Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps. Oxford Historical Monographs.

by Shirli Gilbert

In Music in the Holocaust Shirli Gilbert provides the first large-scale, critical account of the role of music amongst communities imprisoned under Nazism. She documents a wide scope of musical activities, ranging from orchestras and chamber groups to choirs, theatres, communal sing-songs, and cabarets, in some of the most important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz and the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos. Gilbert is also concerned with exploring the ways in which music - particularly the many songs that were preserved - contribute to our broader understanding of the Holocaust and the experiences of its victims. Music in the Holocaust is, at its core, a social history, taking as its focus the lives of individuals and communities imprisoned under Nazism. Music opens a unique window on to the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time.

Genres: Music, Holocaust, History, Nonfiction

243 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel weird saying I enjoyed a book about the Holocaust, but with this one, it's pretty much true. Gilbert's writing is clear and readable, without any of the overly dense prose one sometimes encounters in academic writing. I especially liked how she explicitly avoids fitting her examination of music in the ghettos and camps into familiar narratives of redemption or heroism. Instead, Gilbert attempts to see the musical activities of these people as part of the way they coped with what was happening to them in the face of increasing brutality and a lot of uncertainty about where it was all leading.
The material is fascinating. Music in the ghettos and camps was a surprisingly complicated thing, serving multiple purposes and having many different meanings depending on who was performing, who was listening, and why. Music could be an escape, a key to social systems within the camps, comfort, defiance, despair, or just another means through which to suffer. Gilbert takes a very clear-eyed and probing look at all of this and shows the reader how examining this musical activity can give us greater understanding of the experiences of victims and survivors. She organizes her material very well, too. Each chapter covers a specific place: the Warsaw ghetto, the Vilna ghetto, the Sachsenhausen camp, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The progression through increasing horror is a surprisingly effective structure for the points Gilbert makes and for impressing on the reader the depth and complexity of the topic.