Chopin in Birkenau
Unforgettable and highly emotional experience for us was preparing and playing the melody of Chopin’s Tristesse (Étude Op. 10, No. 3 in E major) as arranged for voice and orchestra by Alma. We could not, of course perform that work publicly at any of Sunday concerts, because the playing of Chopin was forbidden under the Third Reich. We played it for ourselves and for women prisoners who snaked in to listen to something special, something that expressed through music our resistance to the German oppressors.
Helena Dunicz Niwińska, One of the Girls in the Band. The Memoirs of a Violinist from Birkenau, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oswiecim 2014, p. 84
Fryderyk Chopin: Étude E-dur Op.10, No. 3
/”In mir klingt ein Lied”/
for voice and instrumental chamber ensemble
Instrumentation: Joanna Szymala
Lyrics: Alma Rosé
The Artists:
Flute: Alicja Molitorys Recorders: Karolina Jesionek, Julia Obrębowska Accordions: Marek Andrysek Mandolins: Wojciech Radziejewski, Sławomir Witkowski Guitar: Dawid Bonk Percussion/Cymbal: Wojciech Herzyk Violins: Krzysztof Lasoń, Shi Chen, Maciej Tomasiewicz, Monika Dziurawiec, Agnieszka Lasoń, Wojciech Klich, Agata Romejko, Piotr Wacławik Cello: Stanisław Lasoń Double bass: Łukasz Bebłot Soprano: Katarzyna Moś Conductor: Szymon Bywalec Recording Director: Beata Jankowska-Burzyńska Artistic Director: Katarzyna Naliwajek
This transcription is based on a pre-Second World War edition of In mir kling tein Lied, a song arranged for voice and piano by A. Melichar with lyrics by E. Marischka. © BEBOTON-VERLAG GMBH
“In mir klingt ein Lied”
Lyrics: Alma Rosé *
In mir klingt ein Lied,
ein schönes Lied,
und durch die Seele mir erinnern zieht.
Mein Herz war still.
Nun erklingen wieder zarte Töne,
ruft in mir alles auf.
Leben war fern,
Und Wünsche fremd.
Mein Herz! Wie ruhig warst Du, lange Zeit.
Doch nun kam nah
All mein Glück und mein Verlangen,
iefstes Sehnen, schlaflos Bangen.
Alles, alles lebt jetzt wieder auf.
ich will doch nur
Frieden für mein Herz,
Ruhe will ich nur,
nicht denken wieder (mehr)
An ein schönes Lied.
*Based on R. Newman Alma Rosé Vienna to Auschwitz, Amadeus Press Pompton Plains, Cambridge, 2003. The original
manuscript of Alma Rosé is in the keeping of Hilda Zimche, a member of the women’s orchestra living in Israel.
„Beautiful song“
Lyrics: Alma Rosé
Symbolic translation (non literal)
So deep in my soul
Beautiful song
draws memory linger from the time gone by
My heart was lull.
Yet the tones rooted deeply into it
Awakeing me (while) coming out
My life was so far
And wisches too.
O silent hard! Why do you sleep so long?
But now again
All my happiness, desires
Deepest, sleepless feary nightmers
Everything is now reviving
But I only want
qiuet for my heart
loosing of some dates
To be sooted by
This beautiful song.
A word on the origin of the recording:
Many German camps, Auschwitz included, had inmate orchestras. Their main duty was to play lively marches that accelerated the counting of the columns of inmates who left the camp to work in the morning, marching five abreast, and then also counting them in again on their return to the camp after their day of gruelling, strenuous work. There were 11 such orchestras in Auschwitz, one of them being the women’s orchestra set up in Birkenau in the first half of 1943. Operating initially under the baton of a Polish political prisoner, Zofia Czaykowska, the band presented a fairly inadequate level of musical performance. However, when a virtuoso violinist, Alma Rosé, became the conductor, the quality of their music gradually improved. This not only allowed a vast expansion of the repertoire beyond the marches presented de rigueur, but also the preparation and performance of concerts for the SS contingent and the fellow inmates. As the orchestra consisted of singers as well as instrumentalists, the conductor built up the repertoire and extended it to cover, in addition to contemporary hits, the fields of opera and operetta. Thus the band’s repertoire consisted of around 200 pieces on various subjects, most of them being the work of German composers. Working on individual pieces, Alma had to rework the parts of individual instruments to adjust them to the level of skill attainable by her players, and this often left plenty of room for improvement as she was dealing with amateurs. As the ambition and purpose of the conductor was to reach a satisfactory standard of playing, the pieces were sometimes practiced for ten hours a day and more. Besides the instrumentalists’ lack of skill, the range of instruments presented to the band was a challenge as only violins, mandolins, guitars, and flutes were available, therefore the obvious lack of a bass section was an especially severe limitation. Achieving a coherent sound with such a peculiar line-up required more than a musical talent: it called for plenty of hard work.
Early in 1944, when the Birkenau camp was inundated with the smoke belching out of the chimneys of the crematoria, and the inmates of the camp witnessed how the murder machine was gathering momentum, the score of Fryderyk Chopin’s Étude in E major, Op. 10, No. 3, also known under the title “Sadness” or “Tristesse”, made its way onto the sheet stands of the women’s orchestra. The piece was transcribed for voice and orchestra by Alma Rosé, who combined it with lyrics that she wrote. The music of Jewish and Polish composers, Chopin included, was forbidden, and both those performing and those listening to such music were given excruciating punishment. That is why the forbidden compositions were only played during informal musical events organised for a narrow circle of trusted listeners. Thus, all the women of the orchestra were aware that the piece would never be played in the official concerts. Indeed, the Étude was only played a few times in the orchestra barracks for the pleasure and satisfaction of the women working in the orchestra, who found it the only way of expressing their defiance of the situation in the camp. This musical “bolstering of the heart” was also witnessed by trusted fellow inmates from other barracks. Both they and the artists found listening to Chopin in the hell of Birkenau an important and unforgettable emotional experience.
The violinist Helena Dunicz-Niwińska believes this Étude of Chopin may be the only piece she played in Birkenau that could also resound today without sparking horrible memories of the camp, and yet it demonstrates the sound of the music that the women’s band played at the time.
This recording is an approximate reconstruction of a piece orchestrated at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in 1944 by Alma Rosé and performed by her orchestra. The transcription of the Chopin piece was created on the initiative and with the help of Helena Dunicz Niwińska, a former violinist of the female camp orchestra, and with the help of her friend from the band, cellist Anita Lasker.
The recording was made in 2013 at the Academy of Music in Katowice. The piece was presented to the public for the first time during the official celebration of the 100th anniversary of Helena Dunicz Niwińska’s birth in Oświęcim in 2015.
In the photo above, in the center-Helena Dunicz Niwińska during the preview screening of Chopin in Birkenau. On the right, Maria Szewczyk – friend and co-editor of the memoirs of Helena Dunicz Niwińska One of the Girls in the Band. The Memoirs of a Violinist from Birkenau. On the left-Paweł Sawicki, who was in charge of the ceremony. One of the few drawings of the Birkenau women’s orchestra is visible on the screen: Mieczysław Kościelniak’s 1950 drawing “Return from Work” from the series Female Prisoner’s Day, from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Collections in Oświęcim.
What our guests said:
Helena Dunicz-Niwińska
What lay behind the idea of arranging Chopin’s Étude, Op. 10, No. 3, a piece for the piano, for such an extraordinary ensemble and of recording it for posterity? The opportunity for that arose in 2014 with the 70th anniversary of the death of Alma Rosé, conductor of the women’s band in Birkenau.
Helena Dunicz-Niwińska
Helena Dunicz Niwińska
What lay behind the idea of arranging Chopin’s Étude, Op. 10, No. 3, a piece for the piano, for such an extraordinary ensemble and of recording it for posterity?
The opportunity for that arose in 2014 with the 70th anniversary of the death of Alma Rosé, conductor of the women’s band in Birkenau. Born in Vienna on 3 November 1906, Alma Rosé came from an assimilated Jewish family of eminent musical talents. Her father was Arnold Rosé, founder of the Rosé String Quartet very well known before the war. So Alma too became a violinist, and became famous throughout Europe. In 1930, she married Váša Příhoda, a virtuoso violinist. After a few years of solo appearances on stage, in 1933 she established a chamber ensemble in Vienna composed entirely of young women and gave it an attractive name – Wiener Walzermädeln.
Under Nazi rule in Germany and Austria, Jews were stripped of all their rights, so even the greatest artists tried to make their way to other countries that lay beyond the jurisdiction of the Nuremberg Laws. Alma Rosé also made such an attempt but was detained in France on 12 January 1943. Initially she was kept in the camp in Drancy, only to be deported to Auschwitz on 20 July 1943. There she was first assigned to the group of inmates who were to be subjected to pseudo-medical experiments. However, once the German authorities realised she was a famous violinist, they decided to make use of her skills. This is how Alma Rosé became the conductor of the band in the women’s camp in Birkenau.
Alma embarked on that engagement with all her passion and involvement. In the inhuman conditions of the camp, she made the most of the opportunity to immerse herself fully in the music, and plunged into it without rest. After the evening roll calls she would even devote whole nights to her music as well as to tiring, all-day-long rehearsals and exercises with the amateur orchestra.
The band continued to improve its music and art, which brought proof of recognition from the camp authorities, including better living conditions than those of most of the inmates. It was only after the war, when already a free person, that I fully realised, much like other members of the orchestra, that it was thanks to Alma that around 50 women managed to survive the death camp.
Alma found the cruel and painful fate of her nation, sentenced to death by the Nazis, a very profound experience which was reflected in her depressive moods. She found the duty of playing German marches twice a day difficult to bear. With greater involvement, therefore, she would produce arrangements of lighter pieces which she included in the programmes of the Sunday “concerts” produced on the orders of the authorities. She also succeeded in arranging a piece by Fryderyk Chopin. It was his Étude in E major, Op. 10, No. 3. We were not allowed to play it publicly, as it was a piece by a Polish artist, but its secret performances in our block made a great impression on us. The piece also instilled in us its pensive mood and longing for a different world.
As homage to her strenuous effort in the dramatic situation she was living in at the time I intended that there should be a performance of this Étude on the anniversary of Alma’s death, in an arrangement similar to the one she prepared in the camp. The recording of the Étude proved a project as time-consuming as it was complicated. A friend of mine and great lover of music, Renata Koszyk, took the whole project under her wing. In its production, she was supported not only disinterestedly, but also with great passion and involvement, by a large group of magnificent people. Their number includes musicologist Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek, composer Joanna Szymala, conductor Szymon Bywalec, and singer Katarzyna Moś.
Katarzyna Naliwajek
In 2012 Helena Dunicz-Niwińska, who I first met three years earlier while gathering materials about music in occupied Poland, told me about her idea of reconstructing the version of Chopin’s Étude that Alma Rosé produced in Birkenau.
Katarzyna Naliwajek
Helena Dunicz Niwińska and Katarzyna Naliwajek
In 2012 Helena Dunicz-Niwińska, who I first met three years earlier while gathering materials about music in occupied Poland, told me about her idea of reconstructing the version of Chopin’s Étude that Alma Rosé produced in Birkenau.
The first step was to find the original material used by Alma Rosé, namely a popular prewar song that uses the musical material of Chopin’s Étude in E major from Op. 10 for a voice accompanied by instruments. In this Étude, constructed in ternary form A-B-A, the extreme sections carry a dreamy and poetic mood, while the central part is turbulent and full of dramatic expression. In writing his purposefully sentimental song, Alois Melichar (1896 Vienna – 1976 Munich; a minor Austrian composer 10 years Alma Rosé’s senior, author of film scores for Nazi propaganda films), made use of the last section of Chopin’s piece. To this he added two bars of the instrumental introduction preceding the start of the vocal part. Performed and recorded in various language versions, the song had gained vast popularity even before the war. The author of its German lyrics was Ernst Marischka. The song took its title from the first words in his version – In mir klingt ein Lied, and is performed to this day as such, even though it is the English version So Deep in the Night that remains best-known. The conductor of the women’s orchestra in Birkenau knew the song well and most probably even performed it with Die Wiener Walzermädeln, the all-women ensemble that she set up. The peculiar arrangement she produced in Birkenau was adjusted to the available line-up of instruments, a line-up that arose by chance. It was a necessity in their situation as the women assigned to the band could, for example, be amateur players of the recorder. For most, and such was the case with Helena Dunicz. Inclusion in the orchestra was their only salvation from being killed by gas or by murderous labour. The fact that Alma Rosé wrote new lyrics to the song in Birkenau is significant. Her autograph was preserved in Israel by Hilda, one of the band members. What were the changes introduced into the banal text of Marischka? The discovery of printed copies of the song by Melichar and Marischka, and comparison of the two versions, has made it possible to identify them.
Alma left the title, In mir klingt ein Lied, unchanged, perhaps in addition so she could explain that what she was performing was a prewar hit and not a piece by Chopin. Yet, apart from this, Marischka’s sentimental lyrics were completely changed. She replaced the doubtful adjective “little” (kleines), referring to the song, with the simple term “beautiful”. The pedestrian literally: “in which blossoms the dream of quiet love / Of you one and only” she replaced with words bearing a reference to the past: literally: “memories linger in the soul / My heart was peaceful”. In place of “burning, unfulfilled yearning / Write a melody” she had words referring to a memory of the world from before the Shoah: Now again subtle sounds resound / Recalling everything within me”. In the last two stanzas, Alma Rosé made her own daring attempt at describing her spiritual state. The words of Marischka “Resounds in me / A little song, / In which a wish gleams with a thousand hours: / To be with you! / You will live with me in heaven, / Dreaming, I soar above the stars / Eternal sun shines for the two of us / We shall meet again / And my joy with you / Can you hear the music / The gentle music.” Alma Rosé replaced with an entirely different text: “Life was so far away, and desires so alien. / My heart! So long you have been slumbering. / Now everything returns / All my happiness and my longing / Deep longings, sleepless anxieties. / Everything, everything comes to life once again. / I only desire / Peace for my heart. / I only desire rest. / Not to think any more / About the beautiful song.”.
Finding a composer who could reconstruct the piece was not easy however. After a few failed attempts, I asked Szymon Bywalec, an eminent conductor and teacher, whether he knew of such a person. A woman composer would seem to be the preferred choice in order to make fuller reference to Alma Rosé, conductor of the woman’s orchestra.
Then, Szymon Bywalec recommended Joanna Szymala, a young composer from Żory, who agreed to arrange the Étude as performed by the women’s orchestra from Birkenau with great commitment. Much like the musicians who performed and recorded it under Szymon Bywalec, and Kasia Moś who undertook to perform the vocal part, and rendered it meticulously, everyone produced music with striking emotional power.
Joanna Szymala
I found arranging a song based on Fryderyk Chopin’s Étude in E major an appealing experience that at the same time was very demanding. The subject of the death camps was not foreign to me, yet it did not make the decision to perform the task easier.
Joanna Szymala
Helena Dunicz Niwińska and Joanna Szymala
I found arranging a song based on Fryderyk Chopin’s Étude in E major an appealing experience that at the same time was very demanding. The subject of the death camps was not foreign to me, yet it did not make the decision to perform the task easier. Aware of the importance of the project, I finally decided to prepare this arrangement.
The work was not easy for two reasons. The first was the line-up of the orchestra, which comprised eight violins, one cello, one double bass, two recorders, one flute, a guitar, two mandolins, an accordion, percussion (a suspended cymbal), and a female voice. This roster of instruments was pure chance. What was at stake in Birkenau was to save as many women as possible: educated performers and amateurs alike. An attempt at arranging Fryderyk Chopin’s Étude for such an individual line-up was a certain challenge: you needed to obtain the most coherent sound possible, despite the disproportions in instruments and their different sounds.
A harder task was to reconstruct the sound of the contemporary camp orchestra. That required an endeavour to identify with the place and situation, and a reflection on how Alma Rosé, who directed the band at the time, could arrange the piece for the instruments available in these conditions. Obviously, I could not imagine the situation in the camp, even to the least degree. I followed the guidelines of violinist Helena Dunicz-Niwińska and cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, with whom we exchanged emails. They mostly concerned the structure of the piece, differentiation between instruments operating on the planes of melody and harmonics, and the type of accompaniment.
I additionally acknowledged the fact that the inmates only played this particular piece for themselves, to boost their spirits. I knew that the result of my work would be of a highly emotional nature for the former inmates, which is why I tried to take account of all their suggestions as thoroughly as possible. Moreover, my contacts with the two ladies were extraordinary: I found in them a link between reality and the history that I knew from literature and documents.
The work on the arrangement gave me a great deal of satisfaction and a sense that I am contributing in a certain degree to the continuation of the memory of Auschwitz.
Szymon Bywalec
I found the proposal to record the Étude quite a surprise. Although I knew of the inmate orchestras operating in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I knew hardly anything, or rather nothing, about the particulars of this one, composed entirely of women.
Szymon Bywalec
Helena Dunicz Niwińska and Szymon Bywalec
I found the proposal to record the Étude quite a surprise. Although I knew of the inmate orchestras operating in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I knew hardly anything, or rather nothing, about the particulars of this one, composed entirely of women. The arrangement produced by Joanna Szymala was not a great challenge from the point of view of performance, yet gathering an appropriate line-up of performers was. After many conversations with musician friends, I managed to build an ensemble composed of instrumentalists of the highest order, including lecturers at the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice, and their students. The group also included students of the Secondary Music School in Katowice. Thus, the level of performance was quite varied, much like in the original women’s orchestra. After bringing together the entire ensemble, we embarked on rehearsals, which culminated in the recording of the piece in the beautiful, new concert hall of the Academy of Music in Katowice on 8 February 2013.
We all found the production of the project a challenge and a great emotional experience. To the end, we were accompanied by our concern about whether we would manage to obtain an appropriate sound for the piece and properly balance the dynamic proportions in such an “exotic” ensemble. I would like to express my most cordial thanks to everyone, and especially to Helena Dunicz-Niwińska, for her cooperation and contribution. Thanks to her idea, not only I, but many other people as well, learnt about the existence of such a unique orchestra in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the exceptional role it played in the inhuman conditions of the camp.