Tango of Auschwitz, a song of remembrance
The story of this song reaches us through survivor accounts, and the sources tell it in different ways, so we share it with care and with references rather than as one settled legend. According to the Jerusalem Post article A Tango in Auschwitz and the World ORT project HolocaustMusic.org, its words were written in Auschwitz by Irka Janowski, a Polish girl of about twelve, set to the melody of a pre war Polish tango. She did not survive the camp. Prisoners sang her song there, quietly, as a way to stay human.
Irka Janowski was not Jewish, and that fact is part of what the song teaches. It became a Jewish song by the way it lived: prisoners carried it, it crossed into Yiddish, and in 1948 Shmerke Kaczerginski published the Yiddish version, Der tango fun Oshvientshim, in his New York collection Lider fun di getos un lagern. Today it is preserved in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. A song enters a tradition by being sung and remembered, not by the origin of its author. That is the whole meaning of Jewish Songs. For All.
The chain of the song continues across languages: the Polish original and Irka's words belong to everyone, the Yiddish version kept the song alive in the Jewish world, Olga Anikina wrote the Russian poetic adaptation, and RIGLI recorded the English version, Freedom Tango, so that remembrance keeps traveling.
In the camps of the Holocaust there was music. Prisoner orchestras were made to play as people were marched, and survivors remembered tangos among the tunes, so that the phrase tango of death entered the memory of that time. To set a tango against Auschwitz is to hold beauty and horror in the same breath, which is exactly how memory works.
This song is a work of remembrance. It asks the listener not to look away, and to carry the memory forward so that it is never abstract, never only a date in a book.
Why bring it into English
Songs of remembrance must live in the languages the next generation speaks, or the memory fades with the last people who understood the words. Bringing a song like this into English is part of the mission of Jewish Songs for All: to keep the hardest and the most important Jewish songs alive for everyone, everywhere.
The full lyrics and a line by line English translation for this song are being prepared.
Sources
- Jerusalem Post: A Tango in Auschwitz
- HolocaustMusic.org (World ORT): Der tango fun Oshvientshim
- Shmerke Kaczerginski, Lider fun di getos un lagern, New York, 1948
- YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
- National Library of Israel
- The full story in Russian on this site