to play music in situations marked by deception, humiliation, torture, and murder of fellow prisoners generated strong emotions among the musicians. The fact that that their “beloved music had been repurposed into a small cog in the larger wheel of the camp’s machinery of death” (Brauer 2016, 19) forced them into a complicity that brought with it a heavy burden of guilt and shame. For some of them, ‘that helpless implication in the death of others’ (Clendinnen 1999, 47) was even a reason to end their own lives. Others survived but may have suffered from feelings of guilt and depression for the rest of their lives.42 If the legend of the Tango of Death is only treated as a moral tale of hope, the narrative hinders rather than helps audiences to acknowledge and think about these horrors. What does this mean for preserving the actual history of the Tango of Death? Many stories about music in the camps are legends constructed by conflating 41 42

See Music and the Holocaust at https://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/camps /­eastern-europe0/janowska/. A deviant case is a small study of five female and two male ‘musician Holocaust survivors’ which found that the role of music in their experience was “all positive” with the exception of two women who expressed “the revulsion they felt when they performed in the presence of the Nazi camp keepers” (Fisher and Gilboa 2016, 1233). The positive outcome of this study could be explained by the fact that the participants had not been asked “to isolate their musical experience in the Holocaust, but to tell about the role of music in their lives as a whole” (Ibid.). Moreoever, the (five) respondents who survived a concentration camp (Bergen Belsen, Theresiënstadt) focused their stories “on the music they made out of (what they perceived as) their own choice, as opposed to the music that they were forced to play” (Id.).

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historical and mythical elements. While these stories contain important elements of truth, they do not simply represent what actually happened. In order to honor and preserve the memory of what did happen in the Nazi death camps, we must not lose sight of historical reality. It must be acknowledged and understood that music was not only a resource of hope, resistance and survival but also, and more importantly, a resource of abuse in the modus operandi of the Holocaust. This is the actual history that the legend of the Tango of Death will hopefully continue to memorialize.

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Subject Index Camp Concentration 1, 3, 8, 14, 16, 17, 20, 33, 34, 36, 46 n. 38, 65, 68, 81, 89, 107, 112, 115 n. 43 Death 1 n. 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 17, 21 n. 8, 33, 35, 41 n. 18, 48, 50, 59, 65, 72, 73, 81, 86, 88, 89, 90, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116 Extermination 1 n. 1, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, 48, 64 n. 43, 90 Forced labor 20–21, 37, 72, 84 Camp music History of 97, 105 Repertoire of 28–29, 49, 104 Singing 22–23, 28, 34, 35, 99 Songs 22–23, 28 n. 17, 34, 36–38, 42, 43, 48, 50, 70, 96 Camp orchestras 1, 3, 6, 18, 19, 24–31, 34, 44, 48, 49, 65, 67, 99, 100 Auschwitz-main camp 24–25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 Auschwitz II-Birkenau (men) 24–25, 27, 28, 30, 32 Auschwitz II-Birkenau (women) 24–25, 27, 28, 29 Auschwitz III-Monowitz 24–25 Bełżec, Majdamek, Sobibor and Treblinka 19, 25, 26, 27, 28 Janowska 4, 18, 26,44, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 58, 65, 67, 69, 81, 91, 92, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 110 n. 38, 111, 112, 113, 114 Camps Auschwitz 2, 8, 9, 11, 17, 19, 20, 22–30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 63, 72, 85, 86, 88, 101, 111, 112, 115 Auschwitz-Birkenau 2, 9, 20, 23, 24–28, 30, 35 Auschwitz-Monowitz 2, 20, 23, 24, 25 Bełżec 2, 19 n.4, 60 n. 31 Bergen Belsen 2, 115 n. 43 Buchenwald 2, 3, 20, 24 Chelmno 2, 19, 20 Dachau 2, 20, 24 Janowska 1, 2, 19–21, 26, 34, 37–44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65,

66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 89, 90, 91, 95, 96, 99, 108, 111, 112, 113, 115 Majdanek 2, 20, 21 n. 8, 28, 72, 90 Sachsenhausen 2, 20, 24, 31 n. 25, 36, 63 Sobibór 2, 20, 21 n. 8, 25, 26, 60 n. 31, 112 Theresiënstadt 2, 22, 115 n. 43 Treblinka 2, 19, 20, 21 n. 8, 25, 26, 27, 53 n. 9, 112 Death and the Maiden 38–39, 44, 93, 100, 101 Dance of 100 in tango, See Tango de la muerte Orchestra of 17, 53, 54, 56, 61, 63, 66, 68, 82, 111 Fact/factual 7, 10, 110 accuracy 15 historicity 13 information 89 Fiction/fictional 7, 96, 110 dialogue 92, 94 Fact and 6, 8, 76, 95, 97, 103 fictionalized 10, 78, 96, 97 memory 15, 31 Gas chambers 1, 9, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 27, 29–33, 44, 72, 81, 99, 111, 112 History 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 13, 14, 57, 67, 97, 104, 105, 109, 110 Jewish 18, 81 of Tango 92, 95 of the Holocaust 8, 10, 98, 102, 103, 110 of the Tango of Death 105, 108, 109, 116 Historians 10, 14, 29, 30, 111 Tango 19, 34, Holocaust 3, 6, 8, 11, 15, 33, 51, 68, 85 n.10, 86, 97–98, 99–105, 110, 113, 114 by bullets 70 icons 11, 12, 17, 67, 68, 111 legends 8–12, 13, 101–102 memory 6, 102, 103, 113 memorialization 7, 33, 51, 102

133

subject index myths 101–102 martyrology 8, 102 modus operandi 6, 113, 114, 116 narratives 14, 25, 102, 114 Icon/Iconic photograph 17, 50, 52, 53, 56–58, 61–63, 68, 91, 102, 103, 106, 111, 114 poem 81, 85, 111 Imagination 7, 60, 73, 94, 96, 97, 99, 114 Literary 91, 95 of audiences 2, 7, 17, 96, 97, 110 Jews 1, 4, 6, 8, 12–13, 18, 19, 20, 21, 29, 32, 35, 47, 48, 70, 79, 81, 83, 88, 98, 99, 100, 101, 104, 111, 112, 113, 114 Jewish culture 49, 88 musicians 4, 18, 26, 79, 81 tango 18, 48 n. 47, 50, 79, 81, 91, 112, 113 Question, Final Solution of the 20, 32, 85 n. 10, Legend 7–8, 11, 13–15, 96, 99, 116 of Dutch resistance 12–13 of Kol Nidrei 8, 101 of ninty-three Jewish girls 7–10, 11 of the dancer 9 of the death of the orchestra 101 of the Tango of Death 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 13, 17, 19, 32, 51, 67, 68, 69, 79, 80, 82, 87, 89, 91, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115 Visualizing the legend of the Tango of Death 105–110 Lemberg/Lviv 1, 20, 21, 26, 44, 45, 48, 49, 53, 65, 90, 91, 92 n. 26, 95, 107, 108 Concentration camp 20, 46 n. 38, 47, 65, 68, 81, 89, 98, 102, 106, 107, 112, 115 Memory 34, 57, 77, 107, 116 Collective 6–7, 102, 111 Fictional 15, 31 Memorial additions and corrections 77 organizations 102 presence 8, 13 services 10 stone 106–108

Memorialization 7, 51, 102 Murder 19, 20, 22, 72 n. 8, 115 Museum Auschwitz–Birkenau 30, 35 Ghetto Fighters’ House 53, 63, 64 United States Holocaust Memorial 36, 37, 42, 43, 57 Music As torture 4, 6, 23, 54, 90, 113 Camp, See Camp music Classical 28, 64, 103, 106 Klezmer 45–46 Opera 19, 27, 28, 32–33, 100, Popular 27, 34, 36 n. 4 Tango 3, 6, 19, 36 n. 7, 41, 89, 99, 109–110 n. 36 Myths 7–8, 14, 15, 111 about Anne Frank 11–12 about Paul Celan 81, 82 about Hitler 40, 44, 48, 81 about Richard Wagner 31–33, 111 Nazi atrocities 39 n. 13, 40, 59, 66, 69, 98, 108, 111 barbarism, barbarity 4, 67, 101 collaboration 11, 59, 72 collaborators 77–78 fascism/fascist 73, 74, 75, 79, 94 ideology 32, 33 occupation 7, 11, 12, 36, 46, 59, 79, 92 n. 26 propaganda 22, 32, 88 version of Plegaria 43 n. 22, 50, 112 viciousness 66, 79, 91, 113 war crimes 49, 52, 70, 90, 108 n. 31 Photograph 14, 52, 56, 64, 57 n. 24, 59–60, 66–67, 72, 75, 91, 102, 107, 108 of the orchestra 4, 17, 50, 51–55, 57, 59, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 91, 103, 106, 111, 113, 114 Photographer of 52, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62 Propaganda Nazi 22, 32, 88 Soviet 67, 79, 113 Representations 7, 13, 17, 97–98, 110–113 survivors 14, 16, 31, 45, 46, 49, 50, 63, 92, 92 n. 26, 94, 110 n. 38, 115 n. 43

134 Representations (cont.) victims 15, 16, 20, 31, 33, 54, 79, 88, 95, 98, 106, 107 visual 51, 67, 72, 78, 98 Resilience/resistance 2, 6, 10, 11, 23, 99, 100, 101, 114, 116 Schindler’s List 48, 102, 104–105, 110 Soviet citizens 21, 54, 70, 91, 113 Extraordinary State Commission 39, 40, 45, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 63, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 78, 90, 91, 108, 111 prosecution 18, 19 n. 4, 34, 39 n. 13, 40, 65, 66, 71, 72, 76 n. 16, 90, 106, 111 propaganda 67, 79, 113 Red Army 1, 21, 40 n. 17, 57, 60, 61, 84, 111 version of the legend of the Tango of Death 113 Tango Argentinian 3, 34, 39, 43, 47, 91, 92, 106, 112 German 35 n. 3

subject index Yiddish 19 Polish 37, 48 Tango of Death Plegaria 2 n. 5, 3, 4 n. 8, 42–44, 47–48, 50, 81, 92, 94, 95, 105, 106, 112 Tango de la muerte 44 n. 30, 92–94, 105 Tango smerti 95 Tangoul Mortii 81, 87 Todesfuge 50, 81, 82, 84–89, 91, 92, 94, 111 Todestango 37, 43, 48, 50, 82, 87, 89, 91 To ostatnia niedziela 45–49, 50, 95, 104 n. 21, 112 Trial Krasnodar 59–60, 72–73, 77–78 Nuremberg trial 4, 17, 18, 20, 32, 34, 40, 52–57, 60, 65–67, 70–72, 76, 106, 111 Truth 7, 14, 33, 41, 86, 96, 111, 114, 116 true stories 7, 9, 13, 14, 43, 96, 99 Witnesses testimony 12, 14, 35, 40, 45, 60, 63, 64, 72, 74, 77, 78, 82, 85, 113 n. 41 reliability 15–16, 66, 76–77

Name Index Agamben, Giorgio 114 Arendt, Hanna 100 Adorno, Theodor 86–87 Assmann, Aleida 3, 6, 7, 111 Bal, Mieke 8, 13, 14 Barnouw, David 11 Beorn, Waitman Wade 3, 19 n. 5, 21, 55 n. 14, 58 n. 27, 64 n. 41, 75 n. 12, 112 Beyssade, Sylvie 38, 43 n. 26 Bianco, Eduardo 2 n. 5, 4 n. 8, 42–44, 47, 48, 81, 105 Bovenkerk, Frank 12 Brauer, Juliane 6, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29 n. 19, 115 Browning, Christoffer 16 Buruma, Ian 12 Celan, Paul 17, 81–84, 86–92, 95, 111 Chlanda, Marek 51, 68 Clendinnen, Inga 9, 50, 97, 99, 115 Coetzee, John 86 Cohen, Leonard 51, 102–103 Czackis, Lloica 19, 34, 35, 43, 44, 50 Dawidowicz, Lucy 8, 102 Didi-Huberman, George 14 Dorfman, Ariel 100 Douglas, Lawrence 66–67 Fackler, Guido 3, 6, 19, 22–24, 26–29, 63, 65, 100, 114 Felstiner, John 81, 84–89, 90, 92 Frank, Anne 11–12, 101 Gilbert, Shirli 3, 6, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31 n. 25, 35, 36, 37, 64, 97, 114, 115 Ginzburg, Lev 78 Haan, Ido de 12, 16 Haydn, Joseph 2, 28, 69 Hirsch, Francine 51, 67, 71, 72 Hondius, Dieke 13 Jedlińska, Eleonora 51, 61–62, 68 Jenkins, Sir Karl 109–110

John, Eckhard 3, 6, 17, 37, 99 Judkovski, José 18, 34, 81 Kaczerginski, Smaryahu 36 Kiefer, Anselm 89 n. 19 Kulisiewicz, Aleksander 36, 37, 38, 42–43, 48 Kuzmin Sergey, 40–41, 45, 57, 60–61, 73–75, 78 Laks, Szymon 25 n. 11, 114 Levi, Primo 15, 97, 101 Lewinter, Herman 57–63, Lorenz, Chris 14 Lower, Wendy 54 Malishevsky, Igor 44, Milewski, Barbara 16, 36 n. 5 Misiewicz, Ignacy 75, 76 Mund, Yacub 18, 40, 53, 75, 79, 82, 96–97, 101, 106, 107, 108 Muzyczka, Anna 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 50 Naliwajek-Mazurek, Katarzyna 6, 43 n. 22, 50, 53 Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara 9 Nudler, Julio 34, 81, 87, 91–92, 94–95 Ochs, Wilhelm, See Porath, Zeev Ophuis, Ronald 98 Perel, Esther 99–100 Petersburski, Jerzy 45–47, 49 Pihlström, Sami 16, 101 Pohl, Dieter 3, 76 Pojtser, Anna 59, 60, 61, 70, 72–78 Porath, Zeev 63, 64, 88 n. 17, 107 n. 28 Presser, Jacob 4, 12, 18 Redzik, Adam 21, 26, 43, 53 Ross, Alex 30 n. 23, 32, 33 Sands, Philippe 1 Samuel, Raphael 8, 13, 15, 96, 102 Sandkühler, Thomas 21, 64 n. 43

136 Schubert, Franz 28, 38, 39, 43 Sheffi, Na’ama 30, 33 Siegel, Dina 33 Smirnov, Lev Nikolaevich 18, 40, 52–54, 56, 63, 65, 67, 82 Snyder, Timothy 113 Spielberg, Steven 102, 110 Stricks, Leonid 18, 53, 69 n. 1, 75, 79, 81, 82, 106 Szczęśniak, Hubert 31, 35 n. 3 Thompson, Paul 8, 13, 15, 96, 102 Tokarev, Mikhail 40, 60, 72–74, 78 Toltz, Joseph 38 n. 10

name index Vyshinskii, Andrei 71, 72 n. 7 Vuijsje, Marja 29 Vynnychuck, Yuri 14 n. 26, 46, 47 n. 41, 95 Wagenaar, Willem 14, 16 Wagner, Richard 2, 17, 19, 29–33, 64, 108, 111 Wells, Leon Weliczer 1 n. 2, 21, 40, 76, 113 n. 41 Werb, Bret 6, 19, 35, 36 n. 4, 36 n. 6, 38 n. 10, 38 n. 11, 57 n. 25 Wiedemann, Barbara 89, 90, 91 Wiesel, Elie 97, 101 n. 11 Wiesenthal, Simon 1 n. 2, 21, 26 n. 14, 38, 43 n. 25, 53, 64, 76