As war raged through Europe, a group of Soviet Yiddish scholars began recording stories, poems and songs by Jewish men, women and children living – and dying – in Nazi-occupied Soviet Union. Never published, they were rediscovered in Kiev in the late 90s. Now these moving, stirring and sometimes slapstick songs have been brought to life through an international recording project.
The 18 songs on Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of WWII have not been heard for over 70 years. “Every single song is inspired either by an act of violence that the author witnessed or took part in,” says Anna Sternshis – professor of Yiddish studies at Toronto University – who discovered the archives in Kiev.
The songs weren’t written by famous composers but by ordinary Jews and Red Army soldiers throughout the Soviet Union.
“[They are] the first eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust from the Soviet Union,” Shternshis continues, “And astonishingly these first eye-accounts come to us in the form of songs, which we didn’t know.”
The songs were collected by enthnomusicologists, led by Moisei Beregovsky, from the Institute for Jewish Culture in Kiev. Following the German invasion in June 1941, they were ordered to leave Ukraine for a safer place outside the war zone. Travelling by train, they met Jewish refugees from the western part of the Soviet Union and from recently- occupied Poland.
“These people were singing songs about what they had witnessed, so very early songs of the destruction of the Jewish community,” Shternshis explains. “[The researchers] were writing down the words, and if they had the time or ability sometimes they would take notes of the tunes, but rarely.”