The survivors who saw them on their way to the gas chamber on 6 October 1944 still remembered, decades later, how the children in the Auschwitz infirmary were singing Wiegala, WiegalaThe fear of death, which awaited them only a few minutes later, a few metres further on, was chased away.
They were tucked in by Ilse Weber, the loving woman who cared for them for months in the Theresienstadt camp and who wrote numerous poems, stories and songs for them. In a final act of love for these children, including her youngest son Tommy, she voluntarily accompanied them to inspire a last breath of hope through music. Shortly before, Ilse had composed for them the lullaby, which prayed:
The moon is a lantern
in the black background of the firmament,
From there it looks out over the world.
How silent it is!
Stories similar to this one have been repeated too many times in other fields, in other countries. And what is much worse, they can be repeated in present and future times, no matter where.
To avoid falling back into horror, it is essential to avoid forgetting. Therefore, on the centenary of his birth, we must remember the words of the writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, "It is not permissible to forget, it is not permissible to remain silent..." (The sunk and the saved - 1986) remains a moral obligation.
Fortunately, in a world in which immediacy is a priority, there are still people who dream of rescuing and giving value to the sounds without echo, the silent words. The project that bears this name, premiered at Fundación Tres Culturas on the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, was the personal commitment of Begoña Hervás, president of Juventudes Musicales de Bilbao.
The germ of this project was Hervás' disbelief: "I knew about the music that some musicians had made during their stay in concentration camps, but I was surprised that, among so many millions of victims, only the music of a few had transcended. I discovered that virtually all prisoners made music, and that music was made in all camps and ghettos - all of them! Inevitably, the question came to me: how is it possible to make music in such circumstances?
Indeed, there are thousands of pieces of music composed in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Some of them were created by professional musicians, others were just popular ditties to which an inmate wrote lyrics. They composed and sang in order to survive. And also as a way of fighting against the other use of music, the indecent use of those who turn beauty into horror, hope into abandonment.
Prisoners were routinely forced to sing Nazi songs and SS marches with the sole intention of humiliating them. Military marches and Wagner pieces were broadcast over loudspeakers during the night to prevent the prisoners from resting or to cover up the sound of executions. And it was also common practice for them to be greeted on arrival at the camps with a band or choir of inmates playing to calm tempers and prevent disturbances. Professional musicians were treated as slaves, forced to compose and play at their executioners' private parties and gatherings.
But the prisoners also composed and performed music on their own initiative, for themselves and for their fellow prisoners. Music functioned as a cultural survival technique and as therapy, helping them to alleviate fear.
Witnesses to their suffering were scattered the tattered scores, written on pieces of bandages, rags or any other material they could use for writing. They hid them in places where the guards would not usually look, such as under the floors of tool sheds or latrines.
In the early stages of the camp system, the dominant style was music. amateur The deportations were the result of the youth and workers' movements, and professional musicians were the exception. But as the number of deportations increased, so did the percentage of intellectuals, artists and professional musicians from many countries. This is why the music created within the Holocaust accommodates the different national musical traditions of the inmates.
Within the system of ghettos and concentration and extermination camps created by Nazism, there were some cases in which the cultural life of the inmates had a certain place, even if only for the regime's propaganda purposes. The clearest example was Theresienstadt. Faced with growing international outrage at the inhumane conditions in the internment centres, the Nazis allowed representatives of the Danish Red Cross and the International Red Cross to visit the camp in June 1944. One of the Nazis' biggest propaganda operations was then underway. The camp was embellished to the point of appearing to be a normal town. On the day the commission visited Theresienstadt, inmates could walk freely, children attended a school that never existed, and families were entertained by musical and theatrical performances composed by and for them.
This is how opera for children was born Brundibár, by Hans Krása, or the opera by Viktor Ullmann The Emperor of Atlantis or Death AbdicatesThe work was officially premiered in Amsterdam in 1975, as it was not allowed to be performed in the camp because the figure of the emperor was considered a satirical portrait of Hitler. Its composer, one of the most brilliant musicians of the time, was killed in the gas chamber shortly after composing it.
The collaboration of Yad Vasehem (Holocaust History Museum) and other institutions and museums, as well as Francesco Lotoro, music teacher, composer and pianist who has dedicated almost 30 years of his life to the search for and compilation of some 8,000 pieces of music composed in concentration, forced labour and prisoner camps during the Second World War, has been fundamental in the work of compiling the musical pieces that make up this show. During his tireless search, he scoured hundreds of libraries and archives and even rescued the scores from the ruins of the camps themselves.
Thanks to them, Begoña Hervás got hold of the manuscripts of the songs on which to work: "I digitalised the scores, translated the texts, looked for information about their authors, the circumstances that led them to write each of these songs, and the particular characteristics of the camps and ghettos in which they were created".
However, there was still a lot of work to be done. The scores contained only the melodic line. It was necessary to find a composer with the ability and sensitivity to make the harmonisations and arrangements for piano. Arnold W. Collado, President of Juventudes Musicales de Sevilla, has been in charge of this part of the project.
The result, masterful arrangements that perfectly support and reinforce the meaning of the text and the intensity of the feelings expressed in each of the pieces.
Among the many difficulties involved in the project, Collado considers one of the most complicated was working with music written by amateurs: "Of the 15 songs worked on, only four of them were composed by professional musicians. This is a huge amount of work, because there are imperfections in the composition that have to be corrected, but without losing the essence of the composition. For example, I had to create interludes or intermediate passages to give them meaning.
The selection of musicians to perform these pieces has also been transcendental for Begoña Hervás. The young Mercedes Gancedo, soprano, and Beatriz Miralles, pianist, responded to perfection, both for the virtuosity of their technique and their ability to connect with the audience.
But Sechoing noises, silent words it's not, it can't be, just a concert. The story of terrible pain contained in each song had to be supported and reinforced by the staging. It is therefore a musical-scenic show that tells the story of suffering experienced by the authors and their companions. Under the direction of Jon Amuriza, the theatre group Odissea Ensamble recreates "a concert in 3D" that stages each song to show in the most intense way possible what the Holocaust really was.
As Begoña Hervás tells us, "There are students in their twenties who know almost nothing about what it was like. I told them, you have to see it, you have to see it to know what it was like, because something like that should never happen again".
Because, at the end of the day, Sechoing noises, silent words is a commitment to preventive memory. The one that seeks to shake dormant consciences so as not to fall back into horror.
MUSICAL YOUTH
Young Musicians was founded in Brussels in 1940, at the height of the Second World War. In the midst of the horror, the hopeless youth of occupied Belgium needed a reason to hold on to life, an ideal to rally around. At the end of the war in 1945, out of a desire to use music as a vehicle for peace, the Young Musicians of Luxembourg, Belgium and France founded the International Federation of Young Musicians. Soon after, Germany joined the federation, so that what began as a movement of peaceful protest became a movement of reconciliation of European youth through music. Today, Jeunesses Musicales International, based in Brussels, has been present in fifty-five countries, including Spain, since 1952. In recent years, Jeunesses Musicales has opened up to new styles, including alternatives such as flamenco and jazz.
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