Cry, My Heart, Cry: Songs from Testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archive, Vol 2

This is a very unusual album recreating songs remembered and described by Holocaust survivors. The testimonies are taken from the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University, which has over 4,400 of them. The songs were ‘recreated’ by the archive’s musician-in-residence – there’s an inspired concept – namely Minsk-born clarinettist, arranger and musicologist Zisl Slepovitch. He has arranged them from often half-remembered accounts using appropriate melodies popular at the time, or composing new ones for ensembles of clarinet, violin, accordion, keyboards, double bass and (on two tracks) cimbalom. The vocals, in Yiddish, Polish and French are sung by Riga-born Sasha Lurje. Her voice is strong, folk-like and she avoids any temptation to over-emote.

The title-track is a tango also known as the Treblinka Song. It wasn’t remembered from that death camp, from which virtually nobody returned, but was widely sung in the Warsaw Ghetto. ‘A Dermonung Funem Appellplatz’ (The Memory of the Roll Call), another tango, is a memory of a song sung by another prisoner at a daily head count. You might expect this to be pretty heavy listening as these songs are from times of terrible suffering, but they are resilient, satirical and a testament to the power of music in adversity. There are brief accounts of the survivors, information about the songs and lyric translations. Vol 1 came out in December 2019. The archive’s faculty advisor Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlines is a superb account of this most brutal moment in European history.