If I could have crossed, I wouldn't know what I'd have lost

[sovay]

I accept that I didn't know Ben Hecht was Jewish until I read The New Yorker on his recent (and attractive-looking) biography, but I really feel I should have known that during World War II he wrote and organized, with Kurt Weill and Moss Hart, a memorial pageant to the mass-murdered Jews of Europe—a celebration of those who fought and an outcry for the rescue of those still surviving—called We Will Never Die. There's partial audio of the version performed at the Hollywood Bowl on July 21, 1943. That was after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had been incorporated into the script. It's astonishing. It's not a subtle piece of art, but it's not meant to be, and it knows the extermination camps by name; it's open about Jewish resistance in a way I thought had to be reclaimed from the popular reception of the Holocaust, not predated its formation. I had no idea.

Comments

[cmcmck]

The camps and the resistance were known about long before most people realise.

It's one of the great shames of the history of that period that things were known and little was done.

[sovay]

The camps and the resistance were known about long before most people realise.

I should have been clearer when I posted last night. I'm not astonished because I thought no one knew about the Holocaust until the war was over. I know people knew about it; I know people were going crazy trying to make other people believe and take action. Hecht's call for intervention went directly counter to the prevailing Allied strategy of "rescue through victory": like many others, he feared that by the time the war was ended in Europe, there would be no Jews left to save. I'm astonished that details like the names of the camps and the numbers of the dead and the mechanisms of extermination were available to the public in high-profile protests staged in multiple cities and nationally broadcast long before the end of the war and yet the myths formed anyway—passive Jewish victimization, Allied unknowingness. It's like something from an alternate history, except it was ours, and it doesn't even seem to have been particularly buried, just out of the mainstream enough that I hadn't run into it. But it's still a moment of: this happened?

[cmcmck]

The BBC were reporting it during 1942.

You know my background- all of this was kept from me by 'well meaning' people and I'm still working through the consequences of that to this day.

[negothick]

You're right--it IS as though the "official histories" taught in schools represent an alternate history. The "memory hole" Orwell wrote of in 1948 was active at that time in the US: the conversion of the Soviet Union from "our valiant ally against the Nazis" to "our enemy." To do that, history had to be rewritten as you indicate to show instead that "We have always been at war with the Soviet Union" and too many of those who were trying to save European Jewry were--like the ones you list--also "Communists or fellow-travelers." The Fireside Book of Folksongs, found in every school and camp, looked very different in the 1944 edition (which I have) than it did in later ones. In 1944, songs of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War can be found alongside translations of war songs of the heroic Russians.

[sovay]

In 1944, songs of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War can be found alongside translations of war songs of the heroic Russians.

Speaking of memory holes: have you heard or heard of Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II (2018)? An archive of Soviet Jewish songs collected during and after the war, lost for decades when the ethnomusicologists in charge were arrested in Stalin's anti-Jewish purges, performed because of this project for the first time since 1947. All of the songs are in Yiddish. Most of them are war songs—I'm used to partisan songs, but these are soldiers' songs, because so many Jews fought in the Red Army. They grieve the dead, but they also promise and boast about vengeance and victory. There's an amazing pair from a garment worker and her husband at the front; she writes him a song about sewing a shroud for Hitler, he writes her a song about ripping Germany apart. Many of them praise Stalin, bulwark against fascism. The closing track, "Tsum Nayem Yor 1944 (Happy New Year 1944)," cheerfully invites Hitler to kiss the singer's tuchis. It's an incredible collection. And again, the sort of thing there was no reason it shouldn't exist, but I didn't know it did until the middle of last month. (And it's been nominated for a Grammy and I hope it wins.)

[ethelmay]

The edition of the Fireside Book of Folk Songs that I have says 1947 and doesn't indicate that there was any previous version (mine is a sixteenth printing and may well have different contents, though). Is it possible you're thinking of a different well known collection? Or did they actually suppress the existence of the previous version?

[negothick]

Does yours have the Spanish Civil War songs? And "Song of the Great Wall" (Chinese) or "Meadowlands" (Russian)? Not to mention "Joe Hill" (American). Just dug mine out, and you're right--it's copyright 1947, and mine says Third Printing. I misremembered, because the introduction to the "Songs of Valor" (war section) is written as though the War is currently raging, not as though it were past.

[negothick]

I just read about this recording in connection with the Grammy nomination. I had not heard the songs.It's one of those "saved from the rubble of history" stories.

[ethelmay]

It has "Song of the Great Wall," "Meadowlands," "Joe Hill," and "Los Cuatros Generales" (can't see any other Spanish ones). I rather think it was a Christmas present to me in the early 1970s, but am not positive -- it may have been older and been knocking around the family for a while.

[sovay]

I had not heard the songs. It's one of those "saved from the rubble of history" stories.

I really recommend it, as both an artifact and something to listen to. The liner notes explain that most of the songs had been written to extant folk or popular tunes, not always recorded with the lyrics; the process of recovering them in the present day reminded me of Bellamy's work with his Kipling settings. One of the tracks has an entirely new melody, composed by the violinist. The rest are folk-tradition filk.

[negothick]

Those are the songs! I had (though no longer have) a more recent edition and I think those songs are gone, but can't confirm that memory.