קולות מתוך החושך

Examines the role of music in ghettos and concentration camps in Poland, particularly in the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna, and at Auschwitz. In the ghettos, musical creations and performances were part of Jewish spiritual resistance and made life more bearable. In the camps, Jews were forced by the Nazis to play music for sadistic reasons, to give the Jews a false sense of hope, or for the Nazis' own enjoyment. Discusses, also, the singing of liturgies in hiding in the ghettos and on the way to massacre sites or the gas chambers. Pp. 153-262 present the texts and music of songs composed in the ghettos, in Yiddish or Hebrew. Most of the songs expressed hopelessness and despair; only a few, like some partisans' songs, were optimistic. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)