559219 bk Pasatieri 15/03/2004 10:44am Page 12 AMERICAN CLASSICS Also available on American Classics: THOMAS PASATIERI Letter to Warsaw Jane Eaglen, Soprano Music of Remembrance • Gerard Schwarz 8.559177 8.559153 8.559219 12 559219 bk Pasatieri 15/03/2004 10:44am Page 2 Thomas Pasatieri (b. 1945) Letter to Warsaw World première: 10th May, 2004, Benaroya Hall, approximately 350,000 Jews found themselves Seattle, WA at Music of Remembrance’s Holocaust imprisoned. Jews from elsewhere in Poland and from Also available on American Classics: Remembrance concert. Letter to Warsaw was composed other parts of the Reich were resettled into the ghetto. By for soprano Jane Eaglen and conductor Gerard Schwarz. early 1941 the ghetto held over 440,000 souls. Over thirty It is dedicated to Music of Remembrance’s founder and percent of Warsaw’s population was crammed into less artistic director, Mina Miller. than three percent of the city’s total area. The Warsaw ghetto contained three sectors. The In January 2003, MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller “little ghetto” had some modern apartment houses along approached me about writing a song-cycle based on six wide streets where one could find the occasional shop, unpublished texts by the Polish cabaret artist Pola Braun. and for a time even cafés, restaurants and cinemas. Its These texts were composed while Braun was incarcerated population included an intelligentsia and some in the Warsaw ghetto and in the concentration camp comparatively affluent families. In contrast, the “big Majdanek. They were originally set to music that no ghetto” further north was a “jungle of oppressed longer exists. I was inspired by these poems, and their humanity”, where the poor struggled daily for a bite of descriptions of a woman’s loss of freedom and her home. bread and a place to sleep. Amid hunger and illness, the That’s how it all began. I am so fortunate to have had average death rate was 6,000 a month. Life in the third, such incredible texts to set. industrial part of the ghetto, housed workers placed in Thomas Pasatieri barracks and used by the Reich as cheap industrial labour. Compared to the inhabitants of the “big ghetto,” however, Poland holds a unique position in the history of the these workers were fortunate, because they received food Holocaust. Poland was a centre of Jewish life and rations, and an employment card which promised some tradition, with approximately three million Jews in its protection, albeit temporarily. cities, towns and villages at the start of World War II. At In the end all residents of the three sectors were 8.559074 the war’s conclusion, fewer than 300,000 were still alive, destined for the same horrors. Mass systematic and virtually all aspects of a once-vibrant Jewish deportations to the East began on 22nd July, 1942. By the community had ceased to exist. end of August, about three-quarters of the Jews in the The organized persecution of Poland’s Jews began ghetto had been sent to Treblinka. The ghetto’s final almost immediately after the Nazi’s invasion in destruction followed the April 1943 armed resistance, September 1939, with Jews stripped of their livelihood, now known as the Warsaw ghetto uprising. property and basic rights of citizenship. Ghettos were Pola Braun (c. 1910 – 1943) was among those in the established in most cities as a way of ensuring the Warsaw ghetto. A pre-war poet and cabaret artist, Braun complete separation and isolation of Jews, and eventually continued her artistic life in the ghetto, and later while facilitating their mass deportation to concentration and incarcerated at the Majdanek concentration camp. Few extermination camps. The German decree officially details about her life are known, however, and the establishing the Warsaw ghetto, and listing the streets detective work to uncover her story is not easy. As with within it, was issued on 2nd October, 1940, but in fact the most Holocaust victims, whose lives are rarely marked by 8.559173 forced relocation of Jews into that district had been birth and death certificates, research must rely heavily on occurring gradually for months. Jews were informed of a dwindling pool of survivors to verify identity, and the decree on 12th October – Yom Kippur. By 15th recollect and reconstruct their individual and collective November, 1940, the Jewish quarter was sealed off, and history. 8.559219 2 11 8.559219 559219 bk Pasatieri 15/03/2004 10:44am Page 10 II Moving Day III Mourner’s Kaddish Until the beginning of the war, Pola Braun worked organized by Polish prisoners from Pawiak, to whom we in the Warsaw offices of the satirical review Szpilki. In owe thanks for remembering and collecting some of We moved Yis-gadal v’yis-kadash sh’mey raba, b’alma di v’ra the Warsaw ghetto she belonged to a small group of Braun’s poems. Braun was murdered on 3rd November, Without furniture, packages, knick-knacks. kir-usei, artists at Sztuka (Art), a literary cabaret/café on Leszno 1943, in the mass executions code-named Aktion No one brought us bread and salt, v’yam-likh malkhusei b’hayeikhon u-v’yomeikhon Street in the “little ghetto.” The group included such Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival) by the Nazis – No one brought us flowers. u-v’hayei d’khol beys Yisra-el, artists as the well-known Jewish poet and song-writer the liquidation of approximately 42,000 Jewish prisoners But who really cares about any of this? ba’agala u-vi-z’man kariv, v’imru amen. Wladyslaw Szlengel, singer Marysia Ajzensztadt (the from Majdanek and other concentration and labour We’ve moved during this war “Ghetto Nightingale”), several literary personalities, and camps in the Lublin district. From Bielsko to Lwow, then Lodz;. Y’hei shmei raba m’varakh l’alam u-l’almei almaya. the distinguished Warsaw pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman Two of the six poems in this song cycle, Jew and We’re used to it by now— (whose memoir was the basis for the award-winning Tsurik, were written during Braun’s period in the Ever since the war broke out— Yis-barakh v’yishtabah v’yispa-ar v’yisromam film The Pianist). Warsaw ghetto. The remaining four – Mother, Letter to Used to this endless migration, v’yisnasei Daily performances at the Sztuka were organized by Warsaw, Ordinary Day and Moving Day – date from her The constant variation. V’yis-hadar v’yis’aleh v’yis-halal sh’mei d’kudsha, a group of writers from the Living Journal, a satiric daily incarceration in Majdanek. Braun sang her own songs, Even so, though it might be senseless, b’rikh hu chronicle of the ghetto, written by a group of authors accompanying herself on the piano. These heartfelt May even be childish, l’ela min kol birkhasa v’shirasa, tushb’hasa under the direction of Szlengel. Szpilman described songs stirred the emotions, particularly of Polish women The mind does not want to adapt v’nehemasa these programmes as “a witty chronicle of ghetto life, from places other than Warsaw who identified with her To things new, strange and cold. da’amiran b’alma, v’imru amen. full of sharp, risqué allusions to the Germans”. The message. Braun gave concerts at Majdanek in a barrack Small wonder, then, that a person Sztuka was considered an elite club for the ghetto’s few that contained furniture from the ghetto, including a Walks around gloomy and cross, Y’hei sh’lama raba min sh’maya people of any means. First-person accounts of an piano. Several secret concerts were held there for the All the more so since she’s ill at ease, V’hayim aleinu v’al kol Yisrael, v’imru amen. evening at the Sztuka note the high quality of its black- Jewish and Polish women prisoners. Braun’s extant And there’s a drizzling rain outside. market coffee and caviar, and of the musical, humorous poetry was assembled after the war by historians. These And all the more so now Oseh shalom bi-m’romav, hu ya’aseh shalom and satirical offerings. Those who could gathered for include the Polish political dissident Aleksander That we live so close to the highway aleinu v’al kol Yisra-el, v’imru amen. brief escape from the surrounding atmosphere of death Kulisiewicz, himself a prisoner in Sachsenhausen, who To which our fate and disease. Stepping outside meant a return to the copied out variants of some of Braun’s Majdanek pieces. Has been inseparably joined. May God’s name be exalted and hallowed throughout ghetto’s grim realities – the starving, diseased, and lice- Pola Braun’s poems in Kleinkunst style are revealing And blind fate holds us tightly the world that He created, as is God’s wish. May God’s infested ghetto population whose despairing cries for in their observations about her surroundings, her As if in a spider’s web sovereignty soon be accepted, during our life and the “Bread, Mercy, Death” quickly extinguished the deportation, and her Jewish identity. They open a And one would only like to ask: life of all Israel. And let us say: Amen. Sztuka’s fleeting moments of pleasure. window, especially, to the emotional life of all women When must we move again? In 1942, during the mass deportation of 300,000 caught inextricably in the web of Holocaust tragedy. Answer us fate, May God’s great name be praised throughout all time. Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, Pola Braun Braun’s voice of musical witness ensures that she will And this time be true, was assigned to the Ostdeutsche Bautischlerei- not be swallowed up by the anonymity of history.