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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/08/book-of-yiddish-jewish-songs-holocaust-translated-revived-sydney-ntwnfb>
"Even under conditions of extreme inhumanity, humanity has the capacity to find
solace in creative expression.
In the concentration camps and ghettoes of Europe under the Nazi regime, music
became a sanctuary, a way to preserve Jewish identity, process trauma and
maintain a historical record. A small chapter of this vast record, which
resurfaced in Sydney, represents one of the earliest printed collections of
Holocaust songs.
Australia became home to one of the world’s largest populations of Holocaust
survivors outside Israel after the second world war. The influx of refugees
fundamentally shaped the postwar multicultural fabric of Sydney and Melbourne,
importing deep, intergenerational trauma along with extraordinary stories of
endurance and survival.
It was into this postwar environment that one survivor quietly brought a small
Yiddish songbook, that then lay concealed for almost six decades. Printed on
fragile acid paper, the poignant lyrics and musical notes of
Mima’amakim (Out
of the Depths) – a collection of 20 songs written by ghetto inhabitants, camp
prisoners, people in hiding and partisan fighters between 1939 and 1944 – lay
pressed between the pages of an old music score locked away in a Sydney
cupboard. One of only five known surviving copies in the world from an original
print run of 500, it narrowly missed being thrown in the recycling bin after
its owner, Olga R, died at the age of 98 in 2013 (her family requested that her
full name be withheld).
But there was something about the cover of this manuscript that her family, who
did not speak Yiddish, thought looked too unusual to ignore.
It was the Russian constructivist look of it, the Soviet-style geometric
shapes, diagonal lines, and stark black-and-red palette, that prompted Olga’s
daughter to send a photograph to a Jewish music academic at the University of
Sydney, Dr Joseph Toltz.
He forwarded the image to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington DC, where its cultural value and rarity was immediately recognised.
Thirteen years on, Toltz and Associate Prof Anna Boucher, a public policy
expert and global migration scholar at the University of Sydney, have completed
the first English translation of
Mima’amakim and tracked down descendants of
its contributors scattered throughout the Jewish diaspora."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
