https://www.musicofremembrance.org/watch-and-listen/camp-songs
In 2001, MOR commissioned American composer Paul Schoenfield to create Camp Songs, a setting of five texts that Polish journalist Aleksander Kulisiewicz wrote as a prisoner in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The songs’ bitter humor depicts the cruel absurdity of what passed for life there, laying bare the fury seething beneath the terrors. The first song, “Black Boehm,” mocks a short, hunchbacked kapo named Boehm who had a distinctly charred appearance due to the wild enthusiasm he brought to his job tending the camp’s crematorium.
Kulisiewicz, a non-Jew, was sent to Sachsenhausen for his antifascist writings. In his nearly six years there he wrote defiant songs and poems, and he organized and performed at secret gatherings of illegal poetry readings and sings. Denounced to the authorities as a “nightingale,” Nazi doctors tried to silence him through “scientific” means—injections of diphtheria bacilli into his throat to destroy his voice. Fortunately, their attempts were unsuccessful, and the Nazis “let the dog sing.” His songs were acts of courageous defiance, and a means of spiritual survival. After liberation, Kulisiewicz devoted the rest of his life to collecting and documenting songs and music created in concentration camps. That collection now resides at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
MOR premiered Camp Songs in 2002 with Kulisiewicz’s original Polish words and reintroduced it two years later in an English translation that has become the standard version. The work was a 2003 Pulitzer Prize finalist. The video you’ll see here captures MOR’s 2019 performance in a new dramatic realization of the work conceived and directed by Erich Parce, who also performs along with Karen Early Evans and the MOR ensemble.