<p>A transport of Jewish prisoners forced to march through the snow from the Bauschovitz train station to <a href="/narrative/5386">Theresienstadt</a>. Czechoslovakia, 1942.</p>

Song

Browse an alphabetical list of songs and music from the Holocaust and World War II. These compositions express a variety of themes, ranging from loss and despair to resistance and hope.

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  • Shifrele's Portrait

    Song

    Yiddish folk poet and songwriter Mordecai Gebirtig was born in 1877 in Krakow, Poland. He wrote "Shifrele's Portrait" was written in Krakow in December 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II. Gebirtig's eldest daughter, Shifre, lived in Lvov, and was separated from her family when the Soviets annexed Lvov. In this brief song, Gebirtig, gazing at his daughter's photograph, imagines himself in conversation with her. She assures him that the war will end soon, and that parent and child will be…

  • Stand Fast

    Song

    Erich Frost (1900–87), a musician and devout Jehovah's Witness, was active in the religious resistance to Hitler's authority. Caught smuggling pamphlets from Switzerland to Germany, he was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin where he composed this song in 1942. Later deported to a labor camp at Alderney, Channel Islands, Frost survived the war and returned to Germany to serve the Watchtower Society. "Fest steht," reworked in English as "Forward, You Witnesses," is among the…

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