The Life and Death Orchestra

                           Songs for the Betrayed World 
                 'When the Music Stops- What happens then'?

                                                       

                                                      Photo of bodies at Buchenwald-Ohrdruf taken by Colonel Park O Yingst: 
                                                      United States Holocaust Museum # 60630 in Public Domain

                      The work of The Life and Death Orchestra in commemorating the Holocaust is both  impressive and innovative  Two projects worthy of note are firstly  the CD 'Songs for the  Betrayed World' (2000) .Composed by Bill Smith & Bim Sinclair and  credited to the 'The Life & Death Orchestra Featuring Angi Mariani & Herbie Flowers', the CD  interprets both Holocaust related poetry and prose . The poets featured include Yehuda Amichai, Tadeusz Borowski, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Hilda Schiff, Elie Wiesel, and Adam Zych. The music is quite something else, strangely alluring. Elements of cabaret, early tango, brooding  Jazz, with the occasional uplifting track such as 'Us Two ' whilst ' Never' confronts the whole horror of the Death Camps and the loss of faith in the benevolence of humanity . After a few listens to the work of The Life and Death Orchestra, strange to find oneself singing along to some of their songs. But challenging, thoughtful , and it is great to have a focus on lesser known work.

And then there is the opera 'This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen' , partly  based on Tadeusz Borowski's recollections of being a prisoner in both Dachau and Auschwitz as published in 1947 : Borowski (born 1922)  had been writing poetry whilst living underground during the German occupation, associated with the Resistance, and  was arrested on 25th February 1943. His partner Maria  Rundo, a Resistance fighter was also taken , and she was sent to Birkanau. Both survived, were re-united and married in 1946, living in Warsaw then travelling to France and Germany and back to Poland.  Borowski turned to Communism, and to writing about his experiences as a prisoner. In 1951 he died in unexplained circumstances most likely by suicide,after learning that a friend has been arrested and tortured by the new Communist regime of Poland.Some of Borowski's most remarkable work concerns the love poetry he wrote whilst in the camps.


The Sun of Auschwitz (extract)  Tadeusz Borowski

"                 I remember
your smile as elusive
as a shade of the colour of the wind,
a leaf trembling on the edge
of sun and shadow, fleeting
yes always there. So you are
for me today,in the seagreen
sky, the greenery and
the leaf-rustling wind. I feel
you in every shadow, every movement
and you put the world around me
like your arms.  I feel the world
as your body, you look into my eyes
and call me with the whole world"

(Translation that appears in 'The Auschwitz Poems' 1999)

The CD ' Songs of the Betrayed World ' interpretation  can be listened to Here

A personal favourite is Paul Celan 's 'Deathfuge' . The bitter ironic lyrics lend themselves well to a song and can be heard here  Reminds one of Brecht and Weill. Paul Celan  (1920-1970) was from a German Jewish family who were living in Romania . Celan was had to serve 18 months forced labour before escaping,  his parents both died in the camps. A poet, translator and lecturer in Paris after the War ended, Celan took his own life in 1970 after a severe bout of depression.

'Deathfuge'  (extract)

"Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won't feel toocramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden
                                                                 hair Margeurite
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all
                    sparkling he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews in rows has them a shovel a grave
                                                               in the ground
he orders us strike up and play for the dance. ....."

(Translation as appears in 'The Auschwitz Poems' ,1999)

Finally Tadeusz Rozewicz poem 'Pigtail' , already covered by this blog for  Holocaust Memorial Day also adapts well to music and The Life and Death Orchestra's version is  available here


Interview with Bill Smith via email April 12th 2020

Have you had feedback from Holocaust survivors and/or from relatives of those who died in the Holocaust about the work of the Life and Death Orchestra?

When we first performed as the Life and Death Orchestra many survivors came in the audience. We have since met many survivors and their relatives and all were grateful for what we had produced.

It is noticeable that you have used the written word of some writers who were not directly caught up in the Holocaust, such as Adrian Mitchell ( 1932-2008) and Adam Zych ( born 1945) . What would you say in response to those who claim that it is impossible to write adequately about the Camps, or war in general, unless the writer has had first hand experience?

I don't agree with that. If you believed that you would have no art. Adrian Mitchell writes from the heart and understands what happened. Adam Zych was one of the principal curators of the Auschwitz Museum and we went there to meet him. He's a great composer too.

In the performance of the Opera in 2007, there is a section about Darfur , and also references to the Katyn forest massacre. The Opera shows Tadeusz Borowski's bitter disillusionment with Communism after surviving the German Death Camps. The CD has a track about the singer Victor Jara murdered by Chilean fascist in 1973. How far do you think that connections can be made with the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity?

The Holocaust was a unique occurrence in human history but I started to try to understand the evil that humans do so I think that there are links. Borowski and Daghani were not keen on Socialist realism !!!
To quote Arnold Daghani "If impressionism is painting what you see and expressionism painting what you feel, socialist realism is painting what you are told to see and feel."

If there is one poem about the Holocaust that you think that readers should read, what would it be ?

'Again ' by Kevin Carey and the book 'Night' by Elie Wiesel.

What are the future plans for the Life and Death Orchestra? Any chance of staging 'This Way to the Gas..' again ?

We're very hopeful that we can stage the Opera again in a significant way in 2021. We are publishing the full life cycle of song so any orchestra can play the songs. We hope to do a Life and Death Orchestra in late 2021 featuring other composers as well.

Do you think that the Allies could have intervened in some way by bombing some of the major death camps or the rail links to them?

Yes I do think that the Allies could have taken the genocide much more seriously and could have adopted measures to save millions......and the world looked on and the world looked away as we sing in our opera. Mainly our leaders !
( Bill directed me to the following article from 'The Independent' of  April 18th 2017 titled 'Allied forces knew about Holocaust Two Years Before The Discovery of the Concentration Camps Secret Documents Reveal ' )


I wish to thank Bill for his time. 


 Felt appropriate to end with some lines from 'Again ' by Kevin Carey

"Since then My Lai
Kampuchea, paralysis
in the face of ethnic cleansing. If
I have to say it. If I have to say it
again
I will say it again
for  there is no such thing as compassion fatigue
only compassion forgetting. If I
have to say it
again."

( From the booklet that accompanies the CD 'Songs For the Betrayed World'. Originally from Kevin Carey's poetry collection 'Klaonica' -which is Serbo-Croat for 'slaughterhouse'. )





Links

The Life and Death Orchestra  website

The Links page on The Life and Death Orchestra website provides a massive guide to Holocaust research and commemoration organisations.

Never  as performed by The Life and Death Orchestra in 2007

Us Two  as performed by The Life and Death Orchestra in 2007

Tracks from Youtube selection of Life and Death Orchestra tracks -audio

Culture Poland website page on Tadeusz Borowski

'The Keep' archive page on Arnold Daghani  ( Artist referenced above by Bill Smith)

Recommended Reading 

'Holocaust Poetry', anthology edited by  Hilda Schiff  ,St Martin's Press, 1995

'The Auschwitz Poem' anthology edited by Adam A. Zych, Auschwitz- Birkenau State Museum 1999




Other blogs by Michael Bully 

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Leon Zdzislaw Stroinski 1921- 1944 'Warsaw'

                   
                                     Leon Stroinski- Poet of the Warsaw Uprising 

                                                

     Monument of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Warsaw by Yair Haklai, courtesy of Creative Commons licence 
                                             

Leon Zdislaw Stroinski was born in Warsaw in 1921, and died  fighting in the Warsaw Uprising on 16th August 1944. A collection of his prose poetry was destroyed in the fighting. In 1963 a collection titled 'Okno' ( 'Window') was published, containing 9 poems, 11 prose poems, a short story, and two polemical pieces' , and republished in 1982.
This post, more than anything, is an appeal for further information about his work. Hugh Haughton in his 'Second World War Poems', ( Faber & Faber 2004) , featured the prose poem 'Warsaw' , translated by the poet  Adam Czerniawski , who was born in Poland in 1934,


                                                     Warsaw 

" During the building of the barricades, the Vistula, brimming with reflections of forests, birds and white roads line with poplars, rose at first like a mist, then like a stiff cover of a book.

          In its shade at dawn caretakers come out with huge frayed brooms to sweep up the the tears which have collected during the night and lie thickly in the streets.

            Already. the market women, extended to the edge of sunlight, recommend potatoes grown on graves.

         And on the horizon of the street, across the roar of grenades lying in the curves of cobblestones,the soul of the city has been moving for months.

      The reflection of her face, too difficult to comprehend, has left a trace on the twisted faces of ruins as on the handkerchief of St Veronica.

       Those who will cone in the far, far future wanting to decipher them, drawing their cold-blue hands across features taut like strings, and who with careless fingers will poke the moan of those dried up in crevices-
       will burst in prayer or blasphemy.

       Here my country has come together from decimated forests and villages turned into a dog's howl. It persists in the whisper of mechanised armour.

      We had to wait through so much blood and pathos in order to build from the silence of ruined monuments such a vault over a city of jazz and death.

      Now lemurs from Gothic temples are thick on roofs of trams and terrify insurance officials on their way home.

    The  dead wander beneath the pavements and pound on bucklers which give a hollow sound, while at evening in double rows of whispers they walk arm in arm with the living, and you can tell them part only by skilfully folded wings, which nevertheless stick out on their backs like humps.

    But in daytime huge stone capstans hum, and only around noon, when folk sit down to lunch and it's a bit quieter, can you hear more distinctly the heavy rhythmical tread of God's steel-shod boots. "

Translated by Adam Czerniawski, 'The Burning Forest -Modern Polish Poetry', 1988.
     
I have not  been able to trace the copyright holder of this poem- if anyone owns the right, please get in contact and would be delighted to give them all due credit. 

           Another poet who died during the 1944 Uprising was Krzystof Kamil Baczynski ( born 1921) who was killed fighting the Germans on 4th August 1944. Have not been able to find anything by him in English but Culture.Pl website has a fascinating page about his life, but no extracts from his poetry.
Anna Swir was a military nurse during the Uprising, and came within an hour of being executed but was spared, and lived until 1984. The Chicago based Poetry Foundation has a useful biographical page on her, and links to some of her poems.




World War 2 Poetry blog supports the Second World War Experience Centre  Please consider looking at their website and the SWWEC Youtube Channel 

Miklos Radnoti (1909 -1944)

                                               
    Miklos Radnoti -'Flame must rise above death and autumn'   

                                                   
                                                      Miklos Radnoti in 1930, courtesy of Wikpedia.

                                                       Peace, Horror


                                         When I stepped out through the gate,it was just ten o'clock
                                         A baker stepped by on gleaming wheels, a song on his lips.
                                         A plane droning high overhead and the sun up, it was ten,
                                         And my dead sister came into my mind and with that they were all
                                         Flying above me-those whom I love and who are not alive-
                                         Darkly across the sky, a host of the silent dead.....
                                         Then a jolt, and a shadow crumpled against the wall.
                                         Silence. The morning came to a halt on the stroke of ten;
                                         Hovering over the street- and a certain horror.   (1938)



                                               

                                Miklos Radnoti was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in 1909 .Radnoti's first collection of poetry 'Pagan Invocation' , was published in 1930. Two others followed in 1931, and 1933. In 1934 Radnoti moved to Budapest and started writing for a literary magazine titled Nyugat . Cultural life in Hungry began to reflect contemporary cultural tensions, Radnoti was firmly aligned with the more Left-leaning writers and artists of the day whilst German economic domination and political influence was growing.  Radnoti still had collections of poetry published and married his school sweetheart Fanni Gyarmati, and a lot of his poetry was inspired by her.

A fair amount of his poetry featured eerie premonition of what calamity was going to befall Hungary. Radnoti avidly followed the Republican cause in Spain. In 1936 he brought out a collection titled ' Keep Walking, you the Death Condemned' . The poem of the same name was also a strange premonition of Radnoti's own fate
                           
                                       "Keep walking, you, the death-condemned'
                                         In front, the dark trees ranged in line
                                         Topple towards you; bushes hide
                                         A cat and the chill wind. The road
                                        Turns white with fear, arching its spine.
                                   
                                        Shrivel away now, autumn leaves!
                                        Shrivel, oh terrifying world!
                                        Cold hissing from the sky is harsh,
                                        And on stiff, rusty blades of grass
                                        The shadows of wild ducks are hurled ....."


A series of repressive measures were passed in Hungary from 1930- 1941, instigated by Admiral Horthy's regime.  Types of employment were banned to Radnoti as a Jew , but worst was the fact that Jews were forced to register to join a forced labour system. Hungary became more aligned with the Axis, even declaring war on the Soviet Union in 1941, and sending troops to take part in the invasion.  Radnoti was called up for three months in 1940 for labour service, and for ten months in 1942-1943 Shortly after this term, Radnoti converted to the Roman Catholic faith. In 1944 he was deported to Yugoslavia to serve with other Jews in  building  roads for the German occupiers. By then Germany had assumed control of Hungary.

In September 1944, the Germans had to evacuate the Balkans following the advance of the Red Army and the growing confidence of Tito's partisans. The Hungarian Jewish labourers,who were partly guarded by Hungarian soldiers,  were made to join a forced march back into Hungary. Cold weather, near starvation, damaged health, and exhaustion led to many casualties. Around the 8th November 1944 , near the town of Gyor, Radnoti was amongst 21 sick and exhausted  Jewish labourers who were separated from the main column. The following day, near the town of Abda, the Jews were made to dig a ditch, then shot one by one.

After the War, the bodies were exhumed. It was discovered that Radnoti had hidden a notebook of his poetry in his coat. In 1948, a posthumous collection of poetry was published.

Ultimately Radnoti's work was inspired by Jewish culture, with a growing Christian influence, Anti-Fascism, reverence for nature, an instinctive humanitarian viewpoint, with a haunting fatalism. A feeling that however hopeless his predicament must have seen as a Jew with liberal-Left views,  trapped in central Europe dominated by the Axis, Radnoti was never going to  abandon his idealism.

However harrowing Radnoti's war poetry could be, thought that it was fitting to end with some lines that showed that Radnoti was poet who wrote about love. And this must not be forgotten. Here are  the final three verses of 'Autumn Begins Restlessly'... written in August- September 1941.

                                     
                                                    " The landscape falls asleep
                                                     Death lovely in his white glide
                                                     Settle on the countryside.
                                                     The sky cradles the garden.
                                                     Look; in your hair's and autumn leaf that's golden,
                                                     Above you, branches weep.

                                                    Ah but your flame must rise above death and autumn
                                                    And raise me love, love, along with you.
                                                    let the wise thing be to love me today-
                                                    Be wise and kiss me, hungry for dreams too.

                                                   Joyfully love me, do not leave me, fall
                                                   With me into the dark sky sleep creates.
                                                   Let's sleep. Out there the thrush is well asleep.
                                                   The walnut, falling on fallen leave piled deep,
                                                   makes no harsh sound. Reason disintegrates."



Sources

Poetry

Some English translations of Radnoti

Dame Judi Dench  reciting Miklos Radnoti poem  from (Exiled Hungarian ) director Robert Vas'  film 'My Homeland' from 'Youtube'.


                               
Books 

'Foamy Sky- The Major Poems of Miklos Radnoti' Selected by Zsusanna Ozsvatha and Fredrick Turner, , Princeton University Press, 1992 is highly recommended. A superb collection of Radnoti's work from 1929- 1944 with a useful biography.

'Forced March-Selected Poems' by Miklos Radnoti, Translated from the Hungarian by Clive Wilmer and George Gomori. , Enitharmon Press , in association with the European Jewish Society, 2003. Also recommended...shorter collection than 1992's 'Foamy Sky' and a great introduction to Radnoti's life and work.

Fanni Gyamati died on 15th September 2014.  The Daily Telegraph Obituary is well worth a read.

Other blogs :

Bleak Chesney Wold   19th century history & literature blog

A Burnt Ship                17th century history warfare & literature blog 

Contact: Michael Bully     World War 2 Poetry@mail.com   ( please ram words together without spaces) 

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Nelly Sachs ( 1891- 1970) 'Chorus of the Rescued '

           'The Worms of Fear  Still Feed Upon Us'


I wish to thank the 'Swedish History in English' Facebook group for their help with this feature

Nelly Sachs in 1966 at the time of being joint winner of the Nobel prize for Literature


                     German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs (1891- 1970) managed to escape from Berlin  to Sweden in 1940.  A fellow poet, Gudrun Harlan, managed to contact the Swedish novelist  Selma Lagerholf to assist : Nelly Sachs had been a long standing reader of Selam Lagherholf's work and they had corresponded for some years, and Nelly Sachs later maintained that her own love for Sweden developed from Selma Lagerholf's writing- particularly the novel 'Gosta Berling' (1891) .  Prince Eugene of Sweden also helped in acquiring the necessary documentation.

 Nelly Sachs  had already been interrogated a number of times by the Gestapo, and one source suggests that she had actually received notification to report for deportation. However on 16th May 1940, Nelly Sachs and her mother took one of the last flights from Germany  to Sweden, where they remained for the rest of their lives.

It was only after World War 2 that Nelly's poetry received international acclaim : She wrote a great deal about the Holocaust. Her most famous poems include Chimneys, Numbers. Some are just too stark and painful to read . They evoke the systematic brutality of the Holocaust as much it could be possible in the written word.

There is an element of trauma for having escaped, the 'guilt of the rescued' . Many of Nelly Sachs'  relatives did not survive the camp. A number of friends such as fellow poet  Getrud Kolmar were also murdered in the holocaust. Nelly befriended the Romanian poet Paul Celan, who survived a Nazi Labour camp, and later settled in Paris.

There is a brittle and fragile element to her poetry- 'the rescued' can not separate themselves from the horror of those who perished:


Chorus of the Rescued

We, the rescued,
From whose hollow bones death had began to whittle his flutes,
And on whose sinews he had already stroked his bow-
Our bodies continues to lament
With their mutilated music.
We, the rescued,
The worms of fear still feed on us.
Our constellation is buried in dust.
We, the rescued,
Beg you;
Show us your sun,but gradually.
Lead us from star to star, step by step.
Be gentle when you teach us to live again.
Lest the song of a bird,
Or a pail being filled at the well,
Let our badly sealed burst forth again
and carry us away-
We beg you;
Do not show us an angry dog, not yet-
It could be, it could be
That we will dissolve into dust-
Dissolve into dust, before your eyes ,
For what binds our fabric together?
We whose breath vacated us,
Whose soul fled to Him out of that midnight
Long before our bodies were rescued
Into the ark of the moment.
We, the rescued,
We, press your hand
We look into your eye-
But all that binds us together now is leave-taking,
the leave-taking in the dust
Binds together with you.

- Nelly Sachs, translated by Michael Hamburger 

Taken from the anthology 'Poetry of the Second World War- An International Anthology ' .edited by Desmond Graham 1995.

Several collections of her work were printed during Nelly Sachs' lifetime.  Her New York Times obituary suggested that her collection  ' Flight and Metamorphosis'  (1959) received particular acclaim.
A play 'Eli' from 1950- set in Nazi Occupied Poland- was read out on West German radio, and performed on stage in 1962. In 1965 Nelly Sachs won the Peace Prize of German Publishers ( Friedenspreis des Deutcshen Buchandels ) And  in 1966 she became the joint winner of the Nobel Prize of Literature along with Israeli writer Schmuel Yosef Agnon.

Paul Celan took his own life in 1970, three weeks before Nelly Sachs died in a Stockholm hospital on 12th May 1970. She was 78.




Links of interest 

Nelly Sachs'    Nobel Prize Speech 1966

New York Times obituary  to Nelly Sachs


Jewish Women's Archive   Article on Nelly Sachs


Nelly Sachs Collection on line

Home page has English language biography feature. The digitalised documents are largely in German and Swedish.

New blog by Michael Bully launched in 2023 Bleak Chesney Wold Charles Dickens/ 'dark' Victoriana 

UPDATE 2025 

World War 2 Poetry blog supports the Second World War Experience Centre  Please consider looking at their website and the SWWEC Youtube Channel 

World War 2 Poetry blog welcomes the new War Poetry Review website run by the War Poets Association

Remember Babi Yar -'Art Destroys Silence'

'Babi Yar' -Yevgeny Yevtushenko (born 1933)



People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence. 

'Testimony-The Memoirs of Dimitri  Shostakovich,' ( edited by Solomon Volkov) ,1979.

 

                                   

                                                     

During the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Babi Yar,  a ravine by Kiev, was the site of  a particular horrendous massacre of  some 33,000 Jews on 29th September -30th September 1941 at the hand of the Nazi killing unit, Einzsatsgruppen: The Babi Yar Memorial Centre maintains that 120,000 people were shot by the Germans and their allies. Those who died included " Soviet prisoners of war, political opponents, mental patients, civilians of Roma, Russian and Ukrainian origin."

The atrocity was immortalised by Shostakovich's 13th symphony in B flat minor, opus 113, completed in 1962, which opened with a musical setting of the poem 'Babi Yar' by Yevgeny Yevtushenko . This poem was first published in Soviet journal ' Literaturania Gazeta' in 1961.

The Soviet Union had seen a wave of anti-Jewish feeling instigated by Stalin in 1952- 1953. Yevtushenko's poem presented the massacre of 29th September -30th September 1941 as the culmination of antisemitism generally, and referenced anti- Jewish feeling amongst Russian people. The poem opens with a protest that

 " No monument stands over Babi Yar/A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone."

Although more cultural expression was permitted under Kruschev , the first performances of the 13th sympathy were placed under immense scrutiny  by the Soviet authorities. Two performances, on 1st December and 3rd December 1962 went ahead at the Moscow conservatory. Yevtushenko soon had to rewrite parts of the poem ( that were being performed as part of the symphony ) as it was felt that not enough emphasis was placed on the non-Jewish people who were killed at Babi Yar. One revised verse read

"I think of Russia's heroic deed
In blocking the way to fascism,
To the smallest dewdrop, she is close to me
In her very being and her fate."

( Source 'The New Shostakovich', Ian MacDonald. 2006 edition)

The combination of the poem and the symphony , particularly as Shostakovich was well known outside the Soviet Union, helped to highlight Babi-Yar. The massacre was also a setting for a scene in the famous 1978 US television series 'Holocaust' . Memorials to the victims have now been placed in different parts of Europe and North America.

The treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union was to remain a major human rights concern during the Cold War, and beyond. Yet the collaboration between Shostakovich and Yevtushenko over 'Babi Yar' has made quite an impact :

"No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.

I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails.

It seems to me that Dreyfus is myself.
The Philistines betrayed me – and now judge.
I’m in a cage. Surrounded and trapped,
I’m persecuted, spat on, slandered, and
The dainty dollies in their Brussels frills
Squeal, as they stab umbrellas at my face.

I see myself a boy in Belostok
Blood spills, and runs upon the floors,
The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded
And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half.

I’m thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of “Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!”
My mother’s being beaten by a clerk.

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The “Union of the Russian People!”

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes.
How little one can see, or even sense!
Leaves are forbidden, so is sky,
But much is still allowed – very gently
In darkened rooms each other to embrace.

-“They come!”

-“No, fear not – those are sounds
Of spring itself. She’s coming soon.
Quickly, your lips!”

-“They break the door!”

-“No, river ice is breaking…”

Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fiber of my body will forget this.
May “Internationale” thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.

There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian"

Benjamin Opoknik translation

Links

Babi Yar holocaust memorial centre

Yevgeny Yevtushenko reading Babi Yar in English

Shostakovich Symphony 13

Picture Credit , In public domain courtesy of Wikipedia UK

Title : Soviet POWs covering a mass grave after the Babi Yar Massacre 1st October 1941 

UPDATE 2025 

World War 2 Poetry blog supports the Second World War Experience Centre  Please consider looking at their website and the SWWEC Youtube Channel 

World War 2 Poetry blog welcomes the new War Poetry Review website run by the War Poets Association

UPDATE 2026 

I have been alerted to the fact that Shostakovich's 13th symphony 'Babi Yar Suite' was not the first symphonic work to commemorate the Babi Yar massacre. Jewish Ukrainian composer Dymitri Klebanov's first symphony In Memoriam to the Martyrs of Babi Yar (1945) would have this distinction. 

Holocaust Music  Entry for Klebanov.