From 1933 to 1945 Nazis of the Third Reich developed numerous prisons throughout Germany and other conquered countries. These “concentration camps”—termed so because a large number of prisoners were “concentrated” in overcrowded facilities-- housed “degenerates and undesirables”, people considered threats to law and order because of their ethnicity, political persuasion, gender orientation and other “criminal activity.” Millions were systematically murdered by the SS-designed killing system. Prisoners who survived the journey to the camps were greeted with insulting songs and ceremonies intended to humiliate and stamp out morale. Guards forced prisoners to sing while working, while marching, during roll call, and while being punished; this stemmed from military prison habits used to suppress prisoners such as Adolf Hitler, who was incarcerated in the 1920s.

From the beginning prison officials established prisoner choirs and orchestras to perform for staff entertainment and rituals/ceremonies as well as drown out the screams that accompanied torture and mutilation. Officials also used constantly blaring high-volume loudspeakers to project radio broadcasts of propaganda.

Despite the use of music-as-oppression, prisoners claimed another use. In the early days of the camps inmates commonly sang spontaneously and unaccompanied, either alone or in groups. They whistled popular songs from their lives before incarceration and hummed new ones that protested the systematic sadism surrounding them. Prisoners composed what became known as “Konzentrations (KZ) Leider—concentration camp songs—which expressed the harsh reality of their daily lives and their hope for a better life. Many musical performances were allowed in censored form by camp authorities, while on special occasions prisoners held large uncensored, clandestine gatherings. After WWII began, the number and diversity of concentration camp prisoners greatly increased to include a higher percentage of professional musicians—and individual opportunities for music-making became more limited, although musical traditions and practices became more consistent throughout the camps. Leading prisoners continued the tradition of camp anthems, despite the lyrics of blatant oppression, because they acknowledged the songs as a source of prestige and recognition. Camp administration adopted existing anthems from prewar camps or had prisoners compose new anthems for particular camps—for example, Buchenwald. Despite the domineering use of camp anthems by SS staff, prisoners held on to the songs’ true purpose of maintaining solidarity and perpetuating feelings of hope. In later years of the camp system, inmates composed and performed music of many genres, including “degenerate music” (jazz, tango, and “gloomy” Jewish songs). Singing became a daily practice and a means to describe daily life. The music echoed the changes in living conditions, becoming a means of preserving the history and memory of daily experiences.

Can beauty co-exist with horror? In the case of Nazi concentration camps, the answer is yes—through the arts, especially through instrument and song. Even in the first years of the system prisoners were composing new texts for well-known melodies or entirely new songs. These camp songs speak to the hardships, fears and hopes of the internees.

Arranger Donald McCullough composed the 13-movement music-narrative, which premiered at the John F. Kennedy Center on March 17, 1998. Designed to recognize and honor the prisoners who died in four of the more than 7,000 SS prisons, the cantata includes songs and first-person accounts from inmates at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Brzezinka and Majdanek. All songs, originally in Polish, were found in the archives of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum; recollections are based on interview transcripts and historical information. There is no plot—each song and story represents various places and times in the Holocaust camp experience.

The Prisoner Rises (composed at Majdanek concentration/extermination camp, Poland, 1943-44, unknown lyricist, military melody)

…..The staff at Majdanek camp outside of Lublin murdered 95,000-130,000 between November 1941 and January 1945 through starvation, disease, exposure, torture, slave labor, gunshot, hanging, and gas. A haunting song of struggle, sadness and hopelessness, “The Prisoner Rises” sets the tone.

Singing Saved My Life

Concentration camp inmates sang. In the early day guards forced prisoners to sing self-deprecating songs while working, marching, during roll call, and while being punished. Officials later established prison choirs and camp orchestras to entertain staff, perform at rituals and ceremonies, and drown out the screams of torture and death. Loudspeaker music also accompanied torture and mutilation. As time went on ,despite the SS use of music as a form of domination, inmates were allowed to create their own music. During their very limited free time prisoners composed, rehearsed and performed what reminded them of home. Participating in instrumental and vocal music as performer or audience led to highly emotional experiences that helped prisoners cope with the daily terrors and atrocities they faced. Music, especially singing, enabled inmates to maintain traditions and honor their cultural identity. Singing was a life preserver.

Song of the Polish Prisoners (Buchenwald concentration/extermination camp, Germany 1944. Kazimierz Wojtowicz, lyrics; Jozef Kropinski, melody)

Jozef Kropinski and Kazimierz Wojtowicz, Poles imprisoned for collaboration, formed a musical collaboration first at Auschwitz and then at Buchenwald. This powerful anthem is one of the 177 songs —often with lyrics by Wojtowicz—that Kropinski was able to retrieve after his liberation by US soldiers in 1945. Wojtowicz is also credited with 40 compositions during his internment.

The Execution of the Twelve (July 19, 1943)

Hanging ‘ceremonies’ set to marches played by inmate orchestras were a popular method of decreasing the prisoner population while serving up a ghastly tool of prisoner control. The hanging of July 19, 1943 began as a standard event with an “audience” of 30,000 prisoners. Then one of the 12, a boy, took unexpected command of his execution.

In Buchenwald (Buchenwald concentration/extermination camp, Germany, 1944. Kazimierz Wojtowicz, lyrics; Jozef Kropinski, melody)

Another surviving collaboration of Wojtowicz and Kropinski, the somber “In Buchenwald” mourns the suffering and all-encompassing bleakness that defined the camps, the singer pining for home.

A State of Separation (The story of Irena Augustynska Kafka, Fallingbostel labor/extermination camp, Germany)

Hitler considered many ethnicities subhuman, especially Jews and Slavic Europeans, among them Poles. On September 1, 1939 the Nazis took charge of the “subhumans” as they invaded Poland. After being hidden from Nazi “recruiters” Irena Augustynska received word that her family would be killed if she did not materialize and cooperate. She joined 19 other seventeen-year-old girls at Fallingbostel slave labor camp. Following liberation she met and married fellow inmate Mieczylaw Kafka; in 1949 she, Kafka and their son were granted asylum in the US. The Kafkas were employed at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where Kafka taught Polish and she supervised the children’s nursery. Irena Kafka died--free--at 88.

The Train (Brzezinka concentration/extermination camp, Poland, 1944. Krystyna Zywulska, lyrics; melody unknown)

In 1939, Warsaw-based Jewish student Sonia Landau was forced by the new Nazi government to leave law school so returned home to Lodz, Poland. Even though the family subsequently fled to Warsaw to avoid persecution, in 1941 they were relocated to the Jewish ghetto. One day Landau and her mother daringly walked out of the ghetto and blended in with the other Poles. Landau later joined the Polish resistance as “Zofia Wisniewska,” where she counterfeited non-Jewish ID cards for Jews in hiding and German deserters. Upon arrest in 1943 she assumed the identity of Polish Catholic Krystyna Zywulska. A political prisoner at Brzezinka, she began mentally composing poetry to endure endless roll calls. Other inmates memorized her poems such as “The Train” and shared them with their comrades, and soon her work spread to other camps. Landau’s talent at capturing the pathos of Auschwitz life resulted in her being protected by a high-ranking Auschwitz prisoner who admired her ability and was able to have her transferred to a relatively safe work detail in nearby Birkenau concentration/extermination camp. She continued to compose poems to deal with the sights, screams and stench of the mass killings next to the storage facilities for new inmates’ confiscated belongings, where she worked. She labored in street clothing and received sufficient food; she and her co-workers even held clandestine cabarets in the work detail barracks. After liberation she married, and while managing a growing family became a popular journalist and author. It took her another 20 years to finally reveal her true identity and ethnicity.

Singing From Birth Until Death (Brzezinka concentration/extermination camp, Poland, 1942)

Brzezinka, a concentration/ extermination subcamp of Auschwitz, opened in 1943. Ultimately the bulk of the prison population was Jewish. It was the site of countless murders of pregnant women as well as newborns and their mothers, who sang lullabies even as they and their newborns were killed.

The Striped Ones. (Majdanek concentration/extermination camp, Poland, 1943. Lyrics, Zofia Karpinska, melody, folksong)

Prior to 1943 Majdanek inmates, many of them Soviet prisoners and Slovakian Jews, frequently and clandestinely sang the songs of their homelands at night and while working. Although after 1943 the prohibition of cultural entertainment was lifted, inmates were restricted to singing before roll calls and after work, so they had limited time and energy for musical gatherings. Nevertheless, the arts flourished—an opera singer gave concerts in the barracks, and Zofia Karpinska wrote numerous poems and lyrics, among them “The Striped Ones”.

There’s No Life Like Life at Auschwitz (composer unknown)

The energy that emanates from a sense of camaraderie—and the occasional liquor-driven secret “party”—offers glimmers of hope and a sense of freedom at odds with a grotesquely oppressive environment. Gathering places such as the Auschwitz pump house reinforced a community feel, and celebrations with contraband spirits were especially sweet.

Tempo de Tango (Buchenwald, 1944. Jozef Kropinski, composer)

Donald McCullough’s arrangement of Kropinski’s “Tango” captures and amplifies the overall feel of what the Nazi regime would have labeled a “socially deviant” composition.

Letter to Mom (composer unknown)

In some labor camps in occupied territories inmates were allowed to send censored postcards to loved ones at home. Generally Jewish inmates were were required to write postcards describing the camp conditions as pleasant and their lives not too difficult because of considerate staff. “Letter to Mom” is the sort of truthful missive that a prisoner could only dream of sending.

Song of Days Gone By (Buchenwald concentration/extermination camp, Germany, 1943. Jozef Kropinski, composer)

One of the 117 songs Jozef Kropinski was able to retrieve after liberation in 1945, “Song of Days Gone By” speaks of lost life, love and hope, soothed by the strains of the cello. In 1942 the Polish political prisoner joined the Auschwitz camp orchestra, serving as concertmaster after a harrowing violin audition. In 1941 he composed a march and seven songs, four of which were settings to poems by fellow inmates Kazemierz Wojtowicz and Edmund Polak. All were later relocated to Buchenwald, where Kropinski and Wojtowicz continued to collaborate. From late 1943, after laboring during the day he wrote one composition nightly until liberation in 1945. He wrote pieces for voice, piano , orchestra and string quartet in various genres—folk, march, dance, opera, and serious and light classical. On April 10, 1945 camp authorities sent him on a death march, during which US soldiers rescued him.

…..After liberation Jozef Kropinski neverr penned another note.

Denise is an assistant professor of voice and opera in the Department of Music at Radford University. She appears in concert, musical theater, and opera stage and is known for her ability to sing a variety of styles utilizing brilliant high notes, pure tone, communicative warmth, and musical intelligence. She has been a performer internationally and throughout the US with extensive Oratorio experience. She has performed with orchestras such as The New York Pops, Toledo Symphony Orchestra, Southwest Michigan Symphony, Fort Worth Symphony, Tulsa Symphony, Fort Wayne Philharmonic, the Symphony of Bartlesville, Oklahoma City Symphony, Roanoke Community Choir, and Charlottesville Community Choir as well as many other symphonic and choral organizations. Denise’s operatic roles include First Lady in Magic Flute, Mother in Amahl and The Night Visitors, Violetta in La Traviata, the title role in Suor Angelica, as well as Gilda in Rigoletto. Denise has been a soloist in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall and is a sought-after recitalist performing in London, England, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, and at the Certosa di Gragnano in Milan, Italy, Sackville, Canada, Manitoba, Canada, Leibnitz, Austria performing for international audiences representing 32 different countries.

Dr. Bernardini has completed over 50 graduate hours in mental health with an emphasis on mindfulness and performance anxiety pathologies. She is a presenter on the mindfulness of singing for educators and singers. She is set to complete a Master’s Degree in Clinical Mental Health in May of 2025. Denise’s book The Mindfulness of Singing has been an Amazon Best Seller and has been the subject of many podcasts and articles.

Senerity Everette, soprano, is a freshman at Radford University in the voice studio for Dr. Denise Bernardini. In high school she attended The Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk, Virginia. While attending she had her first experiences performing in recital, operas, and competitions. This past summer she competed in the National NAACP ACT-So competition in Boston and won 1st place in the Vocal Classical Category. Serenity hopes to continue her studies at Radford University to start her career path as a singer and artist.

Jason N. Brown is a native of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. His performance and recording credits include theAmerican Spiritual Ensemble, Louisville Bach Society, Kentucky Bach Choir, and Lexington Singers. An enthusiast of sacred music, Brown's singing and conducting repertoires include numerous oratorios, masses, canticles and cantatas. In addition to music of the African Diaspora, his particular interests lie in high baroque and neoclassical literature.

Having earned degrees in music from the University of Kentucky and West Virginia University, Jason maintains great activity as a singer conductor, and educator along the eastern seaboard. He has served as Director of Music at Lyttleton Street United Methodist Church (Camden, SC), Hunter Presbyterian Church (Lexington, KY), and is currently Minister of Music and Arts at the historic First Presbyterian Church of Richmond, VA.

Michael D. Richardson is a baritone possessing a voice described as being “a balm for the soul” and “full of pathos” He commands the stage - captivating audiences wherever he goes with a rich and powerful sound blended with a soothing and enveloping quality that has been said to be silvery and booming.

Michael thoroughly enjoys singing whenever and wherever he can. Outside of graduate work, he has also been featured as a soloist in multiple concerts with The Shenandoah Valley Choral Society as well as multiple collaborations with The Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival. Michael has twice been a Young Artist in the Nightingale Opera Theatre Young Artist Program in Hudson, Ohio - performing roles such as William Putnam from Jake Heggie’s opera, If I Were You.

An Iowa native, Michael completed his undergraduate studies at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, IA - After which he has spent the last six years in the Shenandoah Valley attending James Madison University - completing his Master’s in Music in 2020, and is currently a candidate for the DMA in Vocal Performance, Pedagogy, and Literature. Michael is studying under the tutelage of Kevin McMillan.

A native of Roanoke, Bobby Buchanan has sung with several choirs in southwest VA and Los Angeles, CA, where he lived for 30 years before moving back to Roanoke. He's very grateful to be in his 3rd year with the Blacksburg Master Chorale. He is an accomplished pianist, organist, vocal arranger, and music director, having directed such musicals as "Annie, Get Your Gun", "Grease", "Godspell" and "Oklahoma". For the Roanoke-based Showtimers Community Theatre, he performed the role of Jesus in "Godspell", Joseph in "Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat", and Lun Tha in "The King and I". He also sings in the St. John's Episcopal Church choir (Roanoke) as well as the Roanoque Baroque Chamber Choir.

Benjamin Wyatt is cellist of the Avanti Ensemble and teaches at the Renaissance Music Academy in Blacksburg, Virginia. He has performed extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, and is a regular guest with various ensembles. Mr. Wyatt has collaborated with numerous leading artists in recent years, including members of the Guarneri, Vermeer, Pacifica, Vanbrugh, Brentano, Ridge, Meliora, Mendelssohn, Amernet, Chicago and Dover String Quartets. Also active as a Baroque cellist, he has played with ensembles including Musica Angelica, The American Classical Orchestra, and Three Notch’d Road.

After undergraduate studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music, he completed his doctoral studies at the University of Southern California where he was honored as the Outstanding Doctoral Graduate; he studied the Suzuki Method in New York at the School for Strings with Pamela Devenport and has taught at Institutes and workshops around the country. His students have been accepted to prestigious music schools, including The Juilliard School, The Cleveland Institute of Music, The New England Conservatory, and Rice University.

After listening to the recording, I was tempted to write back that no bio is needed. If the rest of the concert is anywhere near as meaningful as Not in Our Town, the audience should be focused on the messages given through song rather than on me.

Christa Honaker resides in Blacksburg and works in poultry genetics in the School of Animal Sciences at Virginia Tech. Having played oboe for over 30 years, Christa has performed with various groups throughout southwest Virginia, including Handel'sMessiah with the Blacksburg Master Chorale. More recent groups include Virginia Tech Wind Ensemble, Virginia Tech Philharmonic Orchestra, Blacksburg Community Strings, Summer Musical Enterprise, Blacksburg UMC, Church on Main, and Bedford Community Orchestra.

"I am grateful to my husband and children for supporting my passion of making music and am honored to be a part of this message tonight."

Amelia Ball

Jean Brickey

Jenna Catalano

Sheila Darby

Rose Duven

Elizabeth Ellis

Lily Erdal

Kaye Gilliam

Christa Greatorex-Potter

Genevieve Gwynne

Alyssa Henderson

Renee Jacobsen

Janice Jones

Sarah Joss

Maggie Kruesi

Hana Kwon

Susan Miller

Linda O’Brien

Shawn Roggenkamp

Judy Ruggles

Olivia Schumann

Jennifer Spoon

Julann Stephenson

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

Elizabeth Wiley

Ashton Bishop

Summer Bork

Lauren Butt

Victoria Cochran

Carol Croy

Rachel DeLauder

Mary Hansborough

Susan Hansen

Emily Hungate

Peggy Layne

Jane Mahone

Rachel McLaughlin

Elva Miller

Mary Denson Moore

Suzanne Nelson

Patricia Norris

Tina Plotka

Rachael Powell

Judie Reeemsnyder

Debbie Reynolds

Nora Scherer

Leda Stubbs

Susan Wyatt

Shirlee Yoder

Jonathan Belnap

Ed Champion

Janice McBee

Kyle Moore

Daron Phay

George Terrell

Patrick Withem

Joe Adkisson

Josh Arnold

Joe Ball

Bobby Buchanan

Taylor Burleson

Charles Byler

John Byrne

Alex Darby

Dennis Duven

Jesse Garrett-Larsen

Scott Malbon

Wayne Neu

Charles Schade

Keith Stephenson

Taylor Terrill

Mark Wiley

Lawrence Yoder

Jennifer Spoon

MOOG

Fred Williams Meyer

Fidelity Charitable

Jane & Jeff Hammel

Keith & Julann Stephenson

Robert and Margaret Kincaid

Dwight Bigler

Mary Osgood

Mary Denson Moore

Joe & Amelia Ball

Kaye & Tom Gilliam

Judy Ruggles

Peggy Layne

Wayne & Melodee Neu

John & Gloria Ralston

Linda & Raymond Plaut

Beverly B. Fleming

Gregory & Marjorie Ogden

Alan & Patricia Steiss

David & Mary Scesney

Samara Abpianalp

Chad Davis

Christine DeRosa

Bill Drummond

Carlos & Jane Evia

Madeline Gozzi

Cliff & Mary Hughes

Katherine Landry

Susan Nilo

Lauren Perkin

The Printz Family

Mimi Owen

Janice Litschert

Janice Jones

Lester & Suzan Karlin

Owens Bookkeeping