The Sound of Hope: Music as Solace, Resistance and Salvation during the Holocaust and World War II

In her preface, Kellie D. Brown, a professor of music and chair of the music department at Milligan University in Tennessee, defines her purpose thus: “This book represents an attempt to unite historical, political, cultural and sociological contexts of the camps, ghettos and other war-torn locations with the music and musicians that forged indelible links with those places” (p. 2). She expresses gratitude for the subjects of her book, stating that “they have taught me that music holds the power to uplift the human spirit and to triumph over oppression even among indescribable tragedy and suffering” (p. 2). She refers to her project as designed to honor their memories and to herself as having “undertaken the holy calling of bearing witness to these stories and lifting back the folds of darkness to reveal moments of light and beauty, to discover where grace abounds” (p. 3). After such a lofty introduction, any reader might be loath to find fault with such a book, but despite glowing reviews in such publications as Choice and The Washington Post, I found this publication to be misleading, simplistic, confused, and under-researched.The book is an assortment of chapters, each retelling a story of a different person or musical composition: 1. “The Rise of the Third Reich and its Cultural Agenda” (pp. 9–20), 2. “Alma Rosé and the Women's Orchestra at Auschwitz-Birkenau” (pp. 21–60), 3. “Dr. Herbert Zipper: From Dachau to the World” (pp. 61–78), 4. “Alice Herz-Sommer and the Music in Terezin” (pp. 79–120), 5. “Władysław Szpilman and the Warsaw Ghetto” (pp. 121–156), 6. “Olivier Messiaen: A Composer Confronts the End of Time” (pp. 157–184), 7. “Dmitri Shostakovich and the Musical Redemption of Leningrad” (pp. 185–226), 8. “The Vocal Orchestra: Female POWs on Sumatra” (pp. 227–276), and “Epilogue: Out of the Ashes. The Israel Philharmonic and the Violins of Hope” (pp. 277–294). The volume's notes are gathered together at the end, followed by a brief bibliography and an index.Polish musicians or composers are discussed on pages 42–52 (in passing) where Szymon Laks's wartime experience conducting the men's orchestra in Auschwitz is summarized and dismissed, and pages 121–156, where Brown presents her Cliff Notes of the memoirs of the pianist-composer Władysław Szpilman (1911–2000). His book, The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–1945 (1999), gave rise to a feature film by the same title, later honored with an Oscar. Brown's chapter is a straightforward summary of the Szpilman story. Given that his book is widely available (the English version alone in 13 editions in 188 libraries) and that summaries have already been published, there seems to be little reason to retell it yet again in this volume, and indeed, this retelling contributes nothing new to our knowledge of the period, Polish music, Jewish music, or Holocaust studies.Reviewing the details of Brown's treatment of the Szpilman story, however, allows us to understand the core issues with this volume. On 36 pages of the Szpilman chapter, we find 52 endnotes, which seems respectable until we realize what is being cited: Szpilman's memoir, The Pianist—27 references (52 percent of all) and Diane Ackerman's The Zookeepers’ Wife (2008)—13 mentions (25 percent of all). One or two mentions each are of books by Janusz Korczak (Ghetto Diary, 2003, cited once), Mitchel Duneier (Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, 2016, cited twice), Michel Mazor (The Vanished City: Everyday Life in Warsaw Ghetto, 1993, cited twice) and Katarzyna Person (Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto 1940–43, 2014, cited once). In the text, veering away from its supposed musical focus, some attention is given to Janusz Korczak (c.1878–1942), the heroic doctor and selfless protector of Jewish orphans, and to the brave nurse Irena Sendler (1910–2008) and her role in saving Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. However, the organized effort of the Polish government-in-exile and its underground military arm, the Home Army, is not even noticed. In 2010, Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski published Code Name Żegota: Rescuing Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942–1945; it is available in four editions in 210 libraries. Their earlier book, Żegota: The Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942–45 (1999), is also available in 53 libraries. Moreover, it seems that any history of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps should include notes on Witold Pilecki and Jan Karski, who tried to alarm the West about the genocide being committed by Germans in Poland. Since they were not musicians but Polish government-in-exile representatives, this omission can perhaps be excused. While the author has room for mentioning the Righteous Among the Nation honor bestowed on Szpilman's “savior,” a German officer, she fails to mention that 7,177 Poles are included by Yad Vashem on that list, a quarter of all honorees. She also fails to mention that in German-occupied Poland, helping Jews was an automatic death sentence.What about the rest of the book? Let's review some statistics. Of 9 chapters, one is on a Polish musician, as mentioned above. Of 285 pages of text, 36 pages are about Szpilman's story (12.6 percent), and an additional 7 pages feature mentions of Szymon Laks (1901–1983), so 42 pages of 285 have Polish content (14.7 percent). In the bibliography, I found 17 books related to Polish culture, 8 on ghettos, and 9 on Auschwitz: that's 15 percent of 113 items. The author presents a disclaimer that there was no more space for extensive references, but one blank page separates the bibliography from the index, so definitely this page could have been used to add such crucial titles to the reference list as Jews and Music-Making in the Polish Lands, edited by François Guesnet, Benjamin Matis, and Antony Polonsky (Polin, vol. 32, 2020); The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (2012), edited by Peter Hayes and John K. Roth; Warsaw: The Jewish Metropolis (2015), edited by Glenn Dynner and François Guesnet; The Jews in Poland and Russia. Volume III, 1914 to 2008 (2019) by Antony Polonsky; and Making Holocaust Memory (2008), edited by Gabriel N. Finder. If such significant volumes are omitted, and instead popular films and stories are cited, this book is clearly not aspiring to be a scholarly treatment of its subject.My credentials for having been invited to write this review include organizing the first ever conference on Polish Jewish music in 1998 and publishing a series of articles on Polish Jewish composers. I have spent years researching the life and work of Maria Szymanowska and Aleksander Tansman, with results featured in a series of articles and book chapters. I am a contributor to two issues of Polin, edited by Antony Polonsky, with articles on the question of identity markers (vol. 19, 2007) and on documenting World War II losses among composers of Jewish descent active in Poland (vol. 32). I also studied Aleksander Tansman's American years for a collection issued in 2019 in English and Polish, Homage to Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986) (2019), edited by Anna Granat-Janki. In addition, I wrote about Olivier Messiaen whom I met in 1987 in person and greatly admire, so I regret Brown's decision to include a chapter on his masterpiece, Quartet for the End of Time, in this badly organized volume. It does the composer a great disservice. Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony fills me with dread and disgust for this masterpiece of Stalinist propaganda, since I visited the cemetery where 900,000 residents of the city who died of hunger, murdered by Stalin's order to not surrender, are buried in mass graves. The less written about this work, the better for humanity in my opinion. Instead, why not study the oratorio Isaiah, The Prophet that Tansman wrote while in hiding in Nice for a year in 1941, as he waited for an American visa, protected by his French wife? At that time, Laks was caught and deported to Auschwitz from Paris.I am not an expert on Holocaust studies, Jewish culture, or Jewish music apart from its particular vein of Polish Jewish music by assimilated Jews who made enormous and lasting contributions to Polish culture, to mention only Józef Koffler, Poland's first 12-tone composer and a Holocaust victim. Readers of The Polish Review might want to consult his biography, Józef Koffler: Compositional Style and Source Documents (2004) by Maciej Gołąb. There is no mention of Koffler in Brown's book, nor of any collections of ghetto and camp songs, such as those gathered by the Auschwitz survivor Aleksander Kulisiewicz, edited by Bret Werb and Barbara Milewski and published by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.Finally, I take exception to the dismissal of the life of Szymon Laks, a noted neoclassical composer, whose postwar career was reduced by Brown to the following: “after the war Laks returned to Paris and to his work as a composer through which he promoted Polish nationalism.” If one does a search for recordings of Laks's music, one finds they are available on such labels as Naxos, Dux, Albany Records, Zefir Records, and EDA Records. As many as 35 compositions are in the catalogue of his British publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. You can also find his books, a whole series of political and cultural essays in Polish, published in London. Brown's statement dismissing his music as “promoting Polish nationalism,” taken together with the omission of the history of Żegota and the other notable items listed above, could be viewed as anti-Polish propaganda. Readers interested in the subject of Polish music during World War II would be better served by reading a book by Katarzyna Naliwajek, who spent years researching this topic in archives and oral interviews: Sounds of Apocalypse: Music in Poland under German Occupation (2022).