Kategori: Huvudämne – Historia och minne

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The Children Take Their Revenge

Still depicting the two performers in ”Unzere Kinder”.

Already in one of the first scenes of the film Unzere Kinder (which follows the newsreel prologue that depicts the harsh reality of Jews being mass-deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp and what happened to them and their belongings there), the children from the orphanage who belong to the very small number of surviving Polish-Jewish children protest and confront the two Kleinkünstler returning from exile in the Soviet Union, who are essentially playing themselves and in a sketch perform a sentimentalized version of the wartime events (“because that is not how it was”). This opens up the divide (in the context of the film) between the children who were forced to become survival artists (compare the quote from one of the boys, “It was my job to trick the German gendarmes”) and the returning artists who survived the war exiled deep into Soviet Russia.

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Morals and Mores of the Warsaw Ghetto

One of the milk cans used to hide documents. From the Ringelblum ”Oyneg Shabbos” Archive.

This article examines a text about the declining morals and mores of the Jewish inhabitants of the wartime Warsaw Ghetto, presumably written on 4th July 1942. It is derived from the “Street” section of Volume One of The Ringelblum Archive Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (published by Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma; Warsaw). The text is attributed to Stanisław Różycki, and its complete title in translation reads as follows: “4th July. Warsaw, ghetto. A study [of] ‘Ulica’ [The Street]. The appearance and the social life of the street in the ghetto” (hereafter referred to as the Morality of the Street). The original text is written in Polish and described on the archive’s website as: “handwritten, notebooks, ink, Polish, 150×197 mm, 31 sheets, 31 pages”. In the transcribed English translation I am analyzing and quoting here, the text consists of around 8,800 words, including footnotes, spread over 19 A4 pages.

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It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning

THE YIDDISH POET AVROM SUTZKEVER.

When one reads the poem “Grains of Wheat” by Avrom Sutzkever (written in the ghetto of Vilna and here read and analyzed in English translation, see here for the full text in another English translation) and stumbles upon the line “As if protecting a baby -,/I run with the Yiddish word,” it is hard not to think of the poet’s firstborn child that was slaughtered in the ghetto the day after he was born; the child was alive just long enough for the mother of the poet to forget that her grandchild was doomed to be killed from the moment he was born, the same way as Herod once “killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region that were two years old or under” (Matthew 2:16). Maybe it is during this short time, during this split second of dissonance, that the poem is written, that the poem takes place. The poet may be unable to save his Jewish child but is now trying to save the Yiddish word (and all that is written with it and within it) with his written words. 

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Att skriva konstmusikalisk samtidshistoria i en globaliserad värld

Av Andreas Engström

I en text jag skrev om kvinnliga nordiska tonsättare genom historien, som publicerades i programboken till Nordic Music Days i Reykjavík 2016, tog jag som ett av flera exempel på samtida tonsättare och tendenser upp den svenska grupperingen Konstmusiksystrar med unga kvinnliga tonsättare. Kort därefter fick jag ett mail från gruppen där de, bland flera saker, uttryckte sin uppskattning att bli ”omskrivna som en del av konstmusikhistorien”.

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