Yiddish glory: Jewish refugees in Central Asia

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

During World War Two, approximately 1.6 million Soviet, Polish and Romanian Jews survived by escaping to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, avoiding imminent death in ghettos, firing squads and killing centres. Many of them wrote music about these horrors as the Holocaust unfolded. Singer Alice Zawadzski, whose own family found themselves on a similar journey to Central Asia, and historian Anna Shternshis of the University of Toronto, who led the project to bring these songs back to life, travel to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to retrace the journeys of those Jewish refugees who became music composers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The comb is the podcast that seeks out stories and voices from across Africa,
0:05.0	but otherwise might go unheard.
0:07.0	The comb.
0:08.0	Each week we focus on a single story that matters.
0:11.0	The comb.
0:12.0	Find out more at the end of this podcast.
0:19.0	At four o'clock this morning, Hitler attacked and invaded Russia.
0:26.0	In June 1941, Stalin's Soviet Union was invaded by Hitler's Germany.
0:32.0	More than 16 and a half million people fled.
0:36.0	In an urgent attempt to preserve its industrial and human resources,
0:47.0	the Soviet Union embarked on a massive actuation program,
0:50.0	the scale of which had never been seen before or since.
0:59.0	As what is evacuees, many were refugees who had to escape the incoming violence under their own steam.
1:05.0	Others were arrested and deported and imprisoned,
1:08.0	a so-called politically unreliable elements, including members of my family.
1:14.0	The monumental experiences of Jewish people in particular were expressed in some way,
1:19.0	were expressed in songs and poems written in the heat of those very moments.
1:25.0	But until the final collapse of the Soviet Union,
1:28.0	one of those bodies of works was thought to be lost.
1:32.0	My name is Alice Savatsky.
1:34.0	I'm a British singer and violinist with Polish roots,
1:37.0	and today, on the BBC World Service,
	...

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