Audio: Music - HGH 367 - Genocide in Our Time - Resource Guides at University of Maine Augusta

Musical Resources for the Holocaust and other Genocides

From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: "For many victims of Nazi brutality, music was an important means of preserving and asserting their humanity. Such music—particularly the topical songs—also serves as a form of historical documentation. Like 'audio snapshots,' these works offer a telling glimpse into the events and emotions that their creators and original audiences experienced firsthand."

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust Song Sheets

HMD Song Sheets
- Includes sheet music:
  - Peat Bog Soldiers – a protest song written by prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp.
  - The Partisans’ Song – a famous piece of Jewish resistance.
  - Cambodia – a song sheet
  - No More Genocide – a peace song written by genocide survivor Jean-Paul Samputu.
  - Darfur’s Peace – a peace song written by Sudanese activist Omer Ihsas.
- Also includes a recording of Darfur’s Peace / Salaam Darfur.

Armenian Genocide

Rwandan Genocide

From the Genocide Archive Rwanda: Listen to songs of anti-Tutsi propaganda that were sung by the Interahamwe militia and Hutu extremists, before and during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Please be aware that some audio recordings contain sensitive content.

Cambodian Genocide

Rohingya Crisis

Visit Music and the Holocaust "From Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 until the liberation in 1945, music played an integral role in daily life under Nazism. On this website, you can learn about diverse composers and musicians, including those who supported the Nazis and those who became their victims. Visit our music page for a wide range of sound recordings of music and songs, or explore musical life in ghettos and camps across Europe using our interactive map. You can delve more deeply into the subject of music and the Holocaust by exploring the themes on the right. Our resources section provides educational and reference material for further reading and listening."
Visit Heartstrings
Heartstrings: Music of the Holocaust is an online, curated exhibition of audio illustrating the Yiddish musical spectrum of the Holocaust.
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"The songs that were created during the Holocaust in ghettos, camps, and partisan groups tell the stories of individuals, groups and communities in the Holocaust period and were a source of unity and comfort, and later, of documentation and remembrance."

Music with Holocaust reflections

The following compositions are known to have been constructed, performed, and/or recorded in reflection of the Nazi Holocaust:

Dmitri Shostakovish, "Symphony no. 13 in B-flat minor" ("Babi Yar"): YouTube audio
- "Symphony no. 13" on Wikipedia
- "Decoding the music masterpieces: Shostakovich's Babi Yar," by Daniel Elphick

Ullmann, Viktor (Josef) "On 8 September 1942 Ullmann was sent to the Terezín concentration camp, where he soon became one of the leading figures in the music section of the so-called Freizeitgestaltung, the programme of organizing the inmates' ‘leisure’." Died at Auschwitz.
Terezin Music Foundation "TMF is a non-profit organization dedicated to honoring the artist of Terezin with concerts, commissions, and programs in Holocaust education in Europe and the U.S."
I Never Saw Another Butterfly : San Francisco Girls Chorus Recording "Charles Davidson’s choral song cycle, I Never Saw Another Butterfly (1968), is one of many Holocaust-inspired musical works related to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) experience. It is also one of a number of settings, by various composers, of poems from the collection of the same title (in its 1964 English-language edition)—poems written by Jewish children imprisoned in that former walled city turned transit-concentration camp as they awaited removal to death camps."
Honoring 'Our Will To Live': The Lost Music Of The Holocaust "Francesco Lotoro has found thousands of songs, symphonies and operas written in concentration, labor and POW camps in Germany and elsewhere before and during World War II."