Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (review)

Although the subject of music during the Holocaust has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, discussions have tended to address musical-cultural life in Theresienstadt, the "model" ghetto/camp that the Nazis established for propaganda purposes. Music-making among prisoners in other concentration camps and ghettos, by comparison, remains largely unexplored, especially in English-language scholarship. Shirli Gilbert's book would seem, then, a welcome contribution. However, this interesting and occasionally useful study's title—perhaps formulated by the publisher—suggests a more comprehensive treatment of the subject than the work discloses. In her book, which includes an introduction, a brief epilogue, and four chapters dealing respectively with the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos and the Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, Gilbert writes that she aims to challenge "the widespread and simplistic conception of music as spiritual resistance, a conception based on unrealistic assumptions about inmate solidarity and the possibility of resisting Nazism's calculated policy of dehumanization" (p. 3). She explains her use of the case-study approach as follows: "Rather than using disparate, de-contextualized examples to support generalized conclusions about the 'triumph of the spirit,' I have sought to understand the distinctiveness that characterized people's interactions with music in particular places and times" (p. 18).

Gilbert's portrayal of a prevailing "rhetoric of spiritual resistance" seems itself, though, something of a rhetorical contrivance. There are simply too few scholarly studies on the subject of music in the ghettos and camps to support such a claim; Joseph Rudavsky's To Live with Hope, to Die with Dignity and Joshua Jacobson's terse essay, "Music in the Holocaust"—the only works that the author explicitly cites as examples of such rhetoric—can hardly account for a "widespread" phenomenon.¹ Nor is a singular, dominant "spiritual resistance theme" found among the more plentiful survivors' accounts of music in the ghettos and camps; narratives offered by Szymon Laks, Herbert Zipper, and Fania Fenelon—to name the better known—are, unsurprisingly, as varied as these individuals and their experiences. Even first-hand wartime and postwar accounts that describe music as a means of spiritual resistance do not present music as "uncomplicatedly heroic" (p. 200), as Gilbert would have her readers understand. In his monumental, unpublished study of music in the camps, Aleksander Kulisiewicz repeatedly refers to music as a means of spiritual and psychological survival, but he also meticulously documents the more wide-ranging motivations behind his song creations and those of other inmates.²

To be sure, Gilbert at times presents matters more accurately, as when she states that "while 'resistance' was undoubtedly part of what sometimes motivated inmates to participate in musical activity, it is not the whole story" (p. 18). But one is left wondering why the author seems so doggedly skeptical of music's ability to provide comfort and strength in those difficult times. An answer of sorts presents itself when Gilbert discusses what may actually have prompted her to undertake this study: a reaction to music's customary consoling and uplifting role in Holocaust commemoration ceremonies, where its presence is intended to serve as a reminder that victims asserted their humanity and preserved their dignity. Music performed at commemoration ceremonies may, indeed, tend toward themes of defiance and encouragement, but commemoration programming, while interesting as a socio-historical phenomenon, is not evidence of the historical musical record. Commemoration ceremonies function (however imperfectly) to honor the memory of Holocaust victims, not to preserve a nuanced history of music in the ghettos and camps.

It seems to me that Gilbert also misinterprets information, particularly in chapters Three and Four. Although she rightly begins the Sachsenhausen chapter by stating that opportunities to engage in creative activities differed substantially according to an inmate's place within the camp hierarchy (p. 101), her depiction of prisoner status and degrees of "privilege" in Sachsenhausen as determined strictly by group affiliation—national, political, or...