Holocaust Center to host, ‘Music from Auschwitz: A Concert’
Something joyful is the last thing that Patricia Hall expected to find while researching the manuscripts of music at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland.
But there it was.
Archived among the manuscripts of music arranged and performed by prisoners in the Nazi death camps was the manuscript for a buoyant foxtrot titled, “The Most Beautiful Time of Life.”
“I was particularly taken by it,” said Hall, a music theory professor at the University of Michigan. “Not because of its musical properties but because I couldn't imagine a more grotesquely incongruous title for music performed in a concentration camp. It made me sad to think about a song like that in that context.”
The arrangement also called for an extraordinary and unusual mix of instruments and it was written for dancing.
Who dances in a concentration camp?
As Hall later learned the music was originally composed by the German film composer Franz Grothe for a jazz ensemble. But was rearranged by prisoners at the Auschwitz I camp for the musicians they had available; four first violins, five second violins, a viola, two clarinets, a trombone and a tuba, who performed this arrangement and many others for Sunday concerts attended by SS Officers. Hall learned of one particularly sadistic SS member who would take out member after member from the orchestra, and shoot them.
“As a researcher of manuscripts (for nearly 40 years), I am used to working with very personal documents, such as diaries, intimate letters, and medical records,” Hall said, in an article describing her research. “What I had never encountered, however, was the painful irony of many of the song titles in the context of a concentra