When one con­sid­ers the ele­ments that com­prised the dai­ly lives of vic­tims dur­ing the Holo­caust, music may not imme­di­ate­ly come to mind. Yet, as this new­ly pub­lished vol­ume reveals, music served as a pow­er­ful tool for pre­serv­ing iden­ti­ty, express­ing grief, and sus­tain­ing hope dur­ing the dark­est of times. 

Mima’amakin: Folk Songs from the Camps and Ghet­tos of Poland, 1939 – 1944 is the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of a Yid­dish song­book first com­piled in 1945 by Yehu­da Eis­mann, and fur­ther researched and edit­ed byJoseph Toltz, an eth­no­mu­si­col­o­gist, and Anne Bouch­er, a migra­tion schol­ar. The songs were writ­ten in Jew­ish ghet­tos, camps, pris­ons, and hide­aways dur­ing the Holo­caust. The book was redis­cov­ered after the death of its own­er, a woman iden­ti­fied as Olga R., in 2013. It is a com­pact vol­ume con­tain­ing twen­ty songs, accom­pa­nied by an intro­duc­to­ry essay by Eismann.

Eis­mann com­piled the col­lec­tion while a refugee in Bucharest, where he estab­lished an office doc­u­ment­ing crimes against the Jews. Olga R. served as one of his sec­re­taries, help­ing to tran­scribe more than one thou­sand wartime tes­ti­monies that would even­tu­al­ly become known as The Bucharest Pro­to­cols. An inscrip­tion reveals that Eis­mann left one of the five remain­ing copies of the song­book to Olga R. when he depart­ed for Pales­tine in 1945. Although Eis­mann was nei­ther a musi­cian nor a poet, the col­lec­tion was like­ly part of his broad­er effort to pre­serve the voic­es and cul­tur­al prod­ucts of Pol­ish Jew­ry that might oth­er­wise have been lost.

Toltz and Bouch­er ensure that the vol­ume serves not only as a song­book but also as a his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al archive. They pro­vide sub­stan­tial back­ground on Eis­mann and Olga R., recon­struct the lives of the iden­ti­fied con­trib­u­tors, and reprint Eis­man­n’s orig­i­nal prefa­to­ry essay. In that essay, Eis­mann orga­nizes the songs into three the­mat­ic cat­e­gories: Yiesh (Despair), Bitokhn (Hope/​Safety), and Kamf un nit­sokhn (Bat­tle and Vic­to­ry). This struc­ture high­lights the emo­tion­al range of the col­lec­tion and the dif­fer­ent ways that Holo­caust vic­tims used songs to cope with their circumstances. 

The edi­tors also sit­u­ate the col­lec­tion with­in the Jew­ish song­ster tra­di­tion, which emerged in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry as Jews embraced new free­doms and moder­ni­ty. Small lyric pam­phlets became a fea­ture of Euro­pean Jew­ish youth cul­ture, and Eis­man­n’s vol­ume joins many sim­i­lar song­books pro­duced in dis­placed per­sons camps between 1945 and 1949. Because the songs were pub­lished with­out new­ly com­posed accom­pa­ni­ments, musi­cians were expect­ed to draw upon their own musi­cal knowl­edge and Jew­ish har­mon­ic tra­di­tions in per­form­ing them.

Each song is accom­pa­nied by a brief bio­graph­i­cal sketch of its song­writer, often enriched by rec­ol­lec­tions from sur­viv­ing fam­i­ly mem­bers that Toltz and Bouch­er gleaned from inter­views. These con­tex­tu­al essays shed light on both the cir­cum­stances in which the songs were com­posed and the lives of those who cre­at­ed them. While many songs express suf­fer­ing, loss, and uncer­tain­ty, oth­ers empha­size resilience, com­mu­nal sol­i­dar­i­ty, and defi­ance, chal­leng­ing sim­plis­tic por­tray­als of Holo­caust victims.

By com­bin­ing music, biog­ra­phy, and his­tor­i­cal com­men­tary, Out of the Depths func­tions as a valu­able con­tri­bu­tion to Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture. The authors dis­cuss the songs’ melodies and musi­cal tra­di­tions in an acces­si­ble way, mak­ing this book a good read for those who have lim­it­ed back­ground knowl­edge but are inter­est­ed in learn­ing more about the role of song dur­ing the Holo­caust. Ulti­mate­ly, the col­lec­tion demon­strates that songs were more than enter­tain­ment; they were a means of bear­ing wit­ness, pre­serv­ing mem­o­ry, and affirm­ing humanity.