Missing songs recorded more than 70 years ago from Holocaust survivors were recently discovered in the archives of the University of Akron. It’s the first time the lyrics of the notable songs were given a melody.
The songs and interviews were recorded in 1946 by Dr. David Boder, a psychologist who traveled to refugee camps in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany and interviewed at least 130 Jewish survivors in nine languages.
“Dr. Boder was determined to give the survivors a voice,” said David Baker, a UA professor of psychology and executive director of the Center for the History of Psychology. “Dr. Boder is credited with being the first person to record testimony of Holocaust survivors.”
The six songs recovered were from survivors in a refugee camp in Henonville, France.
Boder had done numerous interviews that were recorded on wire recorders, which were considered state-of-the-art equipment. He used 200 spools of steel wire. He also recorded religious services, folk songs and counseling sessions. Besides UA, some of his work is also in the Library of Congress and at UCLA.
All of Boder’s works were documented, but the spool with the Holocaust survivors’ singing about their experiences was never found.
The University of Akron received Boder’s work in 1967 and archived some of the material, but it wasn’t until a recent project to digitize the recordings got underway that the lost work was found. A spool in a tin box was mislabeled or misread. Instead of Heroville Songs, it should have read Henonville Songs.
“Forty-eight spools arrived at UA in 1967, but we had no way to listen to them, wire recorders weren’t being manufactured anymore, and none of the wire recorders in our collection were compatible. We couldn’t find any in working order,” Baker said. “But members of our staff, on their own, scoured eBay and salvaged used parts and after many years, put together a functional wire recorder.”
Jamie Newhall, a senior multi media producer at UA, led the search for a compatible recorder.
“We had the machine from the collection. I tried to repair it and had it working for a while but it wasn’t stable,” he said. “I didn’t want to modify it because it was part of the collection.”
After a year, his co-worker, Litsa Varonis, spotted a unit on eBay, purchased it and donated it to the university.
“I took the parts out that I needed and rebuilt it using new parts, so instead of vacuum tubes it now uses modern electronics,” Newhall said.
From there, Jon Endres, a mutimedia specialist with UA’s Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, was able to put the recordings into a digital format.
“It took me a few days to get comfortable enough to digitize them because they are very fragile and I didn’t want to destroy history,” Endres said. “We shared the recording with the national Holocaust Museum in Washington. D.C., which translated them and put them in historical context for us. For me I had the honor of hearing something for the first time in 70 years and [to] actually bring someone’s voice out of the darkness and bring them back into the historical record is the coolest thing when it comes to this story … to bring people back to a time that maybe we should be reminded of our history.”
Five of the recordings are in Yiddish and one is in German.
Baker said the most informative pieces were two songs sung by a woman named Guta Frank, who survived several Polish ghettos and at least two concentration camps, according to information from the Holocaust Museum.
One was an introduction to Undzer shtetl brent, a mainstay of commemoration ceremonies. Frank says the song had been sung by the composer’s daughter in the cellars of the Krakow ghetto to inspire the people to rebel against the Germans. Frank altered the song’s original refrain from “our village is burning” to “the Jewish people are burning.” Her second song, Unser Lager steht am Waldesrande, was the anthem sung by those in a forced labor camp going to and from the work sites.
“It’s the most significant discovery from our collections in our 52-year history, ” said Baker. “That we could give the world the melody to a song sung by those sentenced to their death through forced labor during one of the most unspeakable horrors and trauma of the 20th century is remarkable.”
Marilyn Miller can be reached at 330-996-3098 or mmiller@thebeaconjournal.com or Follow her on Twitter@Marilyn MillerBJ.