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The Documentary Podcast

Songs from the Depths of Hell

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.32.7K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2019

⏱️ 51 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Aleksander Kulisiewicz spent six years in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, imprisoned soon after the Nazi invasion and their attempted destruction of Poland. In the camp he found a unique role both as a composer and living tape recorder of the world of the unfree and the damned. Blessed with a photographic memory prisoners, many of whom knew they were to be killed, would ask him to remember their songs. Songs of resistance and defiance, songs of love and home, songs that captured the brutality of life and death in the camps. He would also write 50 of his own songs. Performances would take place in secret, at night, away from the eyes of the SS. Kulisiewicz survived a death march at the war’s end and recovered to become the foremost chronicler, in song, of the world of the Concentration Camps. He would obsessively document memories and songs until the end of his life in 1982. In the 1960s he became an unlikely attraction in festivals of folk song for youth rebelling against the silence of their parents generation. Strumming his guitar liberated from Sachsenhausen, performing in his camp uniform, Kulisiewicz would sing his songs from the depths of hell. Oral historian Alan Dein explores his life and musical legacy.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Do you think he felt that he was in a way chosen to be the person that was going to be

0:12.3

the conduit for these songs?

0:14.3

He was chosen and damned.

0:16.5

I'm Alan D. You're listening to the BBC World Service and this is songs from the depths

0:24.8

of hell, the musical legacy of Alexander Kulishavic.

0:28.8

He was more than just the archivist.

0:30.5

He was Orpheus in Hell, Orpheus singing songs to try to raise the dead.

0:35.4

My father believed in God all the time, but his problem was that he knew that it was

0:41.4

a trial for the mankind.

0:43.4

He can't imagine that the trial for the mankind had to be so hard, but I think his bad memories

0:51.4

were stronger.

0:52.4

Alexander Kulishavic wrote and chronicle the world of music in a terrible place, in a terrible

1:03.9

time.

1:06.1

He left behind a single largest collection of songs and documentary material about the

1:11.0

world of the Nazi concentration camps.

1:13.4

All right, let's see.

1:16.6

What do we have here?

1:17.6

Here's the earlier part of the Erika story.

1:21.4

All of this is now housed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,

1:28.2

DC.

1:29.2

I'd like to read the list of the archives as it came to us.

1:35.9

Brett Webb is a museum's music curator.

...

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